My name is Seraph Essael and I am running for CSM 21. It’s a long one, so grab a brew and settle in for some light bed time reading.
At a glance:
EVE Online has changed enormously over the years. Corporations help manage larger organisations as well as their own. They have more complicated logistics and sovereignty infrastructure. But many of the in game tools we use to manage these, are built around systems from a much earlier version of EVE. We know that. Fenris knows that. Let’s do something about it.
My focus on the CSM would be on modernising and streamlining corporation and alliance management, improving quality of life for the everyday player, and making sovereignty easier to manage without removing the depth that makes EVE unique.
If elected to the Council of Stellar Management, my priorities would be:
Modernise corporation management.
- A full rework of roles, permissions, hangars and corporation administration.
Shared personal hangars.
- Push for shared / ACL based personal storage that works across all of a player’s characters.
Improve the UI & audio experience.
- More customisation, toggles, better controls, improved readability, and a UI that works for both new players and bittervets.
Address force projection.
- Find / monitor the balance between sovereignty advantages and excessive strategic mobility.
Improve sovereignty management and modernise Alliance infrastructure.
- Give alliances better tools, information and visibility for managing their space.
- Bring useful functionality currently handled by external applications into the game where appropriate.
- Reduce administrative drag.
Corporations and alliances are the most important player creations in EVE Online. They build empires. They wage wars. They run economies. They are an identity; communities are established around them. They create the stories and the news articles that keep people playing.
Players deserve tools designed for the modern EVE, not tools inherited from the EVE of fifteen or more years ago. Better information. Better quality of life. Better management. Which leads to letting players spend less time managing the game, and more time playing it.
The most important thing in Eve Online is the players. Give players choice; they deserve to be able to customise their UI, that lets them play a more fluid and more streamlined game, the way they want to. Including being able to move the system information panel in the top left of the screen.
My EVE Story
I first started playing EVE shortly after release, while I was still at school. I registered using my school email address and created a character whose name I don’t even remember anymore. For almost ten years, EVE was a game I played in the background, playing for barely an hour a week, disappearing for months at a time and generally having no idea what I was doing. I was mostly a highsec carebear with skill points scattered all over the place, specialising in absolutely nothing and belonging to no major groups. I ran missions, and when wormholes arrived, I started dipping my toes into them daytripping. I ended up joining a corp in a C2 and whacked down a POS to live out of. I don’t remember much else from that era.
Then, sometime in 2012, due to finding out an IRL friend played, I decided that if I was going to keep playing EVE, I should probably actually play EVE. So in early 2013, I biomassed my original character, started Seraph with the intention of specialising properly. My friend wanted to get into PvP, so I became a dedicated Caldari and ECM pilot to support him. That was really the beginning of my love affair with PvP.
I played on my single character for five years before getting an alt.
I joined a C2 group called Devils Diciples and spent a good amount of time there, learning to become an FC and eventually became a Director. I spent a year with them but I wanted more, so I reached out to eXceed Inc. a corp in No Holes Barred and I joined them. I worked my way up through eXceed and became a Director there as well. When No Holes Barred eventually disbanded, I stayed with the corporation for a while as we moved into a C5. Eventually, though, I decided to go my own way with two other members in eXceed. and we started a C2 corporation, Binary Adaption, got on the recruiting train, and eventually built and managed a small wormhole alliance.
This wasn’t a dictatorship. The founding members and CEOs of the other corporations all had a say in how things operated and where we wanted to take the alliance. We built something together and, for a while, it was a lot of fun.
Eventually, as so many EVE stories do, it turned sour; One group wanted more say over another and stuff got flung around, so after a discussion with my closest EVE friend and Director, I decided to pull the plug. We disbanded the alliance, I helped our members get their assets out, and closed the hole down. We deliberately left the structures behind so that, if someone wanted the hole, they could come in and take it and have structures there.
Lazerhawks came in and did what Lazerhawks do best.
From there I moved over to N0MEX, a C2 wormhole group living in a hole they called Envy, I FC’d for them, winning quite a few fights against other low class wormhole groups. I theory crafted lots of fleets, and I eventually worked my way up to Director again. Those guys were brilliant. A good number of lasting friendships came from that corporation, and I don’t think I’ve ever been closer to a group of gaming nerds than I am with that bunch of miscreants.
We know each other’s kids’ names. We know each other’s wives on a first-name basis. What started as a gaming community became genuine, real-life friendships. We did a ridiculous amount together.
We decided to build a Keepstar from scratch. Even when other groups were beginning to tear theirs down out of fear, we still went ahead and put ours up.
After the usual group came for our Keep, we moved up to a C5 and rebuilt, but the content in wormhole space was slowly changing and, for us, dying off thanks to repeated evictions. We eventually made the decision to pull out and move elsewhere.
I still play other games and do other things with the N0MEX lot. The people in that corporation genuinely became some of my best friends. Even today we still talk daily and play other games together.
I made the move to Air in 2020. Air is one of the oldest, still active, player corporations in the game, established about a month after launch. It is the corporation I’m still with now, within INIT. I’d never done Nullsec before. I had no idea about the can of worms that I was opening up for myself. I told myself that, at this point, I was simply going to enjoy logging in for PvP pings. No recruitment. No corporation leadership. No monitoring structures or roles, or anything of the sort. No responsibilities.
…So naturally, I ended up as the CEO of an INIT corporation.
Who I am
PvP is a massive part of my EVE play style. I’ve done pretty much every flavour of it over the years. I’ve spent many years living and breathing wormhole PvP, and I’ve FC’d both small and medium-sized groups within them. I’ve done the TiDi fights, the nano gang and home defence. There’s probably no PvP outside of Highsec ganking that I haven’t partaken in over the years.
These days, I’m enjoying an over-propped Huginn with 100km webs and taking outnumbered fights in my Rattlesnake (which used to be the Rattlesnake Victory Edition Hull. Yes Fenris, I’m still salty it was changed)
But PvP isn’t the only reason I log in. One of my favourite things to do is Officer hunting. It’s a slow process, and one you certainly don’t do for ISK per hour, but I find it incredibly relaxing. After a busy day at work, coming home and spending time with the family, and finally getting to the point where the house is quiet, there’s something strangely therapeutic about sitting down, warping from belt to belt or skyhook to skyhook, and killing spawns. Looking for that elusive officer.
I also enjoy making EVE videos, primarily PvP focused videos along with the occasional cinematic project.
https://www.youtube.com/@OrangeEagle
EVE isn’t just a game to me anymore. It’s a hobby, and one I’ve had for more than half of my life.
It’s outlived relationships. It’s outlived workplaces. I’ve made incredibly close friends through EVE, and I’ve made a few enemies along the way too. We’ve celebrated things together, argued with each other, built things, lost things. Lost people along the way too.
That’s the part of EVE that has always stuck with me. The game creates stories, and it’s the people who make those stories matter.
I also enjoy the old school Eve lore and the rich backstory Eve has.
Over the years I’ve also developed a bit of an obsession with bug reporting. I’m constantly encouraging people to report bugs, even the tiny ones, and to provide as much useful information as possible. One person reporting something might not give the developers enough information to reproduce it. A dozen people reporting the same issue, with useful details, gives the developers a much better chance of identifying, reproducing and fixing it. So always stick in a bug report ticket even if you think it’s trivial.
It’s a small thing, but I genuinely believe that better bug reporting leads to a better, more polished gameplay for everyone.
I’m no stranger to focus groups that discuss the direction Fenris takes; I was part of the Strategic Cruisers focus group, where I had the opportunity to take part in discussions around the changes to T3 cruisers and help shape the direction of their revamp. That experience gave me a taste of what it is like to have meaningful, structured discussions between players and developers, and why I know that they actually work.
I’m also a big fan of FC Karkurs “little thing” thread. I have a smaller QOL list of my own that I’ve gathered from people over the past couple of months. QOL changes make EVE feel better to play. The kind of changes that might not make headlines but can make a huge difference to someone’s day to day experiences.
Being part of the CSM is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’ve spent more than half my life playing in different areas of EVE, from highsec missions and wormhole day trips to living permanently in wormhole space, running corporations and alliances, FCing, PvPing, living in nullsec and simply logging in to hunt Officers. I’ve been a line member, a recruiter, an FC, a Director and, despite my best intentions and having no more responsibilities, a CEO. So naturally the next step for me is to go one further.
I’ve seen EVE from a lot of different perspectives. The CSM is an opportunity to take player ideas, concerns and frustrations and turn them into something constructive: a properly structured discussion that can be presented to the developers in a way that is useful to them.
I don’t expect every player’s concern to result in a change. And I certainly don’t think my way of playing EVE is the only way of playing EVE.
Outside of EVE, I’m a Head Chef, responsible for a team of seven. Managing a kitchen means I’m no stranger to plans, discussions, problem solving and, perhaps most importantly, thinking about the longevity of a product or name that you’re building. You have to be able to make decisions, listen to the people around you, and adapt to keep everyone moving in the same direction.
I’m also a family man and a father to a wonderful one year old daughter. That has given me an even greater appreciation for the balance between work, family and gaming. EVE is an important hobby to me, but it’s a hobby that has to fit around real life. I understand that other players have exactly the same balance to manage, and I think that’s an important perspective to have when considering changes to a game that people invest a significant amount of their time into.
Outside of all that I enjoy climbing, have an unhealthy obsession with the colour orange and I am fuelled almost entirely by Tea.
In Depth Breakdown:
Modernise corporation management.
Not just streamlining it; corporation management needs a complete overhaul. The current role, title and access system is cumbersome, unintuitive, and in many places still feels like a legacy of the days when POS access management was central to corp operations.
Roles need to be reconsidered. Managing access to containers, hangars, offices and corporation assets can become an exercise in navigating layers of permissions.
I would push for:
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A more intuitive corp management interface.
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A complete review of the existing role / title system.
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Simplified and more granular access permissions. Possibly through ACL.
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Easier management of hangars, containers and corporation assets.
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Better visibility into who has access to what.
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In game tools for managing large corporations without requiring spreadsheets, third party apps and external documentation to keep track of everything.
Bring the tools players already use into EVE. Today, many corporations and alliances rely heavily on third-party applications such as Auth, SeAT and similar tools to perform basic organisational functions, the demand for these tools is already there. In the past players would use applications like Jackknife. There has been a demand for this for over a decade.
Eve forces players to build an external ecosystem around the game. I would like to see Fenris actively examine which of these functions could be brought into EVE itself. The goal isn’t to replace third-party tools. It’s to make the core game capable of supporting the organisations that players have built.
Fenris have already looked at some areas of corporation management. The latest Brand Management and Opportunities, show that Fenris have experimented with improving corporation tools. Opportunities in particular have been used very successfully by some corporations and alliances.
I’d like to see that experimentation continue, but with a focus on tools that solve the actual problems corporations face every day. For example; recurring jobs like fuel, extractions and infrastructure checks.
Shared personal hangars.
This is a quality of life feature that I believe is long overdue. We need shared, ACL based personal hangars.
A huge proportion of EVE players have multiple characters. Alts are fundamental to the way a vast majority of people play the game.
During the POS era, players could effectively create personal spaces that their characters could access, providing a simple way to keep assets available across their characters via POS’. When Upwell structures replaced POS’, that flexibility didn’t get replaced with it..
Today, moving personal assets between characters or maintaining shared access can be unnecessarily awkward.
I’d like to see a system where players can create personal hangars governed by Access Lists (or something similar), allowing them to grant access to their own characters (and other players if you really trust anyone that much) without having to rely on corporation hangars or awkward workarounds such as trading, contracts or deliveries.
This QOL improvement will benefit almost every type of player. For example:
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Players with multiple characters, who maintain multiple doctrines across their chars.
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Logistics and industrial players with multiple trusted characters.
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PvE players.
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Players managing assets across multiple locations.
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Anyone who has ever thought, “I know I own that, but which character is it on, where did I put it”
Personal assets should be easier to manage.
UI & Sound.
I don’t claim to be an expert in game design or UI design. What I do have, is a very long history of playing EVE and seeing its interface evolve over the years. I’ve seen good UI changes; I’ve seen bad ones. I’ve seen things that looked great but made the game harder to use, and things that weren’t particularly pretty but were incredibly functional.
The important point is this:
Every player interacts with the UI constantly. Eve doesn’t actually need any pretty graphics to be played.
Players know what they like, for example, being able to split the overview up into separate windows; phenomenal change. And we also know what frustrates us.
UI development needs to balance several things:
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Functionality.
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Readability.
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Accessibility for newer players.
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Usability for the bittervets.
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Customisation.
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And, yeah, making the game actually look good.
Changes should feel fluid, readable and intuitive, rather than change for the sake of change which Fenris does like to do sometimes.
Give players more control.
I’d like to see Fenris provide more toggles and customisation options throughout the entirety of the UI. Different players have different needs and different ways of playing EVE. So where appropriate, give players the choice. If something can be turned on or off without compromising gameplay, why not let us choose?
And please, after all these years, for the love of god I'd like to see the ability to move the system information currently anchored in the top-left corner of the screen.
Yes, I’m going to pester Fenris about this.
Wait, Eve has sound?
Jokes aside, sound is an important part of the experience. When the sound system was changed a few years ago, a number of previously separate sounds were consolidated into fewer sliders. I’d like to see some of that control restored.
Give players back a more granular control over what they hear. Players should be able to build the audio experience that works for them.
UI and sound aren’t the most glamorous CSM topics, but they’re things every player interacts with every time they play EVE and they deserve attention.
Projection: Find the balance.
Projection is one of the biggest strategic questions facing nullsec. The ability for a 250 person battleship fleet to be punted across seven regions in roughly twenty minutes is an extreme level of force projection. At the same time, sovereignty should mean something.
If an alliance invests the enormous amount of effort required to claim and maintain sovereign space, there should be meaningful advantages to defending that territory.
Owning sovereignty should provide both navigational and defensive benefits. The answer shouldn’t simply be unlimited mobility. There needs to be a careful balance between strategic mobility that rewards owning space and mobility that allows alliances to instantly project overwhelming force across huge areas of the map.
The changes to the Ansiblex network will be an important test of this balance, and I would want the players, the CSM and Fenris to monitor their effects carefully and be able to discuss them at length about what makes them both fair and balanced and tweak as necessary.
My position is straightforward:
Sovereignty should provide strategic advantages, but those advantages should not allow unlimited projection. Especially not past your own Alliances borders.
The goal should be to make geography matter without making large alliances incapable of defending their own territory in a timely manner.
Modernise Alliance & SOV management.
Sovereignty has become increasingly complex, but the tools available to alliances in game have not kept pace with that complexity.
Alliance leaders and administrators are managing:
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Skyhooks.
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SOV hubs.
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Strategic resources.
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Infrastructure upgrades.
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Defensive operations.
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Industrial infrastructure.
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Large numbers of systems and structures.
Yet much of this management remains unnecessarily difficult. Skyhooks are a good example:
An alliance can be required to interact with its own Skyhooks through mechanics designed around hostile raiding. Essentially, this boils down to “having to rob your own stuff”.
There should be a distinction between "we are harvesting our own infrastructure” and “an enemy is attacking and trying to steal stuff from our infrastructure”. Why should an alliance effectively have to raid its own infrastructure to access its own resources?
The system should recognise ownership and provide appropriate tools for owners to manage their stuff without forcing them through mechanics designed primarily around hostile interaction.
Give SOV Hubs better information.
Not just for the Alliance administration but for the people within that alliance. We can all access some of that information out of game, so let us access it in game. For example: what upgrades it has. Sovereignty infrastructure should provide the information players need to actually manage their space. At present, SOV hubs can feel remarkably “information poor” but considering how important they are to owning space…
Alliance leadership should be able to get a clear picture of the state of their sovereignty without just relying on external tools, spreadsheets, websites and Discord bots.
I have witnessed first hand, multiple times, what it is like when the ESI goes down and you lose all access to this information.
I would push for better in game sovereignty intelligence and management tools, including clearer information about:
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System status.
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Infrastructure.
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Upgrades.
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Resource availability.
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Vulnerability.
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Activity.
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Relevant timers.
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Changes and alerts.
If sovereignty is one of the core systems of nullsec, then the game should give players the tools to actually manage it properly.
Bring Corporation and Alliance management into the game. The tools players need already exist, but nearly all of them exist outside the game. Corps and Alliances nearly all rely on external applications to handle authentication, permissions, organisational management, infrastructure information and logistics. EVE has always had an incredible player created ecosystem and there is nothing wrong with using it.
But, when external applications become necessary to effectively manage a large organisation, that is a sign that the in game tools need attention and a little bit of work. A prime example of this was the Map changes Fenris recently implemented. The 2D “Dotlan style” had been needed in game since forever.
I would like to see Fenris look at what functionality from these third party tools and devs could be brought into EVE. And potentially work with these third party devs, by using focus groups as well as the CSM. This is absolutely not a way to remove third party applications, but to establish a much stronger baseline of functionality inside the client.
What you can expect from me
My in game demeanour is pretty much identical to who I am in the real world. I’m level-headed, mostly calm, I honour ransoms and 1 v 1’s: I believe in an honourable play style and always willing to help anyone who asks. Anyone who knows me, can absolutely attest to that.
I’m probably opening a whole can of worms by saying this, but my DMs are always open. Discord ID: theorangeeagle
Even if I don’t represent your particular area of space or your style of gameplay, I will always listen. I don’t believe that being elected to the CSM means only listening to the people who play the same way I do.
I’d like to work with other CSM members who are knowledgeable about areas in which I am not.
One thing I’d particularly like to aim for is hold focus groups around topics that repeatedly come up within the community. Rather than having the same discussions happen over and over across Reddit, Discord, forums and in-game channels, I’d like to see a way of bringing together players with different experiences and perspectives, having a structured discussion, and producing something useful from it.
Those findings could then be taken to Fenris in a clear and constructive format: here’s the problem, here’s how different groups of players experience it and here are some potential solutions.
I don’t expect every focus group to produce something fruitful. EVE players are far too good at disagreeing with each other for that. But being able to turn noise into something that developers can actually work with is something I’d strive towards.
If I’m elected, I want players to feel that they can come to me, regardless of whether or not I personally agree with their position.
I will always put the health of the game at the forefront of any discussion.
If you made it this far, thank you very much for your time. And congratulations on reading through this wall of text.
Feel free to ask me questions below and I will answer them truthfully and to the best of my knowledge.
Thank you.
) to listen to your ideas (which I do agree with) and have you considered how they might be implemented in the game
) I’d like that to be happening in all regions.