Greetings! Thank you for doing your civic-cosmic duty and checking out your candidates for CSM 17!
Before I get into what I’ve done, I want to tell you who I am and why I am running for CSM 17. I am a gamer, like you. I’m not a famous streamer, an Eve politician or the Darth Vader of Eve. I’m just a guy sitting in my chair trying to make the pixels blow up. Or, at least, that’s who I used to be.
This past year, something changed. I saw old friends leave our community for good. I saw our world upended as our economy was ripped asunder by a faceless entity. I watched scores of players posting in Reddit and on these very forums that we had lost them for good. I saw our content appearing to stagnate while our prices went up. All of this while part of this beautiful world rages in conflict and the rest of it sits on the very precipice of economic collapse. I cannot sit by idly while one of our sole sources of stress relief seems determined to Lemming off a cliff.
I am no miracle worker and I don’t pretend to have the answers that will suddenly part the clouds and bath the servers of our great game with the holy light of redemption. I wish that I was. What I am, is a dedicated servant. A man who will work for you regardless of your race, sex, creed or national origin. I intend to make myself available on the forums, in game or however I might serve you best. I will be your voice, together with the rest of the CSM team. Together, let us forge forward into this uncertain future with our heads held high, courage in our hearts and determination in our soul. Let’s do this together.
**The Creation of Moce**
My toon name is old. I have been gaming online since 1998 with Ultima Online. I played UO from 1998 to 2003. By 2003, the Dev team had obliterated what made Ultima Online Unique. The unrestricted PvP, the unrestricted looting of your fallen foe. There is something viscerally appealing as a game that allows you to be who you really are. It’s fascinating how many people choose to go the route of the evil player killers, versus a noble hero. Ultima used to allow for a perfect expression of that.
I couldn’t resist the launch of Star Wars Galaxies in 2003 and I was there when it launched. I was a Wookie named Moce and I led a rebel clan on Corellia. The imperials had overrun our server and I loved every minute of it… Until the developers ruined our game.
I played Everquest, Everquest 2, World of Warcraft and World of Tanks. I was forever seeking that high I got from Ultima Online when I would successfully overcome an evil player. A chance to be a hero, even if only in pixelated form. In 2014 I found Eve Online.
Eve was over a decade old when I started playing. Back then, I used to get really attached to my ships. I’d name them something unique and think that my Merlyn or Moa was some kind of killing machine. We were all newbies at some time. I flew with TEST in 2016 and again in this recent war 2020.
I have played this game in high sec, null sec and wormhole. I even tried faction warfare long enough to decide that the system needed a lot of work. This past year, I founded my own alliance under my philosophy of real life first and under the idea that we would be a family. A big digital family. I was successful in that endeavor. I have a large group of online family to compliment my real life one. We are a member of the FIRE Coalition, so if you vote for me, I will be representing one of the smaller coalitions. I will definitely be representing the little guys with regard to alliances.
My guys started pushing me to run for CSM. I think they want to see how much I can take before I collapse. I guess we’ll find out!
**Who am I in real life?**
25 years of online gaming has conditioned me to avoid telling anyone who I am or where I live. I find it rather difficult to part with that habit, but if Brisc can do it, so can I.
My name is James Sawyer. I served in the United States Marine Corps for 4 years as an active duty infantryman. Currently, I am a police officer from Wyoming in the United States of America. I have been in law enforcement for 20 years now. I hold a bachelors degree in Criminal Justice Administration. I also attended law school, although I crashed and burned a little bit past halfway through.
I have a wife and four kids. I have horses, chickens, ducks, goats, cats and dogs. I live a simple life without a whole lot of stuff. But I have love, a roof over my head and an honorable job that allows me to serve my community.
I have literally dedicated my life to service to my country and my community. It follows that I would want to keep serving in the community that I love in Eve. Give me a chance to serve you in CSM 17.
Addendum: Many players have sought me out to ask about a platform that I would support. MY guess is that CSM would not be asked for a list of changes, but rather their opinion of changes sought out by CCP itself. Having said that, if I had my say, I would push for some changes.
- Fix the ore distribution. Null sec lost all their asteroid belts and a portion of its ore, as all other aspects of Eve space. I would push for some portion of the ore that was removed for scarcity to be replaced in all space, and asteroid belts back in systems that lost them. Regular and more rare ores would be found in some quantities in moon mining.
- NPCs… Yeah this needs work. We need to get them off the gates, so players aren’t warping from system to system with rats on every gate. Its a perma camp and it removes small ships from the ability to gate camp at all. Even if the rats are cleared, they will be back fast.
- Ship balance changes. Assault frigates/cruisers need to remember that they are assault. I would propose a 50% reduction in range, 50% increase in speed and the sig radius buff replaced so that they can burn in with full ferocity. No more stand off sniping fleets. Battleships would get a 50% buff to range. Lets face it, they are supposed to be the king of battle until and unless a capital is dropped. Marauders don’t need that distance buff >:(
- The UI is broken. Create a new player and look at what they see. There needs to be an full rework where the basic UI allows for players to do all the basics for the game. Then, have the versatility to do what eve players do best: Ignore stuff they don’t care about. They can then adjust the UI to fit their own play styles.
- Null sec ratting buff. BUFF?! Yeah I said it! In wormhole, 15 battleships can turn an isk facet on and, assuming good hole control, make billions an hour. That is no joke. I am not proposing billions an hour for Null. What I am envisioning, is more players on site and the site isk values do not go down. The same dynamic would go for High and low sec. This would encourage player fleets. Support for newbros and better isk for newbros. Would it be abused? Of course it would. Its Eve. Botters will send fleets of Ishtars onto single sites and make a hell of a lot more isk. They also run the risk of getting whole groups of them caught by roaming fleets. This method would get more players into space in bigger fleets. You might not have the fleet even warp off if your roam doesn’t pose enough risk to the rat fleet. Content all day. CCP just needs to do a better job at catching botters, not punishing groups of players because they want to play together.
- Killmails for Logi. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love logi. Except CCP. Its a thankless job. You will be primary target in nearly every engagement and no matter how good you are, you will not appear on the kills. Your presence could have been THE reason for success and the only one who knows is maybe the people you flew with. I’d add a category that tracks heals done to a ship that was registered as having damaged or impacted a ship that was killed.
- SOV Warfare. If you know anything about taking or holding space, SOV warfare is the 6th layer of hell just above 10% Tidi. It involves entosis modules that will be cycling forever while a cover fleet tries to stay awake. I’d change it so that once the system is reffed by entosis, the next event is combat based. Attackers will have to kill a structure in space that has some form of ECM defense like active or a persistent warp bubble. Attackers would have to kill the base while the defenders would have to kill the attackers. Additionally, the defenders could rep their base. Fun stuff!
- High sec response would include reps from logi depending on your sec status AND Concord would be faster to respond to you even if they’ve been baited elsewhere in the system. Incentive for people to pick a side and essentially be forced into faction warfare.
- BAD reputations need to have harsher consequences. Personally, I am hated by Gallante. All they do is whine at me as I enter their sovereign territory and will eventually start to shoot at me. There needs to be a response and it needs to suuuuck. Bad enough rep and there is no such thing as high sec for you for the empire that you pissed off. Why does it make sense to let some evil monster dock at your station, buy stuff and chill?
- Alliance and Corp interface is horrendous and needs to be simplified. It is an old code and it is crying out for a fix.
- Alliances need to be able to directly tax corps, so there is no more of this third party stuff.
- Walking in stations. Why the hell did we all spend time building a toon in character creation if we are never going to see that toon move around? Let us walk around Jita like a mall in the 80s. Let us shop for ship parts in stores. Of course we could still shop via interface, Amazon style. I mean, its the future for Bob’s sake.
- DUST… I want to shoot planets for players fighting on them. DUST needs to return in some capacity and Eve needs to be connected.
- Back to SOV. TCUs are just flags on the map. WHY?! Make them mean something. Half cost for fuel or better isk for the alliance owning them in ratting sites. Make it MEAN something.
- STOP SELLING SHIPS IN YOUR STORE!!!
I hope this short list helps to clarify my positions…