Hello! It's great to meet you all. I'm JD, and I'm the newest member of the Community team here at Dovetail. I've come in as the Director of Community Management - so, essentially, I'm here to lead the community and social team and help them do what they do best - representing and communicating to you folk! I've come from Jagex, who specialised in the RuneScape franchise, where I spent 7 years in the community team, doing everything from live streams to social media. Whilst I've only been here two weeks (and starting a new job remotely is very weird, so please bear with me), I've been blown away by the passion I've seen - both from all of you who play our games, and the teams within the company. It's been a really positive first impression, and I hope I'll be able to build on the hard work Sam, Jamie, and Natalie have done in the past 6 months. Whilst I'm new to the world of rail - barring a childhood love for Thomas the Tank Engine - I'm looking forward to learning all about it with you all. I'm hoping you can teach me a thing or two! Natalie's also very pleased I'm taking on her 'noob' status (I'll try not to overshoot on any stations live on-stream though). I've been spending time trying to learn East Coastway at the moment, but am open to any suggestions for routes for newbies! Outside of work, I'm a keen runner, football fan, quiz-writer, reader, and cook, and enjoy (mostly through necessity with lockdown) going on walks to explore new places. I also have 2 cats, Phoebe and Leo. I'll be dipping in and out of the forums, Discord servers, Facebook groups, and popping up on live streams in the coming weeks, so I look forward to speaking to you all then!
Welcome JD to the forum and dtg . Hope you will enjoy your your new job and see you in some streams soon with your cats.
GWE may well be the best for a newbie, because it's a fairly easy route without many complications, and has a nice variety of services (HST express, commuter, freight). LIRR is tricky, and only provides one type of service. SEHS has variety, but it can get complicated.
Welcome to the community JD I've 100% completed several routes so far. Im Massively portsmouth fan ( off topic ). It wouldnt be normal if you didn't SPAD on your first live stream
Hello and welcome to the community JD I hope you settle in well and I am looking forward to meeting you and your cats in stream soon.
welcome DTG JD , cant wait for (hopefully!) another driver who is my skill level so i dont feel embarrassed like when matt drives lol, all the best in the new job and see you on stream!
Welcome! Good to see a fellow fan of football, cooking and keeping fit (although I personally suck at running, despite my best efforts for a respectable 1 mile time -- I'm more of a weights guy). I'm sure that you'll enjoy most of your interactions here. These forums seem to house a decent diversity of characters and personalities. Looking forward to catching you on stream at some point soon.
Hello JD. I spent years playing RuneScape when I was younger, although I wasn’t around when social media happened and live streams but they were always a great community. Since the launch of TSW2 I would say one of the most positive changes including some great content is the community team has really turned around things from TSW to how DTG communicate with us, the community. From responding to bug inquiries to creating the very useful roadmap. For the majority of TSW the community never had an idea if a bug was trying to be resolved or if any of our constructive feedback was actually worth writing. We didn’t know what was happening two weeks from now, or if there would be an update, which I think was a big part in why this community was always so negative and resentful towards TSW and DTG. The announcement of TSW2, and the arrival of Sam and the community team is when I saw a change. It’s been a really exciting year so far and I think that you will definitely enjoy your ride. Your going to do a great job and you might even have fun along the way, good luck!
Hi JD, Almost forgot to mention. You may like to download the TSW2 Starters Guide. It is intended for starting TSW2 players and covers a lot of topics on gameplay you will not find in the official manuals. You can download it here: https://www.hollandhiking.nl/trainsimulator Select the TSW tab at this page. At that same page you can find a Route Guide for GWE as well. Maybe another tip: GWE was one for the first routes for TS as well. It is still there and runs from London-Paddington as far as Oxford. It is called Great Western Main Line in TS. So you can compare both games easily.
Congratulations, Jason! A great achievement. I'm a Spurs fan, so whilst I can't empathise with the trials and tribulations you've had over the past 10 years or so, I'm starting to feel that way now! I'll try not to SPAD
Seems like we have a lot in common, which is always a good start! I'm running the London Marathon later this year, so I'm more of a runner (although I'm trying to do more strength training at the moment to do all-round stuff). I've seen so far! Feels like a really good crop of people. Thanks for the kind welcome.
Thank you, Matthew. Couldn't agree more that the team has done a great job in the past 6 months or so, and hopefully I'll be able to take all the credit/help them out even more! It's certainly an exciting time.
Thank you, Rudolf - I'll add it to my ever-increasing list of resources! Appreciate the advice though, and thank you for the welcome
Nice! I've developed an admiration for the disciplined approach of long distance runners, whether professional or recreational. When I took up running last year I realised just how smart you have to be with your pacing, breathing tempo, structure of a run and so on I find progressing at running waaaaaay harder than strength training - not as easy to "cheat" by eating a massive pizza the day before in order to get better at running haha. Anyway, apologies, I'm hijacking
Good thing with SEHS is that one of the trains is extremely similar to that of the 377 on East-Coastway, and the others are recognisable and easy to drive
hello JD welcome to the community we hope you enjoy your new job and if you have any questions about certain trains the community will be more then happy to help you looking forward too seeing you in the streams soon
Welcome to the club JD! You're certainly going to catch the train bug after spending time here It was a tough decision between SEHS and GWE but I ended up voting for GWE. That way you'll be able to experience the famous BR Class 43 HST! Both are solid choices coming out of East Coastway as you'll be able to apply some of the experience you've gained in East Coastway to either of those two routes. Passenger services all use combined power/braking on both routes and they also use the Class 66 for freight like ECW. In the end it boils down to the words of a certain pannier tank. "There are two ways of doing things. The Great Western way or the wrong way..."
Welcome JD afaic you only need to know enough about actual driving to replicate issues that users are experiencing, so no pressure to become expert. What route/s and speed management/signalling systems have you learned so far ? If you want to keep things simple, choose a route with the least complex signalling and the safety systems and start by switching the safety systems off. So GWE. This also has the upcoming 1970s/BR Blue (livery) Diesel Legends of the Great Western loco pack to promote. But I guess the marketing focus is currently on SEHS and it's a lovely route with my favourite modern train/Electric Multiple Unit (EMU) in the Class 395 Javelin. The safety/speed management system is straightforward - it tells you the max speed at the next signal, but then again, I'm an expert. A couple? of buttons to press to swap between the overhead line (OHLE) and third rail power. I've little interest in modern US routes so know nothing about LIRR (I find the US so out of date ...and not in a good way)
The first thing I thought when I saw your name was JD from Gears of War (Marcus Fenix’s son). You don’t happen to be a gears fan do you?
Welcome, JD. I wish you well, but would ask that DTG still pay attention to the cash cow that is Train Simulator 20XX (immense amount of DLC available) in respect of processing tickets and support for bug fixes and updates and no only concentrate on TSW.
Thanks for the lovely replies everyone. Hopefully you were able to catch me on the live stream last night with Jamie, but if not, it's here.
Hi JD I’m new to 2022. I’ve been running around on TSW2. As for 2022, don’t bother with the class 143 on the Riviera line. I can’t master it, and I used to work on the things. First station I stop at I get a fail notice come up. My last attempt was a perfect run from Newton Abbot to Teignmouth, perfect as far as I could get it anyway. It said, “Fail, check your debrief”, it said “I didn’t load any passengers anywhere”. But according to the debrief I did. Anyway that’s my moan for the day. Hope you enjoy your time with DT Games. Cheers, Terry
