Greetings fellow capsuleers.
Like many others I began my eve career as a member of ProviBloc. After a short time I was completely hooked by this space game that can be really rough to you but also gives you something very few games provide: A community to interact with. Be it hostile or friendly - most of my encounters within eve have been good. As a fellow member of this community I want to give back to this amazing community therefore I am running for CSM18.
My story in EvE:
Unlike many others my history is on this single account with a trading char and my only PvP toon “Gideon Zendikar” - so you can look up my PvP history by checking that characters killboard using the typical sites.
As mentioned above I started in ProviBloc and quickly started FCing/PvPing with my old Alliance Elemental Tide. I learned the basics of nullsec and tried my best to sustain myself within republicovs crazy frigate and destroyer kitten roams.
When my corperation decided to leave ProviBloc with Evictus. I doubled down on my FCing.
After leading my fellow members into many battles and getting better by doing so I quickly started FCing for the whole Legacy Coalition during several of the conflicts they had during that time (Winter War against FRT e.g.) But as all good things my time with Evictus came to an end when their development did not coincide with where I wanted to go within EvE.
As a former member of ProviBloc I returned to where I started. But this time it was different . I did not join ProviBloc but the group fighting my former comrades. Going back to my roots within T.R.C but far more experienced I did what I excel at: Take newbros, shape them into a formidable force and try to get them involved within the community as active new members.
Overcoming our archenemy I continued FCing within T.R.C until the day that a certain Reddit post was created that introduced me to the bad that can happen to you personally within a game that creates such tight bonds with your fellow peers.
After being accused of being a spy for the Initiative and later cleared from this accusation I joined the corporation I currently am a part of and this is where my story is currently at:
I reside in Thera and mainly do solo/small gang PvP with my fellow peers in D-sync and midscale PvP with a group now widely known as the Thera Boys. While doing this, I used the opportunity the Bring Solo Back (BSB) community presented and branched out into making video content that go into depth on the various fits I use: Youtube Video - Logi Vengance. Using these videos and my FCing in spectre fleet as well as helping some newer Corporation/Alliance leaders on a personal level, I still maintain my efforts to support the newer player base even though it is not as direct as it used to be.
Reading my EvE history you might be able to see that my way through EvE has not been without bumps and that my play style is unusual. This can give me a perspective many other candidates currently no longer have: Flying a single account and trying to take on the struggles that EvE provides while maintaining your assets even if you PvP for the most part. I can emphasize with the struggles of being relatively spacepoor and still trying to achieve something you set your mind to.
Hopefully if you guys and occasional girls agree I can set my mind to improving this amazing community that can make you feel warm and fuzzy while later hitting you like a train.
Things that I would like to be adressed:
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Make space topology matter again: Too many tools break the geography of this game - be it jump drives, ansiblexes,filaments, conduiting or bridging when transversing through space one can avoid taking regular gates far too often. You rarely see fleets burning a long way through their own space anymore - this takes away chances for smaller groups to setup bombing runs, catching stragglers, bubbeling part of the fleet while the other part is stuck in warp so you can engage the smaller part first. All these strats used to be deployed far more often when you actually had to take fleets through gates and the attacker could try to predict the path that the defender is likely to use. These things were vital to give smaller groups the chance to use their more connected communication and setup to fight the bigger groups. Ansiblexes in particular are the worst offenders of this. A more detailed reasoning is given in a reddit post I created using input from various FCs: Ansiblex Reddit post
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Rebalancing of income sources so that risk and reward are more inline - There is a massive imbalance between the amount of money you can make running abysaals within highsec compared to the “dangerous” regions of EvE. People min/maxing their income should not remove themselves from engaging with other players, it should facilitate interactions. Be it the need for good intel or a good umbrella response to safe a friend in trouble - these things create the content people play eve for. There is nothing wrong with a safe income source within highsec for people with limited time. These options should not overshadow the income sources in null/wormhole/ls space.
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Passive non playercount scalable income sources: Combined with the proposed changes to projection some form of passive income would help create more incentive for groups to engage in the sov meta all together. These would create internal friction between bigger groups as some might deem their cut to be too small and on the other side would give reasons for groups like mine to have assets out in space that others can attack. Currently many of the most advanced groups make their assets as small as possible to create a limited footprint to maintain as they see no benefit of owning sov/structures in the first place. This is not healthy. CCP give us reason to be attackable and make it possible for someone else to force our hand.
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Changing the way mobile warp disruptors can currently be deployed: Everyone who has hunted has run into gates/wormholes that have massive ammounts of bubbles anchored around them that make it impossible to catch anything as you waste so much time burning out of these bubbles. There would be several vectors to adress their current usage and I would be happy with any:
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reduce hp so that they can easily be removed by a roaming party
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increase distance needed away from gates/whs when anchoring one
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Increase value of fitting, reduce value of hulls: pirateering would be in a much healthier place if the ammount of loot you would get from regular t2/meta 4 fitted ships would increase. This would not affect PvE players directly by keeping the cut even point of their activity the same while increasing the incentives to go out and hunt those roaming in space. If loot would be a bigger income source of our day to day activities that would also be a much needed benefit for being in a smaller group as loot would have to shared by fewer players.
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Remove structure ECM from Athanors and Tataras: Active moon mining was introduced to connect Alliance income to an active high value task to give a small group of players an angle to engage with an enemy on a strategic point of interest. The current way structure ECM works is actively hurting smaller groups while not really being effective against bigger groups of players. In its totality it does provide little to no protection to the strucutre itself and goes against the basic concept of active moon mining.
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Reduce Force projection of the big Nullsec-Empires: Currently all conflicts in EvE deteriorate to a proxy conflict between the bigger empires as the current way jump bridges work allow for a fast transit through all of eve without the need to restage. This completely kills conflicts between smaller entities on their own. This can be seen throughout my time within RC for example: As the big alliances were preoccupied with the conflict against Goonswarm the Proviwars were almost exclusively handled by the local residents and after speaking to people on both sides of the conflict a lot of them look at this specific conflict as one they regard as one of the best times in EvE and I tend to agree.
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Inclusion of the base fitting skills into the default skillset of every char - it is okay if a newbro can not fit t2 guns on his hull but whenever one designs a doctrine or a ship for them you always have to keep their lower powergrid/CPU in mind and at the same time these pilots are kept from engaging with the community through a skillpoint barrier - This hurts player retention and is just not needed.
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More rapid changes in the meta: It sometimes just needs a numbers tweak to upset the current status quo and those upsets give us theroycrafters and FCs a chance to be the ones adapting faster by putting time and effort into figuring out the new meta as well as give industrials rapid new emerging markets that will benefit those that are able/willing to adapt quickly.
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Removal of base sov bills - the upgrade ones(cynojammer) should remain: The longer established groups can handle the sov bill a lot easier than a group of new players: currently there is no reason for a small group to actually try to own sov apart from the perceived prestige it provides. Adding negative effects like sov bills just add to a stale sov meta.
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Adjust the default standings towards triglavians to neutral by default: On many of my npsi fleets we lose someone who just started the game as he has hostile standings that anybody that knows about the available mechanics can fix in 5 mins. This leads to needless frustration with the game itself as they will struggle to catch up with the fleet again and miss out on content. There is no benefit to keeping the mechanic this way and it mostly frustrates a newer playerbase and could hurt retention of these.
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T1 ship reblance is needed: In my opinion T1 ships should at least be viable as an isk efficient way to engage against enemy pilots. A lot of T1 ships are no longer competetive even on a isk efficency basis. T1 Destroyers pale in comparisson to the “new” faction destroyers that require the same skillset, they are too slow on grid and their relative big signature just makes them easy targets to apply to. T1 battleships are too expensive in comparison to their faction/T2 counterparts and are not worth fielding and the faction Dreadnoughts that just require an addional BPC while requiring the same materials to build make the T1 dreads not worth it as a whole. T1 battleships and dreadnoughts would just require a cost change to make them viable while T1 destroyers would require some balance changes (improve on grid movement speed to be at least faster than T1 Cruisers)
See you in space,
Gideon Zendikar