o7 — I’m CruelCodex Owasso, and I’m running for CSM 21
I believe EVE is ultimately a game about players interacting with systems.
Ships, industry, corporations, alliances, sovereignty, Factional Warfare, markets, logistics, and even the UI all influence how players behave, organize, communicate, engage, and decide whether something is worth their time.
That intersection between systems and human behavior is what I want to bring to CSM 21.
Professionally, my background includes systems development, organizational leadership, and industrial-organizational psychology. I spend a lot of time thinking about why systems work, why they fail, how players respond to them, and how unnecessary workload and friction can eventually become disengagement and burnout.
My campaign comes down to three things:
Better systems. Better access to information. Healthier player experience.
I don’t want EVE simplified. Its complexity is one of the reasons I’ve played for more than a decade.
But there is a difference between meaningful complexity and unnecessary friction.
My EVE story
I started playing EVE in 2012, and it actually took me a few attempts before the game finally clicked.
What changed that was finding other players.
I joined Red vs Blue, spending time in both Red Federation and Blue Republic. RvB was essentially a perpetual player-created war built around making PvP easy to find without requiring some larger strategic objective.
That’s where I learned the basics of PvP, made friends, and started creating the kinds of memories that turned EVE from a complicated spaceship game into something I wanted to keep coming back to.
From there I moved into Gallente Factional Warfare and spent more time in lowsec PvP.
Over the years I’ve experienced highsec, lowsec, Factional Warfare, industry, and nullsec. I’ve also flown within several major nullsec organizations and power structures, including Brave Collective and the Imperium, The Initiative, and today Therapy. in Northern Coalition.
Those experiences exposed me to very different cultures, leadership styles, logistics systems, doctrines, and approaches to managing player organizations.
They also showed me how much invisible work goes into keeping EVE communities running.
FCs, recruiters, logistics teams, diplomats, IT developers, industrial coordinators, directors, CEOs, and alliance leadership all carry workloads most members never see.
My strongest areas
I don’t claim to be an expert in every corner of New Eden. My strongest experience and interests are centered around:
-
Systems, player experience, and information accessibility
-
Player organizations, leadership, and organizational behavior
-
Industry and production systems
-
Factional Warfare and PvP
Those are the areas where I believe I can bring the strongest combination of firsthand experience, technical thinking, and professional perspective.
For the other areas Fenris has asked CSM candidates to address, I want to be equally clear about what I know, what I’ve experienced, and where my role should be to listen to players who live in those systems every day.
CSM 21 focus areas
Ships, gameplay, and the HUD
This is one of my strongest areas of interest.
I care about information presentation, UI friction, the Overview, and how players interact with EVE during actual gameplay.
I’ve also worked on my own EVE companion tooling, which has given me a deeper appreciation for how EVE exposes information to players and third-party applications.
One recurring issue I see is that EVE often contains the information or functionality players need, but players don’t necessarily know it exists or where to find it.
That isn’t just a new-player issue.
I regularly hear veteran players asking where information is located, how a mechanic works, or discovering tools they somehow never knew existed.
EVE should be difficult to master. It shouldn’t be difficult simply because useful information is difficult to discover.
Industry and markets
Industry is a perfect example of a system that could benefit from a fresh look.
Manufacturing can become extremely complicated, and managing larger production chains with only the in-game tools can be difficult.
Materials, reactions, intermediate components, blueprints, job slots, inventories, costs, margins, and timelines quickly push serious industrialists toward spreadsheets and third-party applications simply to keep track of what they’re doing.
I don’t want industry made simple.
Planning, optimization, logistics, and market knowledge are what make it interesting.
But complexity created by decision-making is gameplay. Complexity created by poor visibility and administrative overhead is something different.
I want to better understand where that boundary exists and where the tools available to players could be improved without removing the depth that makes EVE industry compelling.
Sovereignty, logistics, and player organizations
Sovereignty and logistics create some of EVE’s largest organizational challenges, but the broader issue applies to organizations of every size and playstyle.
A ten-person PvP corporation, an industrial group, an FW corporation, a wormhole group, an NPSI community, and a massive nullsec alliance all deal with some combination of recruitment, retention, communication, delegation, training, motivation, workload, and burnout.
This is where my I/O psychology background becomes especially relevant.
When Fenris changes a mechanic, I don’t only want to ask:
What does this mechanic do?
I also want to ask:
What does this mechanic require players to do in order to interact with it?
A small gameplay change can create hours of additional administrative work for directors, logistics teams, FCs, or corporation leadership.
Those players often hold communities together.
If the systems supporting those communities unnecessarily burn those players out, eventually everyone feels the effects.
Unstructured PvP
Some of EVE’s best PvP happens when the game creates an opportunity and players decide what to do with it.
Roams, hunting, home defense, ESS fights, black ops, small-gang PvP, and those spontaneous “I’ve got something tackled” moments are what make New Eden feel alive.
I’m interested in the systems that create those opportunities: reasons to undock, places for players to cross paths, objectives worth fighting over, and enough uncertainty that encounters don’t always play out the same way.
The goal shouldn’t be to manufacture fights. It should be to create an environment where players naturally generate them.
Factional Warfare
I’ve been fighting for the Angel Cartel since pirate insurgencies went live.
I genuinely enjoy FW. It creates accessible opportunities to undock, find fights, contribute toward shared objectives, and feel like something is happening around you.
But spending significant time in the system also makes its frustrations visible.
There are mechanics and incentives that can sometimes create behavior that doesn’t necessarily match the intended experience.
That’s exactly the kind of problem I want to examine:
What behavior is the system encouraging, and is that behavior actually what was intended?
I want to bring both sides of my FW experience to the CSM: what keeps me participating and what could make the experience better.
Highsec, new players, and access to information
My own history makes this important to me.
It took me several attempts before I got over EVE’s learning curve.
What finally changed things wasn’t EVE becoming less complicated.
It was finding other players who helped me understand it.
EVE should remain difficult to master, but complexity and unnecessary confusion are not the same thing.
Players need better ways to discover and understand the information and tools already available to them.
Better information doesn’t make EVE easier.
It gives players the ability to engage more deeply with its complexity.
EVE and Vanguard
Vanguard interests me because the opportunity goes beyond connecting two games mechanically.
It can introduce an entirely different audience to the EVE universe.
There are FPS players who may never have considered installing EVE Online who could discover New Eden through Vanguard.
I want actions in Vanguard and EVE to create meaningful consequences and opportunities in both directions, but I’m equally interested in the player journey between the two games.
If someone discovers New Eden through Vanguard, there should be natural ways for them to understand the larger universe around them and become curious about EVE Online.
Done well, Vanguard can stand on its own while also becoming a gateway into the broader EVE ecosystem.
Why I’m running
My background in industrial-organizational psychology is a major reason I decided to run.
At its core, I/O psychology looks at people within systems and organizations:
What motivates players?
Why do they disengage?
How does workload affect performance?
Why do leaders burn out?
How do groups communicate?
How do incentives influence behavior?
How do organizations respond to change?
That describes a surprising amount of EVE.
Every corporation, alliance, militia, mining group, NPSI community, and small gang is ultimately a group of real people organizing around shared goals.
The systems Fenris creates become the environment those players operate inside.
And when you change that environment, you change behavior.
A mechanic intended to encourage conflict may instead encourage avoidance.
A system intended to create engagement can become repetitive administrative work.
An incentive intended to reward participation can create unintended farming behavior.
A small mechanical change can dramatically increase the workload carried by the people running an organization.
That human side of game design is what interests me most.
It also shapes how I approach player feedback.
Different groups can experience the same mechanic very differently, and the loudest opinion isn’t automatically the most representative one.
I don’t want to arrive at the CSM with a list of predetermined answers.
I want to diagnose before prescribing.
Listen to the players using the system.
Identify recurring patterns.
Understand the underlying problem.
Consider the unintended consequences.
Then advocate for practical solutions.
That is the perspective I want to bring to CSM 21.
What players can expect from me
You can expect me to be accessible, analytical, curious, and straightforward.
I will ask questions.
I will challenge assumptions when something doesn’t make sense.
I will listen to people who play EVE very differently than I do.
I won’t pretend to be an expert in every area of the game.
And when I bring something to Fenris, I want to be able to explain more than:
“Players don’t like this.”
I want to understand why it matters, who it affects, what behavior the system is creating, and whether the burden it creates actually contributes to gameplay.
Most importantly:
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
EVE’s complexity is one of its greatest strengths.
I don’t want to make New Eden simpler.
I want to help make its systems and player experience better—reducing unnecessary friction, administrative burden, and burnout while preserving the complexity, challenge, risk, and player-driven experiences that make EVE unique.
Better systems. Better access to information. Healthier player experience.
o7
CruelCodex Owasso