EDIT: I am back from camping and also conveniently four wisdom teeth shorter as well! A few interviews down and ready to get stuck into another year <3
Hey Team, full transparency. I’m currently camped at Uluru inside a national park with my family. It’s Gorgeous
While the CSM comes before my own EVE, which comes before my personal life, family is really special to me. Ill be back on the 9th october to finish my CSM run in style and get the new year rolling
Except! CCP are now taking ESI seriously and we are having a really productive conversation.
From Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park,
Ariel <3
Third Party Tools have long been a driving force behind the success of CCP and EVE Online, members of our community working for free are a force multiplier on CCP development resources and have repeatedly resulted in some ground-breaking and unique tools unique to EVE.
CCP and Third Party Developers have a mutual goal of designing safe and effective tools, and It’s been my constant struggle to reignite that professional relationship for the benefit of all players.
I’m Ariel Rin, Third Party Developer, The current Maintainer of the Alliance Auth Project, and I’m running for CSM to continue our work to bring ESI development back to a reliable, safe and game design approved state. In order to continue to push the envelope on community and social engagement in EVE.
My Vaguely Timeline-Esque Story
While I am primarily running on a Third Party Development platform, I’ve been around a while and developed connections and relationships in a wide variety of eve niche’s and mechanics.
!! CSM 19 !!
Currently the Lead Maintainer of the Alliance Auth project with a dozen developers contributing to a fully open source EVE Authentication and tooling platform
Developer of AA Community Apps Market Manager, Relays, Alumni, Incursions, Drifters; contributor to Discord Bot, Corp Tools and more.
Built EVEMeet, for organizing out of game events. This was shut down because of COVID
EVE Partner for my current work on Alliance Auth and previously EVEMeet
Nullbrain line Member in The Initiative [INIT.]
Simple Farmers [FARMD] fanboy, taught me everything I know about gate camping and how to lose a super
Rekking Crew super hunting
Delve Dunks, a 10 person crew dropping dreadbombs in Delve trading 94 Dreads for 2.2T of 69 Supers (and more)
IT Admin and helped run Tactical Supremacy [TIKLE] an AUTZ Alliance focused solely on AUTZ players and AUTZ content creation. Early pioneers of fozzie-sov warfare and citadel mechanics. A founding member of StainFraggin, later Legacy Coalition
Highsec Incursions TLA#1 https://tlaincursions.com/, Level 4 Facwar missions, Level 5 Lowsec missions, C5 Magnetar’s in dreads, if you can make ISK I’ve tried it.
Pandemic Legion (RIP), RKK before they tried to awox me and SNIGG after that
Dustbunny <3 Dust 514
And before all of that, I rented in drone lands, from either Solar Fleet, XIX or whoever was “winning” at the time.
A: Every feature currently in ESI was approved by Game Design, but if CCP choose to change this, I would support it. Part of maintaining an API is removing features deemed unsafe or too powerful. I do place a great deal of value in things that are currently available in the game client, and I think not providing them via an API encourages client cache and memory scraping, tools that we used to rely on in a grey area and one of the primary reasons CCP developed ESI, to legitimize approved methods of data access.
Q: I hate killboards, CCP should stop or delay them
A: So, what does this mean for ingame killmails, should killmails just not exist? Be private and remove the Corp being able to see it? I don’t think so, and ESI is just an approved and safe way to access the data already visible to you.
Q: Having to run a server and have an IT admin for a video game sucks
A: I Agree! While I’ve put a lot of work into making it as easy as possible for players to run their own tools, the amount of time we can dedicate to making this seamless and user friendly is limited by the time we spend dealing with the complications of ESI.
Q: ESI puts too much power into the big blocs
A: In my experience as a developer for large and small entities, this isn’t so. Big Blocs have large masses of humanpower to throw at problems like HR, authentication and social access. Small groups have to spend time that could be spent creating content on these issues instead. Automated tooling levels the playing field for everyone and frees people up to play a video game
Q: What value does ESI bring to EVE and why should CCP care
A: I mentioned that ESI is a force multiplier for CCP developer effort, what I mean by this is for every hour CCP spend on a feature, the Third Party Development community spends hundreds, building and maintaining better tools than ccp could hope to build in their time spent.
Q: What about the Excel Addon
A: An interesting point, the Excel addon is powered by ESI in the backend, a healthier ESI allows not only Third Party Developers to develop features, but CCP as well. Also a shoutout to GESI that already exists for Google Sheets, built by a Third Party Developer and is awesome
Watching Ariels face at the CSM summit when he realised ESI support was back on the menu was akin to watching a child opening up thier first present on christmas day
ESI is a critical backbone to the game that players from all areas of space and group sizes rely on at some level, Ariel is THE subject matter expert on all things ESI and I would highly reccomend him on anyones ballot
Ariel is a subject matter expert and an obvious asset to the CSM. The game does not function well without 3rd party tools, and Ariel represents them incredibly well.
Ariel is a very important vote if you want to support 3rd party devs! Just think of all 3rd party services you use on a daily basis: They all rely on ESI and having a guy making sure it is being maintained properly is invaluable!
Ariel is the ESI and third party vote - vote for Ariel for third party tools, robustness and stability of the ESI, and a vote for people gaming, and not people fixing stuff that is broken due to ESI changes!
Hello Ariel Rin, first of all good luck with your campaign …and may the best will win ofc
(I will great every candidate this way )
Hope you find time to share your thoughts on below topics and game ideas.
1. EVE Vanguard
Have you had an occasion to try it during Operation Nemesis or earlier? What was your impression if any?
What do you think about bidirectional connection planned with EVE Online? Do you see it has a potential to attract more players towards New Eden? And do you think Capsuleers will benefit from it?
2. Information & ISK itemization
How about being able to take a notes from your notepad and put it as an item into container or ship cargo? Same with an amount of ISK? Just like you can do with PLEX.
3. Production Plans
Basically the idea behind this is to bundle all the BPOs (BPCs), required to produce some final product, say, an assembled Drake fully fitted according to some saved fit ready for duty, into a single BPO-like item, and internally arranged into an intricate production workflow. Complete with logistics tasks, if necessary, using delivery corp projects. It could use BPMN diagram editor to arrange.
When installed into industrial job slot it will churn out those Drakes, provided there are required materials in linked containers or pause until they are become available again.
This is a very interesting point. While obviously it would be a large technical undertaking, do you think CCP could ever consider a containerized or SaaS platform for ESI-based tools? Something like Alliance Auth could be provided in an ESI marketplace, simply run as an instance by a corp or alliance who just pay the running/profitable cost to CCP.
The question i have here isn’t really what value is SaaS adding, but what value is it extracting
Its great if your output is of drastically more value than your costs, but in eve we dont generate value, nobody is going to “profit” more by throwing money at a SaaS platform so they can go about their normal everyday alliance/corp/fleet content.
I don’t think this drastically cuts down the humanhours needed, and it would seem to drive the costs up by an order of magnitude.
I must say that personally, I don’t like the idea of needing 3rd party player-made apps in order to play this game successfully… However, it is what it is and everybody that’s been here for a while knows that this game definitely needs it…
As such, I will most certainly be adding your name to my Ballot…
May you have much success and good luck in getting elected…
…and may the best will win ofc 
)