Kudos to some, Calling out others

So CSM 8 has been in office for 2 weeks, and I wanted to offer some first impressions, from the inside.

Firstly, several CSM 8 members have greatly impressed me. Topping the list is Ali Aras, who has been working extremely hard to get up to speed on what CSM 7 has done, and what is still left to be done. The combined CSM 7, CSM 8 and CCP Skype channel has been full of a lot of topics, and it is great to see folks like mynnna, Sala Cameron, Sort Dragon, Malcanis and Ripard Teg chime in about ship balancing, while Mike Azariah and Ali talked New Player Experience (NPE) with CCP. Some folks have been a little bit quieter in Skype, though they still have spoken up from time to time, including Mangala Solaris, James Arget and Korvin. Trebor, of course, is fairly active as well, but he is an old timer, and doesn't really count. Kesper North was a little late signing his NDA, but doesn't seem to have had much to say after signing it, so far.

I do want to mention that CSM 7 lost access to the internal CSM forum, so my impressions are from Skype only. Hopefully some of the less active Skype people have been making up for it on the forums.

Those of you good at math will note that I have only mentioned 12 of the 14 members of CSM 8. The reason for this is because as of May 17th, 20 days after the election results and 14 days after the start of the term, progodlegend and Chitsa Jason have still not signed their NDAs. This is incredibly disappointing to me, and I would assume to their colleagues as well, but most of all, it is a huge slap in the face to their voters. They were elected by thousands of players to represent their communities, and they have chosen not to do so. Something similar happened during CSM 6, where Promethius Exenthal didn't sign his NDA until 5 months into the term. I don't know the story with progodlegend, but I have heard that Chitsa is on a month long tour of Europe, and won't be available until sometime in June.

Even with the missing two members, CSM 8 is off to a great start, and I personally am looking forward to the wonderful things we all hope they can accomplish this term. CSM 7 is losing access to the NDA'd Skype channel on Tuesday the 21st, and I am looking forward to playing a lot more EVE and doing a lot less CSMing.

My Suggested Ballot for CSM 8

As promised, here is the list of the 14 people I will be voting for in the election this year, in the order I will be voting for them:

James Arget
Cipreh
Nathan Jameson
Chitsa Jason
Ayeson
Trebor Daehdoow
Malcanis
Ripard Teg
Mangala Solaris
Ali Aras
Steve Ronuken
Psychotic Monk
Korvin
mynnna

EDIT: CCP removed the easy way to vote, so you will have to vote by hand

Go to https://community.eveonline.com/community/csm/vote/
Log in
Choose your 14 candidates, preferably in the order above
Click Submit(and repeat for all your active EVE accounts)

I would like to explain a little why these 14 candidates, and also why I put them in the order I have above.

First of all, my first 5 candidates are the 5 wormhole candidates. Again, it is CRITICAL for all wormhole residents to do the same. As long as we all list all 5 at the top of our ballots, we will elect as many candidates as we possibly can. Your order may be different from mine, but please remember to include everyone.

Wormhole Candidates

James Arget is my #1 choice for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I think he really understands what is required to be on the CSM, in terms of how things actually get done. Secondly, his views on the priorities for w-space are very similar to my own. He also expresses himself well, though he could be working a little harder on his campaign.

Cipreh is a very close second to James, and in fact I had him at #1 in an earlier version of this post. Cipreh has campaigned a little harder than James. The main reason I have James higher is because James has seen a little more of EVE than Cipreh has. Cipreh has spent nearly his entire EVE career in wormhole space, but CSM talks about a wide variety of topics, and having a little more broad experience would help. Ideally both Cipreh and James will be elected, and we will have the best of both worlds.

Nathan Jameson is campaigning the hardest of any of the wormhole candidates, which I see as a really good sign. CSM is a lot of work, and people that are not willing to put in the work at election time are far less likely to put in time during their terms. My main reservations with Nathan are about the way he plays the game. As he readily admits, he spends much of his time outside of w-space, and he isn't much of a PVPer, partly due to his timezone (he lives in Taiwan). His timezone is also a minor issue, though it can be overcome.

Chitsa Jason could be a very good CSM representative, but I am very worried about his ability to follow through with things that he starts. During the campaign, he started out very strong, but recently has been far less visible. Despite that concern, he does have a lot of wormhole PVP and organizational experience. We certainly don't always agree on anything, but I think he would be able to do a good job on the CSM if he wants to so.

Ayeson has put well below the bare minimum amount of effort into his campaign. He is the only of the 5 wormhole candidates to not come on AHARM's Teamspeak server to talk to us. He is the only one who still doesn't have a sticky campaign thread in Jita Park (at least as of March 30th). He hasn't been posting, he hasn't been tweeting. In talking to him, he seems like he has some good ideas and some good experience to bring to the table, but his complete apathy in campaigning is a very bad sign.

Everyone else

Trebor is my top non-wormhole candidate. He was one of the hardest workers during CSM 7 (and 6, and 5, for that matter), he has a very good understanding of how CCP gets things done, and he and I generally agree on most topics. Don't believe the lies, he isn't out to make all highsec safe from any combat, and he isn't out to get nullsec residents. He also agreed to run for CSM 8, which meant that I was OK with not running myself. :)

Malcanis, well, there is a reason his campaign thread is by far the longest in Jita Park this year. He is an incredibly hard working guy, and he has a very level head on his shoulders.Nobody could ever read all of what he writes, but the parts I have read are very similar to my own views.

Ripard Teg is another really hard worker, and I am hopeful that having him on the CSM will improve the communication between the CSM and the players. I know that those of us on CSM 7 let some folks down, though I think we did improve some things from CSM 6. Ripard writes a fantastic blog, and while I may disagree with some of what he says on that blog, I feel like having him on the CSM would bring a very valuable point of view to the table. Personally, I am also looking forward to having him see how CCP works from the inside.

Mangala Solaris is responsible for running the great RvB organization, and I think he brings some very valuable highsec wardec mechanics understanding to the table. He is also a good communicator, and I agree with most of his platform.

Ali Aras has made a lot of lists by being in touch with the new player experience, and having that sort of understanding is very important on the CSM. She also represents a different side of nullsec than most, and having a wide body of knowledge on the CSM is incredibly important.

Steve Ronuken is on my list because I think CCP needs to continue to pay attention to the 3rd party developers who make EVE the 24/7/365 game that we love. On CSM 7, both Trebor and I have done a lot of API/SDD development, and hopefully CREST will eventually see the light of day, and we need people on the CSM that can communicate with CCP about it.

Psychotic Monk might seem like an odd choice to some, but I think an active highsec scammer/greifer/bad boy would be very valuable to CSM 8. In theory, this role could have been played by Darius III, but he was nearly entirely AFK during his 2 terms, and he wasn't nearly as good at communicating as Mr. Monk (hah!) is.

Korvin was on CSM 5, which was before my time, but from what I have heard, he was active and helpful. In my opinion, the Russian EVE community has been doing themselves a great disservice the last couple years. I love UAxDeath, and he is great at the summit, but most of the rest of the time, he is absent. Greene Lee has some trouble following rapid English conversation, and he was around some of the time, but he was still not participating as much as he could have. Hopefully Korvin gets elected and gives a proper voice to the many, many Russian speaking players of the game.

Some people might be surprised to see mynnna on my list at all. The reason for that is because I have spoken to him fairly extensively in the past few months, and I have been very impressed. I don't think he needs the votes to get elected, but I think he would be a very good choice for one of the two permanent summit seats.

CSM 8 - Vote For Wormholes (but not for me)

Hopefully people have seen the new dev blog, about the new voting system. I wanted to say a couple of things about the CSM 8 election.

First of all, as I have mentioned in several places, I am not running for re-election. I am not doing this because I am burnt out or feel that the CSM isn't effective, but for 2 main reasons. Firstly, I only get 3 weeks of vacation per year, and when on the CSM, all three weeks must be used to go to Iceland (2 summits plus Fanfest). Iceland is really nice, but I would like to see more of the world. Secondly, I want to play EVE again. Being on the CSM is a large time commitment, and it means that I don't spend nearly as much time playing the game as I would like. I miss my corp, and I want to get back to blowing stuff up and losing triage archons again.

Secondly, and most importantly, with the new voting system it is crucial that all wormhole residents make sure to list ALL wormhole candidates at the top of their ballots. I ask that all wormhole candidates pledge to ask their voters to do this. The reason I haven't held the wormhole primary that I was going to do is because this new voting system means we don't have to try to narrow down the field in order to make sure we are represented, as long as everyone includes all of the wormhole candidates at the top of their ballots. The following wormhole candidates are currently running, and I will keep this list up to date: (in alphabetical order)

Ayeson (JP) (Wormhole Forum) (Crossing Zebras Interview) (Blog)
Chitsa Jason (JP) (Wormhole Forum) (Crossing Zebras Interview) (Blog)
Cipreh (JP) (Wormhole Forum) (Crossing Zebras Interview) (Blog)
James Arget (JP) (Wormhole Forum) (Crossing Zebras Interview) (Blog)
Nathan Jameson (JP) (Wormhole Forum) (Crossing Zebras Interview) (Blog)

Edit: Night Beagle removed from list
(Some advice for candidates, if you don't have all the links filled in above, you need to do so ASAP)

As for the order in which you list the candidates, that is up to you. I will certainly be following the campaign closely, and I will be publishing my own list before the election. I would also like to note that I am offering paid campaign advice, which will not impact the order in which I list candidates. I have been approached by several of the wormhole candidates for my services, which I was not willing to offer until the question of a wormhole primary was settled. Since that is taken care of, I am available.

I would also like to mention that Bronya of the Down the Pipe podcast has hosted a debate among the wormhole candidates. It is well worth listening to.

Message Received

I want to start out by thanking each and every person who posted on the forums in support of my last blog post. I thought I might get a couple hundred replies at best, and you guys and gals went above and beyond. I want to especially thank you for staying civil, creative and positive in the entire thread. I read each and every post, and there were very few threats, and very little incoherent rage. It was, by far, the politest and most constructive threadnaught I've ever seen.

CCP has noticed. There have been a couple of posts by CCP staff in the thread, CCP Gargant posted here, and CCP Seagull posted here. I responded to CCP Gargant's post here. I have also talked to other CCP staff, and they certainly are aware of both the size of the thread and the respectful tone of the thread. CCP has said they will make a more substantive response to the thread in the next few days as well.

I do want to make sure people have realistic expectations for what sort of response CCP is likely to make. As my colleague Trebor has explained on his blog, CCP is in the middle of planning for the upcoming May expansion right now, and the CSM is heavily involved in that process. That means that even in the best case, CCP will not be deciding about work on the POS system for some weeks.

The other thing I want to address is that some people feel I either have been dishonest in my choice of quotes from the minutes, or that I am taking the wrong approach by bringing the issue to the players. On the selective quoting, all I can say is that I was there. Before the threadnaught, I felt that it was possible that CCP might not decide to either start work on the modular POS system or give us the fixes to the current POS system that everyone has been looking forward to for literally years. After all of you told CCP how important it is to you, I think it is a lot more likely that they will at least deliver some relatively simple improvements to the current POS system as part of the May release.

If anyone has any questions or comments, please feel free to EVE mail or convo me, or post here. I was also on the Down the Pipe podcast last night, you can listen here. I will also be on EVE radio in a few minutes, at 22:00 EVE time today.

I am a small portion of the community

For those that haven't seen it, the minutes from the December CSM summit are out. A couple of important quotes:

Unifex stated that what CCP did was spend effort and prototype what would make a good POS system. It would, however, only affect the group of people who manage POSes. Focusing that amount of time and effort on some small singular aspect of the game and delivering only that “is what will kill the business”.      (page 37)

and

Taking the opportunity to talk about POSes, Alek queried why the CSM were so late in learning that POSes were hard to do now. Further, he disagreed that POSes would only touch a small subset of the players and asked how did CCP feel able to accomplish the feat of balancing null-sec, which Alek viewed as comparatively more difficult than POSes. Soundwave was the first to respond and told Alek that he felt some of the assertions he made were incorrect and, from a game design perspective, implementing changes to null-sec and the sov system in general would be easier than revamping the POS system. On top of that, Soundwave added, the POS system by itself would only affect a small portion of the community.                                       (page 38)

It wasn't in the minutes, but I spent a lot of time talking to Unifex about this at night. Needless to say, I disagreed with CCP's decision to not move ahead with work on the POS system. I also disagree that only a small group of people would feel the effects of a new POS system. From wormhole residents to Tech 2 producers to nullsec residents, a lot of people interact with POSes. Also, a redesigned POS system would both attract players that were frustrated to the point of giving up with the old POS system as well as new players who cannot use the current POS system because of limitations with roles.

Even ignoring the incorrect statements about who would care about a POS rewrite, I feel that we are owed some work on the POS system. Wormholers have been very patient with CCP during the last couple years while other supposedly higher priority issues have been addressed. During that time, we sat back and continued to pay our subscriptions to CCP, secure in the "promise" that we felt CCP had made at FanFest in 2012 and again at the May/June CSM summit: They were working on a new POS system, there was no reason to fix the many issues with the current one.

That hope has turned out to be a false one. CCP decided that the full modular POS system would require the effort of the whole company for a whole expansion, and they feel the benefits don't justify that much effort. I personally don't agree, but I do feel that if CCP is not going to deliver the full modular POS vision right now, they MUST deliver improvements to the current system. When we were first told about the decision to not deliver modular POSes this summer, I led the CSM in the creation of a list of the needed improvements. The first item on the list, and in my opinion the bare minimum that CCP should deliver, is to have real private ship and item storage at POSes.

The good news is that CCP has not done their planning for the May expansion yet. That planning is happening right now, and CSM is involved in the process. I want you, the players, to be involved as well. I want you to tell CCP that you want POS improvements to be the bare minimum for the next expansion. I want you to tell CCP that you are "a small portion of the community". I've created a thread, please go here and let CCP know that you are also a small portion of the community.

Bye Sean

When I joined CSM 6 18 months ago, there were two goons on the council. One of them we all knew, and one I hadn't heard of. I first assumed he was just following The Mittani's orders, but I very quickly learned I was totally wrong. Throughout the term of CSM 6, Vile Rat, or as I came to know him, Sean, continued to impress both me and everyone else on the CSM. He was smart, diplomatic and tough when he had to be. I got a chance to meet him in person at Fanfest 2012, and he was a great guy to talk to. Even after the term of CSM 6 was over, he and I continued to talk, and he kept right on pushing me to be a better CSM rep for everyone. Tonight, I was saddened to learn that he was killed in Benghazi, Libya, where he was posted for his job with the US Department of State. My sincerest, deepest condolences to his wife and children. EVE lost a great pilot, diplomat, CSM and friend today.

Response to the Response on the POS Redesign

Following the release of the minutes of the June CSM summit, some people have had some big concerns with the outline of the replacement POS system described at that summit. I'm really glad to hear people discussing the changes, and the entire reason we had the discussion at the summit was to involve the CSM and the community in the design of the replacement POS system as early as possible. Right now, the discussions are happening in a thread on the official forums (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=140049) as well as a thread on Failheap Challenge (http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?7700-W-Space-general-discussion). This blog post is a response to the points raised in those two threads as well as concerns raised by people that have contacted me directly. While the following is my personal opinion, I don't just present my opinions to CCP, I always include as much as possible about the sentiments of the community that I was elected to represent.

I want to re-emphasize that the POS system design is just starting now, and will not be in the winter expansion. There is still a lot of work to be done on the design, and nothing at all is set in stone. I also wanted to mention that CCP has some technical reasons to not want to have forcefields in the new system, but those reasons were declared to be under the NDA, so I cannot go into them. The removal of the forcefield is a decision that they made, and is not something that I would choose to do myself, but I am not an employee of CCP and I don't have to do the work to keep them. Lastly, I should point out that not all the discussion on these mechanics happened during the official summit, there was a fair amount talked about in the evening after the formal meetings, and this stuff is not in the minutes.

Docking Games

In the threads, the biggest problem people have with the system that was discussed is that a docking module would bring k-space style "docking games" to wormhole space. I understand this concern, but I do not think it will be nearly as big of a problem as some people seem to think. There are a couple of reasons for this:
1) We already have "forcefield games", and people just don't complain about that all that much. The difference would probably be fairly minor between the two mechanisms.
2) The vast majority of fights in w-space are not outside a POS, they are at wormholes or in sites. The new POS system will still have POS defenses, and that means the new system probably wouldn't change where people fight.

Scouting and Intel

The second biggest worry in the threads is the concern that the removal of forcefields would remove the information about who is at a POS, how active they are, and what ships they are in. I agree with this concern, and asked CCP about a solution to this in the minutes:

3) Force fields (or lack thereof). CCP wants to have docking modules, but they don't want them to be cheap, and they may want to limit the number of ships that can be docked. CCP has been exploring adding mooring modules that would protect a ship that was able to physically get near the module with a small force field around just the ship. This system might replace ship maintenance arrays.  

Two step pointed out that this system might be nice for docking as well, so that people can get some indication of how many people are active in a starbase, especially in w-space where there is no local chat.

I will continue to urge CCP to make a system for players to be able to see who is active in a docked POS. Ideally this would include the ship they are currently in, as well as the number of players that are docked.

Another common concern expressed in the threads is that without forcefields, there would be no easy way to tell if a POS is online or offline. I would like to see CCP address this, but as Vassal Zeren pointed out (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1743748#post1743748), I would expect any new POS system to have a mechanism for people to hack or steal offline POSes. If that was the case, making it a little more work to detect an offline POS might be reasonable, as the reward for finding one would be good.

Full Moon Coverage

Some people were also worried that because POSes would be allowed to be anchored anywhere, having full moon coverage would no longer be a way to deny an enemy a beachhead when invading. I actually see this as a good thing. Invading one of the larger w-space entities like my corporation (AHARM) or some of the other big alliances is already really hard, and I don't think making it slightly easier will be a change for the worse. People will still have to move multiple waves of capital ships in, they will still have to fight where the defender probably has an edge in capitals, and they will still have the disadvantage of facing POS guns/EWar.

The good

The main reason I would prefer to see CCP make docking part of the new POS mechanics is because CCP has proven that they have a lot of trouble getting even one inventory system right. The reason you can't assemble T3s or have your own personal storage space right now is because getting that to work requires CCP to write two sets of code, one for docked ships and one for POSes. I just don't have a lot of faith that CCP won't continue to make people that live in POSes second class citizens. If we have the same interface as everyone else, then whatever bugs we have to deal with will be the same bugs that people in empire have to deal with, which means they (probably) won't languish unfixed for years like the T3 refitting bug.

Another good thing about allowing docking at POSes is that we then get a fuller set of features. I made a list of the features off the top of my head in a post on the official forums (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1763605#post1763605) and I will highlight a few of the more important ones:

• Contracts. This isn't all that important right now because we don't have personal storage, but allowing people within a corp or alliance to drop items off for other people is a really useful thing. This might include things like courier contracts, which would enable people to haul stuff into and out of a hole for others.

• Full fitting and inventory services. This includes assembling and refitting T3s but also fitting a ship from a saved fitting, repackaging ships and items and a lot more.

• Refining. People don't like the current POS refining system (at least that is what they tell me, I don't actually mine myself). This would be a path to having a real refining capability without limits on throughput and yield.

• Real access rights and container access. This includes fixing dumb bugs like not being able to open cans in corp hangars as well as using password protected cans and the current corp hangar access system to provide more granular access to corp assets.

• Clone switching. This is not jump cloning into and out of w-space, but lots of people would like to have the ability to switch between different implant sets. I'd love to see this available to all pilots, and if that happens, it would probably be in the station interface, not by adding some sort of new POS module.

• Privacy. This isn't a big deal for some corps, but right now a lot of people can see exactly what people have in their POS, depending on how it is set up. In k-space, pilots have the option to use alts or a station without a corp office to hide what they have from people within their corp, and I don't see why w-space people shouldn't have that option. Obviously directors will have to be able to see into people's private storage, if only to be able to empty a POS to take it down, but there is no reason that anyone else should be able to see what people have.

Why Change?

People are rightfully very nervous about the upcoming new POS system. I am also nervous, but the right reaction isn't to claim the sky is falling and that CCP (or me, or the other CSM) are out to "ruin" w-space. CCP agrees with me that w-space is generally working pretty well, but the trust problem is actually a really big problem for people who would like to get into w-space.

This comic (http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20120625) is actually far more appropriate for w-space corps, and this is a *bad* thing. A lot of w-space people spend a lot of time talking about how great w-space is, but many, many people can't join in on the fun because of the difficult recruitment process.

"But Two step, all you have to do is fix X, Y and Z in the current POS system! Don't change anything else!" This is another common refrain from the eve-o thread. People who say this are being unrealistic. The current POS system is creaky and old, and making changes to it is not something CCP is interested in doing. The cost for them is very high, and the likelihood of a change breaking something else that we all hold near and dear is higher still. As CCP has explained several times, this is simply not an option. A big part of being on the CSM is that you need to understand exactly which battles you need to fight, and this isn't one of them.

Not the end, just the start of the beginning

As I said before, nothing at all is set in stone, and this is very early in the process. CCP has just started to think about how to design a replacement for the POS system, and feedback from the players and the CSM is very important. I do think it is really important for all of us to think really carefully about the feedback we give and to make sure we don't just react negatively to any change at all, especially when I think it will be for the better. This is also just the start of the discussion between all of the CSM and the players about what you want to see in a POS system. I'd encourage everyone to continue to talk to us, either on the forum threads I linked, via eve-mail, twitter or in our upcoming town hall meeting (date and time to be announced very soon!)