Your EVE Online story.
I started playing in 2007 as a hauler in highsec, working with Red Frog Freight, and then moved on to incursions flying with the USTZ incursion group for several years. The core of that group went to live in a wormhole together, building up their own structures and eventually moving into capital production and moon mining with Rorquals. I was on that journey for several years until I moved to nullsec in 2018 to join Association of Commonwealth Enterprises, a member of Goonswarm Federation.
After some time in Goonswarm Federation, I joined GSOL. GSOL is the logistical arm of Goonswarm Federation and keeps the lights on in all of the systems that GoonSwarm holds. The work that GSOL does includes dropping all of the structures that a system would need to defend itself, refueling infrastructure, and even scooping thousands of cans from a pinata. I was a leader of GSOL for many years and most of my time was spent managing the expansive group of volunteer staff members that reported to me. I coordinated all of the many logistics jobs that GSOL performed, and built many structures that GSOL needed to compete in the Eve Universe.
Much later, given my extensive background in IT, I was approached to manage some of the alliance’s services. Since then, I have been developing numerous applications using ESI, most recently rebuilding GSF’s SRP system, uplifting it from an application that had been in use dating back to 2017. Additionally, numerous other tools designed to assist alliance members, helping to enable them to have fun and exceed their chosen goals when they hit the login button into Eve Online.
Your areas of expertise. In which areas of the game do you feel you are the most knowledgeable? What qualities set you apart from other candidates? As part of your answer, please outline any relevant experience and perspectives you have on these topics:
Just because most of my EVE career to date comes from my experience in nullsec, the logistics and underlying systems that support such play and building up the complex alliance infrastructures, doesn’t mean I’m only interested in these corners of space. Highsec, lowsec, nullsec, wormhole space, industry, PvP, and PvE – it’s all interconnected and affects each other. Neglecting a portion of the space can have unintended consequences elsewhere.
When approaching issues with the CSM I won’t be seeking changes to only benefit the space I live in or specifically my playstyle. Instead I hope to be a point of contact for all players across EVE who have issues they wish to be heard. Although I don’t have firsthand experience with every playstyle, I can listen to players who do and work out the problems they are facing and then ensure these are clearly represented to Fenris and the rest of the CSM when required.
Sovereignty management and logistics
Logistics is something that has always been central to my EVE experience, from hauling cans around in highsec to managing supplies for GSOL in nullsec. That experience gives me a strong appreciation for the sort of work that goes on behind the scenes in nullsec, and I enjoy helping to support the people who are out fighting over structures and sovereignty.
As someone who has spent years supporting operations in nullsec, I have a high regard for the work that is done in the background to keep an alliance running smoothly. Yes, it is nice to get the killmails, but someone has to fuel the structures, reload the ammo, and build the next structures to support objectives.
Industry and markets
Years of running the production and science jobs for structures and capital ships in my role leading GSOL for years. Building various ships for the alliance and running various infrastructure projects for it. As opposed to doing industry for individual profit, all my industry experience has been managing and producing things for an organization.
Ships, gameplay, and the HUD
I’m very interested in how the game presents information to players. Currently, I find that there are far too many steps to complete tasks in EVE and far too much time spent staring at various windows and lines of text rather than exploring space. I’ll be very interested to see how the current changes pan out and what issues will become apparent once people start playing with the new HUD.
Unstructured PvP
My unstructured PvP experience mostly consists of small gang fighting and solo ganking. Unstructured means that there is no timer, no fixed objectives, and the outcome is not guaranteed to favor one side. The kind of PvP that requires quick decisions, the ability to read a situation, and to make an educated guess about your target’s actions. Knowing when to engage or disengage from a fight is also important. I find unstructured PvP to be very unpredictable and thus always different and interesting, because you never know who is going to show up.
Factional Warfare
Factional Warfare – I have done some sites with my corp; that said, I am nowhere near the level of expertise that many other players possess with regards to Factional Warfare.
Highsec and the new-player experience
Whenever FC makes a change to the NPE (new-player experience), I like to make a fresh character and go through it again. As someone with characters as old as 2007, it’s rare that I get to encounter a given system anymore naturally. And since the accumulated knowledge of EVE’s many years of development (that all veterans take for granted) gets fed to new players in various ways, starting over is the best way for me to experience it as they do.
EVE has a vast amount of accumulated knowledge that older players (like myself) forget that new players wouldn’t have. So playing the NPE on a new alt now and then is a good thing for me to remember just how much knowledge the game expects you to pick up along the way.
The connection between EVE Online and EVE Vanguard
I haven’t done much with the Vanguard tests, but I have taken a look at them from time to time. I’m fairly interested in how the connection between the two games will develop, especially once actions in the test version of Vanguard start to have some real meaning in EVE Online.
Mining Dread?
Definitely.
Why are you applying for the CSM?
1. CSM work is a lot like product management
I am a product manager by day, so much of what the CSM does is very familiar to me.
You need to understand the intricacies of working with a company. Passing on a disturbed customer’s angry rant to the engineers won’t get you anywhere. You need to be able to determine the root cause of the issue, define the scope of influence for the problem, work out how often it occurs, and prove why investing time and resources to fix said problem is worth it.
This same model can be applied to working with the CSM as a member as well. The CSM gets a ton of feedback on features, balance changes, and other aspects of the game from a wide variety of players and groups. Instead of trying to funnel that feedback down to a few points of contact and then hoping that it gets acted upon, we can create a process to take that feedback and vet it out with the appropriate teams to create solutions to problems that can be implemented by engineers and managed by project managers.
That is how I would run as CSM.
Players already generate a huge amount of value in the form of feedback for fixes to issues with the game. I want to help translate that feedback into feasible work for the team at Fenris to implement and for the project managers to prioritize and run with.
2. Make sure ESI isn’t forgotten
For two terms, Ariel Rin was the best CSM for making sure that in meetings with Fenris, the third-party developers for ESI would get to talk about their problems with ESI, and he would press the developers to make sure that they were continuing to work on it instead of letting it fade into obscurity. I will keep doing what Ariel did while he was on the CSM.
So, this is the part where I argue that ESI is incredibly important for the operation of alliances, not just big ones but also small ones of 50 people. So, the work of logistics automation, industrial automation, market automation, etc. can all be done by a single person in a small alliance. They can make spreadsheets, take screenshots, copy and paste information from one place to another, and so on. But if we had ESI, then that one person could automate all of that work.
As mentioned above, there is a lot of tedium involved in managing alliance infrastructure, regardless of whether you are supporting 50 players or 50,000. Better ESI coverage gives groups of every size more opportunities to automate that work and spend less time on administration.
I will make sure that ESI is brought up when discussing new features that require access to data for third-party tools to work. I believe that ESI should be a point of discussion at the beginning of development for features, not as an afterthought 6 months later.
This is also why it is so very important that players, including those in alliances, make tools for playing EVE Online. ESI, which is a critical component to how so very many of these player tools work, has to be something that Fenris cares about.
3. Logistics is part of warfare
To me, logistics are a part of warfare in EVE Online. This means that in order to defend an ally, supply a front line, move ships and other equipment to a battlefield, fuel structures, and (perhaps) even move goods in a market-centric economy through hostile space or behind enemy lines, logistics must function well. When you fight for sovereignty, moons, or resource sites, logistics does not disappear. It gets moved to the front lines. Sometimes you have to supply a battlefield. Other times you have to transport ships and supplies through hostile space or even behind enemy lines.
The route planner for logistics should be improved.
I’d like to see:
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Recent kills directly on the route bar and autopilot route.
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“Prefer safer” routing takes into account actual recent kills in the area instead of the static security level of a region.
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More of the route information currently provided by third-party tools in the space map view.
The aim here isn’t to try and make hauling “safe” in order to appeal to an audience that enjoys persistent-world action-combat games. The aim is to make routing more dynamic, so the route planner can react to what is actually happening in space instead of relying almost entirely on static security status.
4. Cut down on the busywork
This is also the root of the other two things I want to see added to the client. Lots of administrative work goes on in EVE corporations and alliances. Work that could be automated by better APIs, but isn’t. Work that would be boring to automate, but is currently done by people in EVE corporations and alliances. Eventually, all that work adds up to become more than one person can handle and burns them out. This work could be mitigated in a number of areas around Fenris to still keep challenging gameplay but reduce mundane work for CEOs and other administrators of large alliance and corporation structures.
Currently, to manage a holding corp, for example, you’d have to grant the person full access to the holding corp, and thus they could do whatever they want with it. It would be much better to be able to grant ACL (access control list) like access to the hangar, or other roles of the holding, and thus they could only do what you granted them.
Better APIs (like ESI) would also help the above scenario: instead of having to manually find and work with another human to do all the above admin work, a single programmer could write a script to automate it all for the alliance. Route planning is another area of the game where better information can enable its users to be more efficient and hence spend less time mucking about to get the job done.
All I want is to remove as much of the “administrative overhead” from “all the work that must be done” in order to keep a corporation or alliance running, as I feel removing that work from these roles will allow them to actually play EVE as well.
Let the people that run the Corps and Alliances of EVE Online play the game as well.
Get in touch
If you want to talk, complain, suggest, disagree about something or just shoot the breeze about EVE, gaming or otherwise, just reach out to me.
You can find me in a bunch of different eve related discord servers or you can join my discord server:
I will try to keep my site up to date with all the interviews that I do which you can find below: