Gideon Zendikar for CSM17

Greetings fellow capsuleers.

Compared to others that are applying for CSM17 I am one of the newer applicants. 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 hence I am running for CSM17.

My story in EvE:
Unlike many others my history is on this single account with a trading alt 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 cooperation 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. I am FCing for spectre fleet and can usally be spotted in my Gnosis trying to get a good fight or I struggle within the Odins Call Alliance Tournament Team.

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:

  • Fix the default Overview - This should have been done ages ago, it hurts new players more than vets seem to notice.

  • Removal of Jump Clone timers when switching clones while being in the station (adjusting to the way it works within citadels)

  • Make space topology matter again: Too many tools break the geography of this game - be it jump drives, ansiblexes or bridging when transversing through friendly owned sov 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.

  • 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

  • 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:

  1. reduce hp so that they can easily be removed by a roaming party

  2. increase distance needed away from gates/whs when anchoring one

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 I design a doctrine or a ship for them I 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.

  • more rapid changes in the meta: It sometimes just needs a numbers tweak to upset the current status quo meta - no need for new modules like the assault damage control all of the time: The Hic meta has been here for some time now and there are some easy ways CCP could help facilitate a more rapid change of the meta without nerfing/buffing ship classes - One of the ways I would suggest would be the reduction of locking range on all HICS so their projection on field is inferior to the Battelships that are currently pushed more. This change would not hurt the small gang community too much - ships would still be relevant in their usecases but keeps them from being the one ship solution to every fleet fight.

  • removal of sov bills: 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.

  • 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.

  • T2 Ship prices tanking - Many point to individual T2 ships (Marauders/Muninn/Cerb) opressing the meta - and there is truth to those ships being oppressive esp. to smaller groups/gangs. A bigger issue in total is price of t2 prices tanking as a result of the introduction of the waste mechanic and the doubling of moon ore in the same moment. Marauders would not be as oppressive to small gangers if they would be more expensive to lose, Munnins would not be the default ship if there price would be closer to those of t1 battleships.

Interviews:

See you in space,

Gideon Zendikar

6 Likes

CCP are already aware of our suggestions. That’s why we have their github for issue reporting and the forums for ideas and suggestions.

Yeah but until it is really implemented I can advocate for it :slight_smile: but I am hopefull these changes go through

I don’t care what you do. I give my feedback on CCP’s official github and forum sections.

Perhaps you should read those forum sections sometime and their github.

Do you even bother reading github issue tracker and the suggestion forum?

You probably don’t even care about Linux gamers or the ESI API either.

This CSM will just be another datapoint in the player decline chart.

CSM this year, no different from last year, or the years before.

Actually you seem to care quite a lot. You post in practically ever candidates thread. If you don’t care please f*ck off and make way for people that do.

Who does. Linux is nonsense. Die Linux.

Get new material. This got old weeks ago.

But you don’t care…… so it makes no difference to you right?

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This escalated quickly.

Well I’m fed up of the same person sabotaging every candidates CSM thread under the guise of “I don’t care. The CSM sucks”.

It’s disrespectful to every single person that’s putting themselves forward in order to try and do a bit of good in game and out. The candidates themselves are stuck having to be polite because they are campaigning and don’t want to lose votes for calling out an idiot.

Saying no more on the subject because I don’t want this hijacked

@Gideon_Zendikar apologies for the rants and good luck with the campaign.

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It’s a simple question, do you or do you not check and track what issues are in the Eve github repositories for SSO and ESI and the suggestion subforums?

Do you or do you not take note of Linux gamer issues.

If you do not, then I don’t see why there is any place for a person that doesn’t follow those information sources on the CSM.

It is a VERY relevent issue w.r.t CSM.

To say that github SSO-Issues and ESI-Issues repositories and issue trackers are irrelevent and the suggestion and feedback subforums are irrelevent, then why are you even running for CSM.

Those github issue repositories are a wasteland, CSM doesn’t care, they don’t even look at them or mention the ESI, Linux gamers they treat with distain…

Do I have to provide you with links to those repositories? If you don’t even know where they are then that says all I need to know.

You should have a link to the topics of relevency from the suggestion forum and the ticket numbers of issues to raise from the github trackers. What is your role on the CSM? To advocate for the gamer, yet you don’t even bother with the sources we put out of information.

Why do we bother opening tickets on the github trackers and subforum for suggestions if the CSM don’t even bother.

All the CSM care about along with their fanbase, is null this null that. Brag about how they got the bigblock vote numbers and so forth.

I suggest you go play the game and not use SSO and ESI based tools if you don’t even bother with the issues. First thing you reach for is one of those tools I bet.

To save you some time, here is the links

SSO-Issues Issues · ccpgames/sso-issues · GitHub

ESI-Issues Issues · esi/esi-issues · GitHub

Features and ideas subforum Player Features & Ideas - EVE Online Forums

Next time you play the game, write down which tools you use and how often, then try not using them. Good luck.

Maybe we need an ESI blackout sometime.

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Tbf most of the adressed issues on GitHub are from older players - not many pilots just starting the game will push tickets on GitHub and I highly doubt the average player will make their concerns heard on GitHub. I am an IT student and could work with GitHub and similar sources and I personally do not think there is anything wrong with Linux for coding but Linux and gaming has been a shallow border topic for any game developer out there for multiple reasons:
If you got any issues with one distripution you do not know if it is cause of fault of your own or some side effects of used packages of the user (and there is a lot that can go wrong here as you should know). So it is an unrealistic ideal that Linux will be supported in a way that it will work without any problems on the user side - esp when considering the massive ammount of developer time that would be needed to achieve that goal for a small number of players. The market share is just not there - many bigger studios tried supporting Linux (look up the available games for Linux on Steam) and many stopped after a certain ammount time as the returns are just not there - why do you assume the calculus is different for CCP?. Accept reality.

On the other hand I do and used to engage with a lot of new players leading (FCing and other orga work) some of the fastest growing Alliances at that time (T.R.U had 2000+ members during the provi war from not existing at all). Evictus was a newbro friendly Alliance while I fced there (went from 1k members to 3k until it finally died this year) and Spectre Fleet npsi is the defenition of newbro friendly. Issues concerning these new players are by far more important than a potential non existtent Linux user baser that does not have a seperate gaming machine with another OS.

ESI issues are a double edged sword - whenever you were part of any bigger coalition that had the IT people that would put in the effort you had good tools at your finger tips - once leaving to a smaller entity some of these were not available to you. So the better ESI etc are the more it facilitates a support for exclusive access to your own peers and the bigger the gap between smaller and bigger entitiys. A good example for that would be the Jump Bridge Route calculaters that started poping up before it was implemented into the game itself. Legacy had access to tools that managed that Provibloc did not. Is this a good thing for the game? Debateable.

On another Hand you make it sound like the only Issues that matter are only to be found on GitHub - and that is just not true as laid out before: Many of the esp. newer pilots do not go to GitHub to complain - They complain on TeamSpeak/Discord or other normal ways of communication and I am convinced the majority of players do complain in these ways and a small minority would acutally try to get an issue resovled through GitHub etc. Touch Grass seriously.

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All good mate - One has to learn how to deal with people that are too deep into their advocacy to see how far removed they are from the average User/Consumer/Person/Voter

Of course it’s not the only issue, but, as per my suggestion (or challenge as it is in a way), play the game without using tools consuming ESI (and SSO), you probably will find yourself reaching for a tool out of habbit, like reaching for a manual stick in an automatic car, out of habbit if you’re use to manual, same if you drive on the right side if you’re used to the left side, again out of habbit.

I fully support an ESI blackout as a form of “API appreciation day”.

Funny how I get lots of CSM vote spam ingame, yet they never contact me after to ask for my issues/feedback.

I do not deny the importance that some of the 3rd party tools have on the average player (Zkill, Dotlan, evepraisal). Some of these tools are arguably too powerful and people including myself have advocated for a delay in the ESI for that very reason. So am I aware of every issue concerning ESI no - do I value the effort some devs put in in their free time yes. Is it the major issue the game currently has: HELL NO. Again touch grass:

You wanna know why nobody responds to your messages and asks for personal input? Because you are very aggressive and hostile in your approach - I have no connection (at least as far as I know) with the former commentators calling you out and I agree with their assesment and even Brisc who I have spoken to once? (Hello Brisc btw) have a like to the commentator calling you out. So my question back to you: Has such a hostile approach ever worked for you?

The CSM and their vote block will constantly spam local chat, my evemail, to try to get my vote, but after the election I never hear a pip out of those people following up to ask “how’s it going, things ok? Any feedback or issues?”

I don’t expect you to respond to my issues. I don’t contact the CSM ingame, they and their flock spam me. Good luck with the vote, no CSM member will get my vote, and unfortunately there is no “none of the above” option.

It’s a game, we’re customers, not your flock.

Don’t worry, you don’t need my vote, I am sure your “flock” block has plenty to give you.

Still not sure why your flock will attempt to contact me in local and evemail constantly. You’re the ones harassing me. It’s the same every year, harassment ingame from CSM flocks, spamming, hounding, for a vote.

Let me know if you get any solicitations for me - you shouldn’t.

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Currently booking CSM 17 interviews on behalf of Ashterothi. Sent Eve Mail with details. Let us know if you’re available this weekend.

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Thx for this amazing interview - really like your approach and most of all I really value your effort and time <3

Gideon for CSM!

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Gideon is one of the best players I’ve ever flown with and I am happy that he is running for CSM. He has the experience and temperament needed to stand up for new players and smaller communities and to be able to hand practical solutions to CCP about improvements to the game. I wholeheartedly endorse his candidacy.

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I think this is well worth giving a listen to for anyone unsure if they want to add Gideon on his ballot.

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