Velonad Tyldamere for CSM 18

Council Of Stellar Management CSM Campaigns
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Your EVE Online story.

Hi, my name is Velonad and I’ve been playing EVE since 2007, for the most part in either low-sec or null-sec.

I started off my EVE career as a high-sec missions’ newbie, quitting after a couple of months trying on my own. I fortunately gave it another try in May 2008 and promptly joined a mission running corporation, that also tried their best at roaming into lowsec every now and then. I learned a lot more this time around, got my first taste of PvP too and I’ve been hooked ever since.

That first taste of PvP made me want more and I ended up transitioning to a more PvP focused corp (Infestation, run by killfest) in late 2008. In my time with this corp I had my first null sec experiences as well as trying my hand at some high sec PvP either in wardecs form or with can flipping/baiting.

My second proper exposure to PvP was flying with Bannable Offense in 2009, mostly in nullsec this time around. We did mostly roaming gangs but had a short period with the alliance Minor Threat, which I believe was run by Lazarus Telraven & Rhydis of AMOK at the time. This was the beginning of my love affair with interdictors, a role I still love to fly to date as well as my first taste of bigger nullsec fleet fights, including my first exposure to the old AoE doomsdays that Titans used to have.

The last stop before I joined my current group was again with killfest at the helm of a new corp, Heroes from late 2009 to spring 2010. We again roamed around in all kinds of space, did wardecs when bored, while I expanded my horizons to also run links, logistics & tackle/scout for the corp.

However, in spring 2010 I felt ready to progress onto new things and talking daily to former Bannable Offense corp mates opened an opportunity for me to join Pandemic Legion and it’s Serbian corp Blood Covenant. Ever since I’ve been flying with them, taking a break a bit after the battle of B-R for RL reasons until February 2017, when I rejoined PL and I’m currently now one of the leaders of my corp HABIT.

During my time with PL I’ve been on most of their campaigns and battles between 2010 and 2014, and from 2017 and until now. Most of what I’ve learned over the years has been refined there. I’ve also since 2019 been able to expand my horizons by starting to do small scale industry, to now being the primary producer of any ship fittings that we use for all our doctrine subcaps. Thus I have gotten valuable insight into alliance logistics & industry chains from this experience.

Your areas of expertise. In which areas of the game do you feel you are the most knowledgeable? What qualities set you apart from other candidates?

You’d notice that since Kenneth Feld can’t run this year for PL some might mistake me for another very big industrialist on his scale. Let’s dispel any myths right away there, I’m not him. Yet I hope that my extensive experience building bulk fittings (I’ve built around 5000+ full sets for the alliance since before the Delve War) will give me a solid background in industry and it has given me insight into the mechanics and interactions in this field that I wish to share with CCP. I’m used to sourcing materials, knowing the bottlenecks and I have a firm grasp of the different processes & steps involved in efficient and quick bulk industrial production.

Whereas in other fields such as fleet warfare, PvP and crafting fittings, I will bring over 15 years’ experience doing so in all kinds of different and evolving metas since 2008. I’ve always loved to try to push a ship fit to its absolute limits, and I’m always trying to chase the elusive tiny advantage over others.

My main playstyles revolve around either major or minor nullsec fleet fights from small scale nano skirmishing and up to big battleship & capital brawls, and I usually enjoy taking supporting roles in fleets, providing alt characters for roles such as cynos, scouts, dictors, links & FAX.

I do also have the good fortune of being involved in the operation of my alliance on a leadership level, working with our coalition partners and our fleet commanders daily. This provides a good insight into alliance & coalition dynamics, and since I think Eve is as much a political and strategic game as well as a tactical one, I think it’s valuable experience to bring into the CSM.

These experiences and qualities will complement the CSM well by providing a solid experienced base for PvP, industry & leadership in my candidacy. Often people strongly identify as either an industrialist or a PvPer, but I consider myself to be both at the same time.

Why are you applying for the CSM?

The CSM is an advisory body and I think my years of experience with the game can make me a valuable addition to the CSM rooster. I also intend to listen to both players and CCP, because I firmly believe that we cannot work well with either party without a good and honest dialogue.

I strongly want the game and the community to prosper also in the future and I think the CSM is a very important avenue to affecting that. This is my primary reason for wishing to take on this responsibility.

What can players expect from you?

In the broadest sense PvP & industry will be my core focus areas if elected to the CSM, and where I feel I will have the most to contribute. Below I have tried to briefly summarize some of the things I wish to touch upon to give an idea of what I want to advice CCP on:

  • Power projection, a hard look for instance should be done on having Ansiblexes being completely fatigue free, I’d favour some kind of fatigue to balance the power projection, while also retaining the ability to react in your own space.

  • Continue to look at tweaking citadels, more options to play/counterplay such as shooting services/parts of the citadel would be interesting.

  • I’d love to see more slightly more frequent ship balance & meta changes being pushed. The Muninn for example staying the way it was for as long as it did, is a prime example of how it should -not- be. At the same time this should be balanced towards not having to replace your entire meta lineup too often either.

  • Industry & resources feedback. There is still work to be done on streamlining some of the industry processes and rationalizing bottlenecks in production to be cost driven more than availability driven.

I also want to have a strong focus on trying to suggest QoL features for the dev team when I can get their ear. “Challenging gameplay, not UI” will be my watchword for this.

In the end I intend to be open-minded and approach this task humbly, as I’d be my first stint at something like this. Regardless of my in-game affiliations, I intend to keep an open mind to the playerbase and work with others both on the CSM and outside it to influence CCP’ decision-making processes for the better of the game.

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Reserved for future use.

Disclaimer: I am having some RL stuff hit me just as I post this, I’ll however try to keep myself updated on forum replies and I can be talked to on the eve-online discord as well.

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@Velonad_Tyldamere would you back any idea mentioned below as CSM member?

  1. Insane idea - pay with PLEX in NES for extra dev time
  2. Quafe+ is from "biomass" (...or corpse reprocessing)
  3. Little things / Small QoL suggestions - Better Visibility Of Other Players’ PI Networks
  4. Little things / Small QoL suggestions - 8 (search shows 13) requests for Stack Split enhancement since Jun’18
  5. Little things / Small QoL suggestions - PI KB-shortcuts for toggling between groups of structures
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  1. Thats just stupid, as CCP or most other companies would not allocate work priority based on donations.

  2. Adding biomass as a source from the what 4-8000 capsules that dies daily would be meaningless for the supply in the amounts you state, this would be a waste of dev time.

  3. Don’t see the harm in this, but it won’t increase PvP activity around customs offices if that is what you are thinking.

  4. Multi-splitting stacks into X amounts would be useful, so I’d support that at least.

  5. Sure.

The more important question is why you ask about QoL changes opinions when CSM have a much broader responsibility than that. Also measuring response times (as you admitted on the eve-o discord) for them as if that is a good way to measure each CSM’ potential activity levels, is flawed at best.

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I have no issues with your answers, like I said to the other CSM candidate, they are just answers. Don’t waste your time with the concen why I ask those :slight_smile:

That CCP’s QoL thread is 5+ years old, some improvement requests are repeated several times, like stack split, Item name from Show info clipboard-copy, and corpse names in contract details. I only counted those that I wanted to request myself and checked if it was already asked. But probably there is more repeating unaddressed requests…

There are also some unfixed bugs. Nothing serious imho but certainly such lack of QA leaves a bad taste when encounterd.

This was a sole reason I jumped that “PLEX for Dev time” idea. Maybe I overreacted a little with this one :wink:

I like playing EVE, but it sometimes feels unpolished and “garagey” to me because of the above :frowning:

Show your CSM potential and ask CCP to do something about this rotting QoL heap at least. Some qol requests have been delivered ofc :slight_smile:

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@Velonad_Tyldamere

  1. What do CCP do correctly?
  2. What do CCP do incorrectly?
  3. What do you wish existed in-game that doesn’t?
  4. What exists in-game that you wish didn’t?
  5. What exists in-game that you think ought to continue to exist?
  6. What doesn’t exist in-game that you hope never comes into existence?
  7. How would you improve PI?
  8. How would you improve the entire corporation UI?
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I feel like you asking these same 8 extremely generic questions to every CSM candiate is a bit of :thinking: moment, so I’ll give you some short answers.

  1. What do CCP do correctly?

They still try to change and reinvent new eden with expansions. Keeping the game evolving is vital for it’s health

  1. What do CCP do incorrectly?

Trying to shill gold items/in-game advantages for PLEX/money

Microtransactions for direct in-game benefits is something I will push hard against.

  1. What do you wish existed in-game that doesn’t?

Covert dictors?! I joke tho, since that would be insanely OP.

I guess a legitimate use for surgical warp probes or similar items that have no real purpose right now.

  1. What exists in-game that you wish didn’t?

Citadel damage caps in it’s current iteration. It’s brutally boring to grind undefended citadels, and likewise very stupid to reward absentee guardianship of citadels by wasting everyones time.

I’d like to see damage caps for example doubled, but also allow citadels to be actively repaired to maybe half of that new cap, to allow a counter to slow down the reinforce rate.

This is just an example that would obviously need a lot of tweaking.

  1. What exists in-game that you think ought to continue to exist?

ESI, absolutely critical to most tools run outside the game.

  1. What doesn’t exist in-game that you hope never comes into existence?

Gold ammo/modules ie stuff that is better than what is available normally in the game and can only be bought via PLEX or real money.

  1. How would you improve PI?

Add templates for typical setups would help immensely with reducing the initial setup time.

  1. How would you improve the entire corporation UI?

The corporation UI is a big beast, I’m uncertain how I’d change that at this time, and I might amend my reply to that specific one with some details.

Howevrr, one detail that I’d personally like to see changed would be to move corp assets to the assets tab, so you can at a quick glance check both personal and corp assets from a single window.

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Allow me a moment to be direct @Velonad_Tyldamere I have no idea who you are. I read your bio and from that I learned that you’ve been playing since 2007, you like PVP, you’re not Kenneth Feld, and you’re deep, DEEP into Industry. I can say with certainty because I have asked everybody what is important to them, that many of the ideas that you stand for, such as a rebalancing of force projection and ships are the same ideas as other candidates.

I’ll share with you the same information that I shared with Angry Moustache and The Oz

The question 3-6 are a special type of question that force you to reconsider your perspective on a topic. They’re essentially asking for an example of a:

  1. A false positive
  2. A false negative
  3. A true positive
  4. A true negative

or in other terms

  1. There was a problem and CCP did not identify that problem
  2. There was not a problem and CCP identified there was a problem
  3. There was a problem and CCP identified that problem
  4. There was not a problem and CCP did not identify a problem

You might find questions like that easier to identify in context. For example how is this true of capital ship balance. Or how is this true of Market Fees and Taxes.

You correctly identified that the questions are broad, they elicit values more so than specific solutions. In my defence, my objective was to get to know as many of the candidates as possible and being as general as possible in my asking offers each candidate the opportunity to be as specific as they want in there answers. In my business that’s called a transderivational search for meaning. You can experience this by going and reading the responses given in other replies by other candidates. My final objective was to draw some attention to and get some activity going on the lesser known candidates threads. Some of these plants just needed some watering and a bit of sunshine their way to get going.

I learned two things from this exercise, the first is in how a person replies and the second is what they reply with :thinking:

This was a really telling reply, I liked that you wrote this, you gave a forbidden answer and it was cool, you gave yourself permission to put something out there tat wasn’t biographical and wasn’t a list of your qualifications.

This is an example of how the questions elicit values, the questions are designed to cause you to think about what is important, and you think it’s important that players are actively engaged around the contested features in-game. That tells me more about what you’ll fight for and against than the information that you presented in the CSM candidate application response (No disrespect intended, it’s a bio afterall).

Obviously CCP’s not going to care what the CSM’s ideas about the game are, everybody already knows that, past CSM’s know that, present CSM’s know that. CCP decides the agenda. What I want want to know is what’s really important to the candidates when nothing is going their way and everything is stupid. I want to know what’s at the core of their thinking and I can read that from this answer that you gave about what’s important to you.

This value that you have presented, it generalises across contexts, if you’re shown a faction warfare proposal which you may not have much interest in but it violates or supports this value. you’ll likely speak against it or speak for it depending. And that’s important to me to know about you.

Dude I’m so with you on this. I just wish they’d integrate some of the more popular ESI tools like the battle reports etc. so that all these amazing community members could get to building the next cool thing.

I didn’t know this about you and so I would never in a ,million years have thought to ask it. but I’m pkleased to see that we share this in common.

There is a shared consensus amongst every candidate on this issue. I imagine CCP opens their mouth to ask this question and the whole room just replies NO! in unison before the words even come out.

Everyone agrees on this too.

Hey this is a really great idea that nobody else has spoken about. It is my opinion that the Corp UI should be a core feature in a game about warring corporations and it should matter at each level of management. I think that the Projects system is a really good start to this, though they need to add in built reward systems, I mean they really dropped the ball here. when you deposit minerals etc automatic payments should at the very least be an option. Anyhow the Corp Ui is kind of thing I’d like to see improved so his question was kind of for me.

Good luck Velonad and thanks for replying.

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Your replies had a lot more thought given to them than what I honestly expected, I’ll touch on some of your points as I’d like to expand a couple of the answers you picked on. This would be to flesh the answers out some more.

That will alas wait until I’m back home, which happens sometime late this weekend.

I’ll edit this reply when I do. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Judge a cover by it’s book and all that I guess…

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Will you oppose your leaders running RMT and Gambling operations being run off TOR and other means, Velonad? I am very skeptical that I should vote for someone who’s leaders in my opinion egg’d on sustained harassment of players outside the Tranquility Consortium, including in IRL.

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Define leaders, provide proof and then we can maybe talk, because I have no idea what you are talking about.

If you wish for a generic answer to my stance on RMT, I will state for the record that I’m completely opposed to it as it is deeply detrimental to the health of any game.

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I’d love to see ESI expanded and given further support. I seem to recall for instance that ACL were supposed to have both writable and readable endpoints, this is still missing in 2023 so doing access control on for instance structures and bookmark lists is a manual nightmare right now.

I think this would potentially be the first step, other things they could look at is just trying to streamline the number of clicks to get from A to B in PI, my general experience is that there are steps that are just done that seem wholly uneccesary.

For example expedited transfers could go all the way to the customs office bay with a single click directly from storage if you wanted it to, i stead pf hopping three loops before arriving there.

I think thats a missed opportunity as well. Frankly if I had my PC with me I’d make a lot more detailed responses to what I think is wrong in the corp ui, but it is kinda hard to have it where I am stuck until saturday/sunday.

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