Category Archives: CSM

In Game Rewards

2 Replies

This may seem a trifle self serving, in that I already have a fan site account from CCP (more for the tools, than the blog, I think). I don’t deny I like getting things (like the spiffy monocle I’m sporting in game, which I won from the pre-Vegas blink promo)

Part of me likes the idea of getting neat in game stuff, without ‘soul binding’. The whole idea of items which you can’t sell to someone else kinda goes against the grain in the ultimate capitalism of Eve.

On the other hand, anything that’s rare is valuable, regardless of the actual utility, and just ‘gifting’ that kind of thing means interfering a little in the sand box. I don’t think it’s as major as some people think, a few billion here, a few billion there, it’s not a major deal. It may be worth asking the community in a survey, rather than depending on the forums for this.

As my prescience is currently in the shop for repairs, I can’t say what the community would say it believes. But I can make some suggestions about alternate options, which cement people into the story of Eve. Options which confer no in game benefit, or a benefit which while tangible, makes sense why it’s not transferable. The second category is a lot iffier as it still involves changing the rules of the sandbox. Or rather, adjusting the variables.

Everything would be with CCP’s approval, of course.

No Benefit Rewards:

  • The right to name a High/Low/NPC Null Station/Planet/Moon
  • A monument to that person, or a something that they designate, as a permanent landmark in Eve. You want a monument to a particular someone? Get that instead of to you.
  • A new module with your, or your corporations name on it. Perhaps a replacement for a standard meta module. Or a ‘reskin’ of it. An ‘Otherworld Enterprises’ Strip Miner?
  • Your name on something everyone gets at Christmas. A meta version of a ship. A trading card.
  • The right to name an Agent.
  • Being able to pitch a mission to the CCP Staff. Fancy yourself a writer? Reduce the chance of people having to save that damn damsel.

In game Benefits:

More controversial.

  • A boost to standings with a particular corp or faction. Corp would be less problematic. Ideally not one of the corps for a trade hub. Though that’s a reward in itself. Reduced taxes.
  • Reduced taxes in a particular station.
  • A blueprint for a branded module. Ideally T1 or Meta 1 stats. See the ‘Otherworld Enterprises’ Strip Miner. A GoonFleet Rifter? Ships should just be skinned T1. Modules Meta 1 could work.

Have any comments? Suggestions? Vile imprecations on my lineage? leave them below.

CSM 8 Results

Leave a reply

Well, they’ve released the ballots for CSM 8, and unsurprisingly, I still haven’t won.

What you can get from the ballots, after processing them, is the following output.

So, there were a total of 17 rounds, With 31 candidates, and 14 being elected, this is pretty obvious stuff. With the way the Wright STV system works, one candidate is eliminated each round, then the entire election run again as if there had been no votes for them. When you have 14 candidates remaining, they’re all elected.

The order of elimination:

  1. DaeHan Minhyok
  2. Cipreh
  3. Kaleb Rysode
  4. Awol Aurix
  5. Artctura
  6. Ayeson
  7. PsychoBitch
  8. Roc Wieler
  9. riverini
  10. Travis Musgrat
  11. Unforgiven Storm
  12. Corebloodbrothers
  13. Steve Ronuken
  14. Psychotic Monk
  15. Greene Lee
  16. Banlish
  17. Nathan Jameson

Obviously, I’d have prefered, if not elected, to be eliminated in the last round. But round 13 isn’t too bad for someone with no track record. Sure, some people have heard of me, but my name isn’t ‘out there’.

There are some people who find the system too confusing. For them, I’ll give a /very/ layman version. For a little more detail, take a look at mynnna’s blog post on it.

Short version:

It takes \frac{Total votes}{Number of positions +1} to get someone elected. So, then someone is provisionally elected (You aren’t elected until it’s actually over.), you take the all the votes for that person, take all the people provisionally elected off the front of it, and reassign the votes to the next candidate on them. These votes are worth \frac{number of votes over what was needed}{number of votes for the candidate}

Once you’ve got a bunch of provisionally elected people, and all the votes have finished cascading, if you don’t have enough of them, you eliminate the lowest scoring candidate, scrub their number from all the votes and start all over again. If votes are exhausted (No candidates left on them) then they’re discarded and the numbers required are recalculated for that round.

It’d be annoying to do by hand, but a computer can chug through them fairly simply.

Most people had hit over 90% of voting power by the 5th candidate.

One interesting side effect of this. If it had been a 15 person CSM, rather than 14, Banlish would have got in, rather than Nathan Jameson (who was eliminated last). This is just because more would have trickled down from votes from mynnna and so on, as they’d have needed less to be elected.

I’ve seen some people saying that nullsec is overly represented. Some saying under represented. Both groups are wrong. Of the voting population, there is proper representation. Strategic bloc voting doesn’t give those blocs more power (Except by getting people to vote the full power of their ballot.) Now, I do wish more people had voted, but you can hardly complain about not being represented, when you didn’t vote.

Next year, I’m hoping CCP do more to promote the CSM to players who are hard for us to reach (without spamming the fuck out of them.) And while it’s not ideal, for a world where we have informed voters, I hope they set it up so you can set up links to prefill the ballot for people, without the need for bookmarklets.

Personal Disappointment – CSM8

2 Replies

Well, I didn’t get elected. It’s a disappointment, but I have to admit, not an unexpected outcome. I still think it was worth doing however.

This is obviously the fault of my Goonswarm paymasters (That check bounced, you bastards! I’m waiting on my replacement!) who didn’t tell their people to vote for me.

But in the real world, away from the conspiracy theorists, I guess the main things I can point at are: A lack of what people see as relevant experience, and a lack of visibility.

The latter, well, there’s only so much I can do about that. But I’ll work on it.

The former, there’s more I can do about that. So, this year, I’ll be branching out more. I would /love/ it if people could give me suggestions on what they’d like to see me do. I’m expecting to rack up a bunch of kill rights on me, possibly war decs, so I may have to switch the indy stuff off onto alts, rather than my main, but I can live with that.

Almost finally, congratulations to the people who you lot voted onto the CSM. I’m not seeing a single name there that makes me cringe. I know you’ll do a good job, even without me 😉

And Finally: in case what I was saying wasn’t obvious: I’m going to run for CSM9 (barring my brain turning to mush and oozing out my ears, or some other life changing event)

Suggested Ballot: CSM8 trail

Leave a reply

Well, me at or near the top of the ballot sheet would be good.. That’d be good.

As for the rest, well, I like to think that the people who are going to vote for me don’t need to be told which way to vote for anyone else. That they’re the kind of people who have considered their options, using sites like CSM Vote Match 2.0 or the CSM 8 votOmat, then interviews, like the ones on Crossing Zebras or Voices from the Void.

Well, that makes this a very short post. So to make it somewhat larger, I’m going to let you know how I’m planning on voting. It’s not a recommendation, but just something to think about. I’m not voting for a balanced card, because that’s a dumb thing to do, I’m voting for the people I’d be comfortable representing my interests.

  1. Me. Because I’m not stupid
  2. Chitsa Jason
  3. Mangala Solaris
  4. Greene Lee
  5. Roc Wieler
  6. Malcanis
  7. Unforgiven Storm

After that, I’m less sure. Still mulling it over. Mynnna seems to be a decent and sane candidate. But they really don’t need my votes. I seriously doubt they won’t get in before the first elimination.

I’ll probably come back and revise this ballot at some point. Still thinking it over.

Lowsec – CSM8 trail

4 Replies

The question a lot of people who start EVE ask is, what’s low sec?

And once they’ve heard the answer, they ask ‘Why in gods name would I want to go there?’

Right now, unless you’re in Faction Warfare, I don’t have a particularly good answer for you. And that’s not a good thing. Lowsec /should/ be an engaging place. Where people want to go, for reasons other than ‘I want to shoot people’. Because without those people, the number of people to shoot is pretty damn low.

Right now, Lowsec (outside of faction warfare) is like NPC nullsec, but with sec hits and gate guns.

While it’s not the focus of my campaign, I don’t like that. I have a few ideas, mostly spit balling as I’ve not talked with many denizens of Low.

Step one: Limited Cyno Jamming. Carriers and Dreads are fine. Supercaps are less so. Adding a blapable structure (Probably in a size limited plex) to turn it off a limited jammer for a while, would make this less of an issue, while not totally crippling logistics. When I say limited Jamming, it’s bad terminology. Light all the Cynos you want, but only ships below a certain size can jump in.

Step two: Local. As an intel source, it’s too powerful. So it needs replaced with something more flexible, were you have to take an action to check if there’s anyone else in system. Or, perhaps, making it delayed. So you have to be in system for a while, before it picks you up. Maintenance is a bitch, after all. and who cares about funding lowsec? 😉

Step 3: POS anchored somewhere other than moons. A POS at a moon is asking to be reinforced, then blapped, with minimal effort in locating it. Shifting them off moons makes it harder to find them. Though I’m thinking a new scan method will be needed. Something a little more time intensive than combat probing.

Step 4: Even out the restrictions on lowsec space. Lowsec is lowsec. 0.4 shouldn’t be special.

Step 5: Station ‘ownership’. I’m not entirely sure how to take this forward, but a kind of mini sov. you don’t own the system, and can’t block people out of the station, but you can get some fees from it, if you take it. Anchored modules near the station, perhaps. Something to ‘Take it hostage’. Or taking out specific NPCs. ‘Protection’ missions?

Step 6: Something to draw people in. Needs to be profitable enough to pay for lost ships. Industry won’t do it, which means resource gathering. Ring mining would be good. More exploration sites (which are easier to find) too.

There are other options. And I’d love to hear your opinions.

Highsec PvP – CSM8 trail

3 Replies

Non-Consensual PvP is part of Eve, and I would not see it gone. While I prefer not to have people do violence unto me, they have the right to try. Just as I have the right to make myself as unappealing as is viable.

If you check my Corp’s war history, you’ll see one war on it (As the time of writing). No deaths on it, but not because I didn’t log on for a week. I was waiting. They didn’t undock. Probably because there was no benefit for them doing so. One guy in a BC isn’t exactly a great incentive, after all. And the war had already paid for itself by then. Next time, the POS stays up and becomes a dickstar, rather than being stolen when it unanchored. Well played. A learning experience.

Ganking is doing fine and well too, it would seem. Plenty of people who don’t follow the simple ‘No more than a Billion or so in a freighter’ guideline. And plenty of people who mine in high risk regions of Highsec, without even the most rudimentary tank. No, a small shield booster is not a tank. If you’ve been ganked, and are offended, the close tab button is up there. HTFU.

Some candidates appear to want to make high-sec less safe. I don’t agree with them there. But I /certainly/ agree it shouldn’t be made any safer.

That’s not to say changes aren’t needed, however.

A war where one side stays docked up, or doesn’t bother logging on, is no fun for anyone.

You can’t /force/ someone to fight. They just wouldn’t bother logging on. What that leaves is making them /want/ to fight. Now that’s harder to do.

Anything that can adjust the cost of a war has the potential to be gamed, leading to a new dec shield. One thought that rattles round my head is having, depending on the size of the corporation, various bandings of kills and losses adjusting either the cost of the next inbound war, or the duration of a ‘safe’ time.

So a 3 man corp losing a billion isk in ships, is then safe for, say, a month (from the end of the last war. Wars are automatically ended. Maybe. This seems gameable. Maybe just a cost boost, for that period of time.)

A corp the size of Eve University has no changes.

So small corps then have a reason to go lose isk in a fight. And maybe even kill the enemy.

Hard caps are, of course, required to stop it from being hideously gamed.

I’d want to see statistics on high-sec wars, to be able to flesh out numbers to something that makes sense. There’s a suggestion I saw on Poetic’s site about bounties and warfare, which looked interesting, but I’m not sure it speaks to the people who would hide away. A benefit, even if they lose, is another matter.

Another thing to do is make it easier to swap into a clone without expensive implants. Maybe just in the station you’re in (with or without a medical station, no standings). No jumping across the cluster. This might be a step too far, however.

tl;dr:

  • Fighting is good
  • Ganking isn’t evil
  • Hiding in stations is bad
  • Giving people reasons not to hide might fix it
  • Stuff blowing up is good for my bottom line.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Heckling?