One Last Time - Re-elect Brisc Rubal to CSM 17
WATCH BRISC’S FINAL CAMPAIGN COMMERCIAL HERE
Brisc Rubal is a veteran EVE Online player, nullsec PvPer, EVE media personality and CSM member. He first came to EVE Online in 2006, and has been all around New Eden. Between his service on the CSM and his streaming, Brisc has become one of the most widely-known EVE players in the game.
He’s been a high sec mission runner. He’s done some time on the Tama gate camp and lived off a couch in low sec. He’s lost two titans, including one in M2-XFE live on stream, and still is in the top 25 all-time for Nergal kills. For much of his active career he’s been an active subcap and supercapital pilot in nullsec, currently serving as an F1 monkey in the Initiative, and he’s even managed to sneak an alt into KarmaFleet, where he is, as Merkelchen likes to say, the “only director in the Corporation who isn’t actually in the Corporation.”
He serves as co-host of Imperium News Network’s “The Meta Show,” the most watched EVE Online talk show, and joins his best friends Innominate and Merkelchen six days a week on RampageInc, one of the most-watched USTZ EVE streams and is part of the EVE Partner Program. He also streams EVE on his own Twitch channel, and creates videos, usually for the Meta Show, on his YouTube channel. He was elected to CSMs 13, 15 and 16.
Despite frequent accusations, he is no relation to Fountain Frank. He looks nothing like Brisc. Stop with the conspiracy theories, people.
Despite being space famous, he is still not an FC, not an alliance leader (although he’s frequently accused of running INIT), not a corporation CEO nor a diplomat. He’s still addicted to this game, plays almost every day, and there’s plenty of proof in the form of empty beer bottles, dead structures in Feythabolis, and photos of him in hot tubs on Onlyfans.
In real life, Brisc Rubal is the online persona of Brian Schoeneman, a veteran lawyer and politician in the United States. In his day job, he represents America’s largest seafaring union in the halls of Congress and the White House. He’s run for office twice, testified before the U.S. Congress multiple times , served as chief elections administrator in the largest county in the Commonwealth of Virginia (with over 1 million residents), served as Special Assistant and Senior Speechwriter for a U.S. cabinet secretary, got verified on Twitter , taken a nap smack dab in centerfield at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, and Rachel Maddow even apologized for making fun of him on TV.
My EVE Online Story
My EVE Online story begins, oddly enough, in Star Wars: Galaxies. One of my college friends and I had been planning on playing SWG since it was announced, and when it was launched in 2003 we hit the ground running. We built a solid guild from the ground up, and I joined SOE’s version of the CSM, their “Player Correspondent Program,” and was the longest serving member until the game shut down.
After SOE decided to ignore their Correspondents and destroy the game that my buddy and I loved, we looked around for a new game to play that could scratch that itch. I started playing World of Warcraft, and he started playing EVE Online. After a year or so, in July of 2006, he finally convinced me to try out EVE. I did.
Swing, and a miss. I was intimidated by the game – spent most of my first couple of months docked in a station training my training skills. I remember the first time I ever undocked from a station expecting to be immediately killed by other players, given the game’s reputation. In any event, it didn’t hold my attention. I would pop in to run a mission or two every month or so, and I bounced around, tried to join a corporation (I can’t even remember which one now), and just didn’t really get into it. This was me for the next ten years – every couple of months coming back and playing by myself, running missions, training my account, salivating over someday getting to fly a Raven, but not really enjoying myself. I never made it past lowsec.
It wasn’t until 2016 that I finally got back into the game permanently. A real-life political buddy of mine was highly active in the game, and he’d joined up with a group up in Tenal. He wanted me to join, so I resubbed and decided to move up there. I had nothing more than an Osprey Navy Issue (which I immediately lost to a PL gate camp in lowsec) and my skills. I finally made it up to Tenal and got into EVE Online proper. What made it different this time? I had friends to play with. I had a corporation that helped me figure things out. I finally got to PvP where I had a reasonable chance at winning. All of that combined to get me, after ten years, finally addicted to EVE Online. The longest I have gone without logging in since was the two weeks I was banned in 2019.
After joining my first nullsec corp, I spent the next six months relearning the game, unprogramming all the high sec stuff I had learned over the years and getting into nullsec PvP. I was flying with DRONE WALKERS at the time, and in January of 2017, I joined STK-Scientific, which was, at the time, one of the core corporations in DW, with the Alliance executor being a member. I was recruited to join them because I was, in the words of our current CEO, “the only guy who was willing to actually PvP and defend his space.” As part of STK and DW, we participated in all of the major wars during the first half of 2017, including the Battle of M-O, and we stayed in WALKA until we were stabbed in the back by CO2. After being evicted from Tenal by Adversity, we ended up on TEST’s couch in Catch, and were finally given space in Feythabolis. I lost my first ratting carrier to Inner Hell down there. CO2 decided they wanted the space and we were told by WALKA to move back to Catch. Live in Catch? ■■■■ no. So STK left DW and went back to the Initiative, joining Initiative Mercenaries. After two months, we made the jump from IM to INIT proper and I’ve been there ever since.
It was around that time that my STK brothers started harassing me to run for CSM. I told them no over and over, and they finally wore me down. I decided to run, ran a professional campaign, with website, TV commercial , paid advertising, appearances on many EVE related Twitch streams and podcasts including Open Comms, Talking in Stations , Declarations of War, and Mindclash, and memes galore. I was invited to join the Open Comms team, which I did until I left the show in early 2021.
Thanks to all of you, I was elected to CSM 13. While on CSM 13, I maintained a reputation as being one of the most approachable and active CSM members. I held a number of town halls and forums, I was active in over 20 EVE discords, continued my appearances on a variety of EVE media, single-handedly did the CSM roundtable at EVE Vegas in 2018, and attended both CSM summits in Iceland. I made it a point to post on Reddit and the EVE-O forums, and I went out of my way to represent the players to CCP. I reached out to underserved communities, including Wormholers, Faction Warfare and Lowsec pilots, and High Sec mission runners (of which I remain). During that time, I continued to play the game daily, managed to lose a Titan, helped evict Hard Knocks from Rage, made some funny videos and avoided all positions of responsibility within my corporation and alliance.
All of this came crashing down in April 2019, when I was accused of violating the NDA and was permanently banned, alongside INIT’s two lead FCs, Pandoralica and Dark Shines. After working with CCP, we were able to clear our names and I was reinstated, NO COLLUSION, TOTAL EXONERATION, two weeks later. Given that I have never hidden who I am, the impact on my personal life from the false accusations was significant, and I chose to step down from the CSM and not run for a second term in 2019.
I spent that 2019 killing people in EVE. After I left the CSM 13, I went out on fleets almost every day, ratted and mined (usually under duress), participated in almost every Saturday Night Swarm with KarmaFleet (unless there was a UFC PPV on), attended EVE Vegas 2019 and EVE London 2019, lost a Widow to Pinecones in Syndicate, joined the Meta Show as co-host, and did my best to remain an ambassador of the game to the rest of the gaming community.
But, as is often the case, when you’ve been in the game and you’re suddenly watching it from the sidelines, the desire to get back in can become overwhelming. I also felt like there was still some feeling in the community that while I had been exonerated by CCP, that I had somehow bullied the company or otherwise was guilty of what I was charged with, and I knew that one of the only ways to shut up those critics would be to run for CSM again and serve a full term. So, while I enjoyed my break, I knew that I had to at least give it one more chance. So after some soul searching and the blessing of MrsBrisc, I decided to run for CSM 15.
Thanks to the help of players across New Eden, I got elected to CSM 15 by an even larger margin than my CSM 13 victory, and I hit the ground running. As one of the returning veterans, I quickly worked to help get the new guys up to speed and prepare them for the new reality of CSM-via-videoconference. I established myself as the unofficial note taker for the CSM, documenting almost every single meeting held, and providing transparency in semi-monthly updates to players about what was happening internally on the CSM. I attended more than 90% of the 50 meetings held during CSM 15. I worked hard to be everywhere that players were, responding to questions via EVE Mail, Discord, Reddit, the official forums and on a variety of EVE Media. At the same time, I kept playing the game every day, hosted marathon livestreams of multiple Keepstar fights in NPC Delve (while playing) as well as anchoring a 14 hour breaking news stream for the first battle of M2-XFE (while losing a Titan - one of the first five to die on the Imperium side), and also anchored INN coverage for the second battle as well.
Throughout CSM 15, I worked hard to bring player concerns to the developers and succeeded in a number of major efforts, including advocating quality of life fixes like adding jump gates to the auto-navigation feature, among other changes that were very well received by the player base. Finally, I did my best to demonstrate to players that the CSM is more than just a group of famous players getting a free trip to Iceland, especially since there was no trip this year. This year was pure hard work, and I made sure to put in my fair share. The results speak for themselves.
And, of course, I got CCP to fix the Red Dot.
Riding high on the wave of community adulation that resulted from getting the red dot fixed, I chose to run for CSM 16, focusing my attention on opposition to CCP’s continued attempts to “fix” the in-game economy, which resulted in significant disruptions across New Eden and the effects of which are still being felt today. In addition, I continued to push for player-driven ideas for positive game changes, like advocating for a fix to AFK cloaky camping, the creation of capital and supercapital specific ratting sites, and continued efforts to get smaller gameplay and quality-of-life fixes that player had been asking for.
Thanks to all of you, I was elected by my widest margin ever on CSM 16, being the 4th player elected to the Council. CSM 16 was the most difficult CSM that I served on. In addition to the continued lack of in-person summits because of COVID-19, strained relationships as a result of the big nullsec war, and CCP’s continued scarcity and industry changes made serving on CSM 16 a significant challenge. Nonetheless, I worked hard to help deliver a number of wins for the community, including the creation of the mobile observatories (as a fix to AFK cloaky camping), the creating of the CRAB beacons, a number of quality-of-life improvements like including ansiblex jump gates in the in-game routing system, showing the exact time and date structures come out of reinforcement for the math challenged (like me), and fixes to citadels like lifting the damage cap on shield timers and restricting Keepstar doomsdays to capital ships, so I could someday end my reign as the “most doomsdayed player of all-time.”
My Areas of Expertise
I am primarily a null-sec PvPer. I’ve spent the bulk of the last six years in PvP alliances. As a result, I’m well versed in subcap PvP, large group PvP, capital PvP (including Titans and supercarriers), and the attendant politics that go into that area of space. Because of the work we’ve done in and around wormholes, I’ve learned a lot about them, although I would hesitate to call myself an expert (except to troll the small knot of humorless wormholers who are some of my biggest fans) in that area. I continue to run missions in high sec, I have a structure that I maintain in high sec so I’m familiar with structure and some logistics aspects of the game, and despite my ardent attempt to not learn anything about mining, I know far too much about it thanks to the krabs in my corp.
My other areas of expertise are outside of the game, but complimentary to it. As an EVE media personality, I know how to run a Twitch talk show, and I’m one of the more professional podcast/talk show hosts in the StreamFleet community. As a real life lobbyist, former public official and attorney, all of my daily professional skills are exactly the kinds of skills needed to be successful on the CSM – how to build relationships, work collaboratively, function in a group professional setting, and use the art of persuasion to maximize positive results for my constituents.
I also believe that my past experience with CCP, both on the CSM, in the EVE media sphere, as well as having been accused, banned, and exonerated by the company gives me a unique perspective on the game and the company from other CSM candidates. One thing that players can count on is that, thanks to my experiences, I am nobody’s sycophant, and I will speak truth to power on their behalf.
I have spent the last year holding CCP accountable for bad decisions that wrecked the player economy and drove players from the game in droves, and I will continue to do that if elected to a final term.
Why the Hell Are you Running Again and What Can Players Expect from a Fourth and Final Brisc Rubal Term?
I am frequently asked why I am running again, especially given my public statements about how difficult the last term was, and the frequent issues I’ve had while serving, from getting banned to real-life death threats and harassment. These questions have arisen quite a bit more as the public perception that “CCP doesn’t tell the CSM anything” has grown, especially after a number of errors on CCP’s part in not informing the CSM of controversial ad campaigns, game changes and other announcements that angered the player base.
My answer to this is simple: somebody has to do it, and I’m pretty good at it. Whether players like the CSM or not, CCP wants it, and thus if it is going to be as effective as it can be, it needs good players who will do the work, show up, participate, and interact with CCP and the community in good faith. The CSM is not a sinecure. It’s not a reward for being space famous or for being a good streamer or a good FC. It requires time, effort and dedication to be effective, and I have served with far too many CSM members who did the bare minimum (or less). The players deserve to be represented by someone who will put the time and hard work into the job, and that is simply a work-ethic that is engrained in my DNA. By asking you to vote for me, I am committing myself to another year of being the most accessible CSM member, and I will do everything in my power to listen, respond and interact with players from around New Eden. While I may not always agree, and I’m never going to hold back sharing my opinions, I will always advocate on behalf of players and playstyles, even those I don’t like or ideas I disagree with. This is how I view the role of CSM, and this is how I’ve chosen to serve.
I am also concerned by how much institutional memory is going to be lost this term. This CSM will see at least 6, and maybe more, new members joining it. With the loss of Innominate, I will be the longest serving incumbent running for reelection this year. I take the responsibility of becoming the CSM’s “dean” seriously, and I hope that I’ll be able to be a mentor to the many new CSM members who will be serving on CSM 17.
Finally, I want to be clear that this will be my final campaign for CSM. I do not intend to run again in the future. I’ve done my time and with the establishment of term limits, this gives me a natural place to end my career, assuming I can get reelected once again. I want to make sure that other players who want to serve have the opportunity I’ve had.
What players can expect from my final term in office is the same thing they’ve gotten for the last three - I will work hard every day on behalf of all of the players of EVE Online, regardless of playstyle, where they live (in New Eden or in real life), or what they do in the game. I want EVE Online to survive and thrive, into its third decade, and I will do everything I can to provide good advice, feedback and ideas to CCP as they work to ensure that it does.
Jesus, this is a long ■■■■■■■ post.
