CSM X

Voting for CSM is now open. PLEASE VOTE HERE.

If you aren't sure what CSM is, check out this post by CCP Leeloo - in short, it's an elected body of players who consult with the game's benevolent masters CCP. They are given direct access to developers and upcoming changes to the game are shown to them first, so they are the most important avenue of feedback and representation we players have available to us. Voting is by no means mandatory, but you can count on the big nullsec alliances to push their hundred thousand accounts to vote, so I want to make sure smaller voices, particularly "highsec carebear" types, get heard too.

I have just finished listening to all of the Cap Stable interviews and panels, w00t! They have put together some great resources which can be found here, if you are interested in doing some research of your own. There are only 5 days left at this point though, so if you don't feel like you have the time to do enough in-depth research, I'm presenting my ballot here for consideration.

The full roles of voting can be found here, and further information on single transferrable voting can be found on Wikipedia. In short (for those who don't use preferential voting... *coughAmericans*), you order your preference amongst the candidates (in the case of the CSM, the most you can vote for is 14). Anyone who exceeds the quota (a set number of votes, usually dependant on the total number cast) is elected outright. After that, the fun of distributing preferences takes place. After initial preferences (ie #1 votes) have been tallied, the candidate with the least votes will be eliminated, and their preferences distributed. If you have voted for only one candidate and they are knocked out at this stage, your vote will "exhaust" and not count; as such, I'm recommending a full ballot of 14, ranging from generally smaller candidates to generally bigger ones.

With that in mind, my recommended ticket:

- #1 Jayne Fillion

Jayne is responsible for adding great content to the game, which a number of SLYCE members take part in and enjoy. Since the game is all about "what can I do", any player that creates content for others to enjoy is a great candidate in my opinion. He represents the NPSI community (Not Purple, Shoot It) - groups who form up fleets and go shoot other players regardless of ordinary allegiances. It's the only way I've been able to enjoy PVP sofar. Campaign thread here.

- #2 Chance Ravinne

I loved Chance's energy and enthusiasm. He runs a great youtube channel, knows about marketing the game, and flies in bombers and wormholes, which are parts of my gameplay (that I haven't covered on this blog yet). Campaign thread. 

- #3 Erika Mizune / Yumene

EVE radio host and industrialist. Erika's ideas on reworking mining and industrial systems are very interesting to me, and represent the PVE content that I'm writing about on this blog. In particular, the idea that finished asteroids have a chance of spawning smaller chunks of bonus ore would make mining a little more fun. That being said, her interview on Cap Stable was pretty poor, with nervous answers and issues understanding the interviewer's accent. Campaign thread.

- #4 Aeon Boirelle

A high sec candidate representing for the carebears. While I don't like all their ideas, particularly on revisiting input duplication, they want to represent parts of highsec gameplay at the core for me, and anyone who wants to fuck CODE. over is OK by me. Campaign post.

- #5 Bam Stoker

AUTZ = BEST TZ. Bam organised the only EVE meet up that I've been to. He is a nullsec player, but standing to represent community interests, and lobbying to introduce better ways for communities to network through the game client itself. Campaign thread.

- #6 Lorelei Ierendi

Who is Lorelei? A high sec carebear. Tick. Some ideas of changes that might have unintended consequences on the economy, but in general, another representative of grinders, and one who is particularly reaching out to the solo players, which I was for a long time. Campaign thread.

- #7 Nervon
Another high-sec carebear candidate. They seem to be a bit more rainbow minded in terms of a mix of PVE play with a little PVP, much like myself, but they have done themselves no favours in terms of having little existence in the metagame. Campaign post.

- #8 June Ting

The recently announced rework of Sovereign Nullsec space means I want to put at least a couple of nullsec candidates on here, and of those, June is the one who appeals to me the most. Her ideas seem to match the thrust of the announced changes, so I trust her to get the details right. Campaign thread

- #9 Mike Azariah

The incumbent highsec resident and blogger who inspired me to start this blog. If you've ever experienced a watering mouth at the sight of the Bowhead like I have, thank Mike. Has done a fantastic job on CSM, and also on Operation Magic School Bus, helping to retain newbies after the success of the "This Is EVE" trailer. Campaign thread.

- #10 Xander Phoena

Incumbent. Although the crazy Scotsman has gotten some bad press in recent weeks, his blogs on CSM 9 have been highly informative. He makes it onto my ballot for his work on input duplication, if nothing else. Disclaimer: former Goon, now flies with Pandemic Legion. Campaign thread.

- #11 Sugar Kyle

The most respected incumbent candidate. Although she represents lowsec, where I barely dip my toes to nab a little ice or deal with market orders, she has also represented PVE content, and been one of the strongest workhorses of CSM 9. Campaign thread.

- #12 Corbexx

Incumbent wormhole candidate, which covers me during wartime and a fair whack of other time too. Has done good work in rebalancing the wormholes I spend time in (c1/c2) so that they are ISK fountains worth the inherent risks. Campaign thread.

- #13 Steve "FuzzySteve" Ronuken

Incumbent third party developer and industrialist. Highly specialised and involved with the CREST API, which has allowed for better market data on sites like Eve Central. Runs Fuzzworks, which has allowed me to optomise my PVE gaming to no end. Campaign thread.

- #14 Khador Vess

RVB fleet commander and all round good guy with some interesting ideas on how to make life in high sec more interesting. Loses out to Jayne, Bam and June for me, but I think he's worth having on the end in case all of the above get exhausted. Campaign thread.

Catching up: CSM 9 Summer Summit

Season's greetings :)

Eve isn't my only love - there's football, politics, writing, not to mention the beautiful people in my life - so although I can't keep away from the game for long, I'm often playing catch up on the latest developments, etc. This is particularly the case with the meta-game content.

This last couple of weeks I've been catching up on what happened at the CSM summer summit - both reading the minutes and listening to discussions in the podcasting universe (podosphere?).

In general, I think it's a pretty exciting time to be a part of EVE; some aspects, particularly in nullsec, have (apparently) been a little dull for a while, and CCP's attention has been divided to expanding into new games, but that has been scaled back, and it seems clear that those in charge have a vision for making the game a great place to be. A lot of the changes or discussions that have been reported in the summer summit minutes really show that.

One of the more controversial discussions to have taken place is one around "Awoxing", or joining a corp with the intent of killing and sabotaging your fellow corpies. For myself I think the changes discussed - to make aggression within corporations policed by CONCORD the same way all other aggro is - are really great; there will still be space for espionage and infiltration in null and low, but such activities will - and should - bear consequences in high sec.

Our corp and alliance is pretty active, for one largely based around Alliance space. We are always getting new players coming through as their first port of call after the NPC corps; some stick around with us, some stay in the Alliance but branch out, and some move out to the big alliances. We've seen a pretty big wave of newbies join up recently, especially since the This is Eve video was released. Thankfully, we haven't been Awoxed, but I've been in corps which have before, and it's not fun. It's reassuring to know that a PVPer with malicious intent can't join us and give those new guys a bad experience of the community with impunity. Of course, newbies need to lose ships to learn about the game (and most of ours have), but they should also be able to trust the players they are flying with.

Nosy Gamer wrote a good post highlighting the different perspectives here.

The discussion around ISboxer, resulting in the announced banning of ISboxer, has already had a good flow-on effect in terms of PLEX prices stabilising and the prices of minerals rising due to the volume of minerals being mined by one person flying forty ships falling.

Another couple of little tidbits that I've heard discussed in the meta recently: only 4% of Eve's players are female, which is low even compared to other MMOs that can average around 15% - or compared to real astronauts, 10% of whom are female.  Some select quotes on the topic from the minutes:

Ali wanted to point out that Eve has substantially fewer women proportionally than any other MMO – average MMO is around 10% while Eve sits at around 4%. She wanted to know if there were metrics as to why this may be and how they go around resolving this massive discrepancy.

CCP Dhalgren wanted CSM to know he was aware of this anomaly but his priority is to grow Eve full stop. There haven’t been any marketing campaigns generated from CCP so far explicitly with the goal of targeting women. The problem with the community-led marketing as described earlier as Ali put it is that if only men play Eve then it there are less women to attract other women. Obviously it doesn’t have to go that women attract female players and vice-versa but there is certainly a correlation.

Xander asked if there have been any case studies done into why there is such a massive discrepancy between the proportion of the playerbase that are female compared to other MMO playerbases?

CCP Dhalgren advised that no such studies have been done but for him, it’s more important to understand why anyone would want to play Eve at all irrespective of age, sex, background, etc and only after that to ask the secondary question of how do we get more of a particular demographic. He went on to emphasize however that the question on women is very important – there are women out there who would enjoy Eve but aren’t playing and CCP needs to look at how to find them.

That's a bit of a disappointing answer for me, as are some of the bullshit essentialist responses given in the past on the issue which effectively amount to "women don't like science fiction". Finding my current corp, which contains many women [ED: on reflection, only 4 active players, so around 20%] and has a culture I would describe as good and non-sexist, has helped me to realise just how important those factors can be when it comes to attracting or retaining women to a space. [ED: On reflection, Gamergate has shown just how important gaming culture can be in including or excluding women; I'm going to make a future post thinking about this in more depth.]

That's not to say CCP's attitude is all negative: the existence of a CSM, and the increasing amount of respect is it being accorded by CCP, reflect that the commitment and passion of the community what's so powerful about EVE. It's a sandbox universe shaped by players, and CCP understands this and actively invites players to be involved in its evolution.

Now is a good time to be one of those players - even a n00b care bear - as we all have the chance to help make the narrative.