Blog

 

Here’s my recommended ballot.

Candidates are linked to their Eve-O threads. You should NEVER blindly follow someone else’s ballot. All votes you place should be based on your own thoughts on the candidates. Please do familiarise yourself with them at least a little if you are going to place them in your ballot.

 

As ever, please vote. Please vote with ALL of your available accounts.

If you like this list, here’s a link to pre-select the candidates to vote more easily.

 

Phantomite
If you are finally ready to vote for a candidate who takes projection and structures seriously, I am the guy for you.
I have plans for ship and weapon balance, Faction war changes to lean in to incentivising PvP over farming, CSM transparency desires and a multitude of UX improvement, to name just a few. My changes aim to improve the landscape across ALL of New Eden and Jspace by not fearing the complexity of addressing heavy, complex subjects.

Drake Iddon
Drake is smart, witty and never confused by bad faith arguments. He wants Eve to be more PvP centric and rewarding for skilled play.

Mick fightmaster
Mick’s approach to the CSM is attentive, interested and logical. From wormholers who want that pure Jspace focus, he’s your guy.

Seddow
Seddow’s approach to changing Eve is based on furthering fleet PvP opportunities.

Itaer
An expert smallgang pilot who wants to push for fair opportunities.

Kshal Aideron
Kshal’s tone and approach is calm and knowledgeable.

Aurous Victoirespere
Aurous performs well in interviews, and he would make a good addition to the CSM.

Gideon Zendikar
Gideon’s aims for the CSM are commendable.

Luke Anninan
Luke is easily the fairest, most reasonable and smartest nullbloc candidate for the CSM. He would be higher, but he’s all but guaranteed a spot anyway.

 

 

Don’t be fooled.

Since 2020, one of the most hotly debated topics has been long range projection via Ansiblex. I do feel confident to state that I’ve been among the loudest voices on this matter, explaining and illustrating again and again in posts, recordings and live broadcasts the reasons why this is a poison to the game, the benefits a fix would bring and the end result any changes should be aiming for.

This has given rise to Fake fixes, almost always peddled by players with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

 

How can you spot a Fake Fix?

 

A Fake Fix can be identified by looking into whether or not it will lead to the ideal situation. A proper fix would end with large groups having to make a choice: continue to live far from the action, or move close to it. Moving close to a frontline would come with the reality of not having a multi-region buffer between you and your frontline.

A proper fix puts a full stop to the paradigm of “crossing multiple regions in minutes from a central, deeply invulnerable, vertically stacked HQ.”

 

Let’s go through some Fake Fixes now to see why they are trying to change nothing of note. (Note: there may me side-merit to some of these proposals, but they do nothing to fix the major issues.)

 

  • “Let smallgangs disrupt the gates”
    This is a classic, repeated non-fix. This doesn’t prevent blocs from mass-movements of players, as all it takes is a forward team of some of the fleet being in fast ships to blob anyone from disrupting.

 

  • “Make Ansiblex one way – so you can go out fast, but not in.”
    This one basically explains itself. It deliberately maintains the ability to move full forces towards their targets.

 

  • “Limit Ansi projection by stopping bubbled/warp disrupted targets from taking the gate.”
    The very problem with Ansiblex we’re looking at here is of vast fleets travelling via them. It should go without saying that massive groups of players can despatch some interceptors and interdictors, and then carry on.

 

  • “Limit the number you can anchor (through costs, sacrificing other upgrades etc.)”
    Much like the early numbers for Equinox, this would just cause the “branch lines” to be trimmed, leaving the superhighways in position. It would do nothing to prevent the current meta of “commuting” to your frontline.

 

  • “Open them and let everyone use them.”
    Are you seeing this pattern yet? ANYTHING but remove the ability for the bloc to put vast forces through them over huge distances.

 

Don’t vote for a candidate that refuses to propose a real fix for this issue. It is the single biggest piece of the puzzle towards making nullsec a healthier ecosystem, and by pushing groups to live near the edges of their space rather than the middle, it ups the need to and the incentive to go to real war, and most importantly, spread out your forces if you wish to defend all of your space.

 

 

This is a post I previously made when I was last a member of Snuffed Out. Eve videos now are almost entirely just sped up unedited fights with the latest meme music, rather than something people have worked on.

People use to try so much harder, and create things people wanted to watch properly. It’s still possible, it just barely happens now due to laziness and desires for instant gratification.

I don’t proclaim to be an expert in this field, but I definitely know some of the keys to creating a good video.

Conaildo was kind enough to search through his backups to fish it out for me – thank you!

 

~

 

Good evening, I am here today to tell you that you can all do a better job.

It’s all well and good to grab the fight clip , drop it into a timeline and grab an mp3 and slap that below it, render, upload, get 4 upvotes on reddit.
That serves a sizable audience: The audience that wants to see the frags that happened an hour ago and they don’t care about anything other than seeing the HP of that titan tick down to zero while some memeworthy music plays in the background.

But who gives a toss about that? You can get muchos upvotes (maybe as many as 20) by actually producing something rather than chudding something out and splattering it across youtube to be forgotten forever.

We have people in alliance far more proficient than that, and you can do something amazing, you could be spending some real time and creating a video that has an intro, a theme, explanation and an epic conclusion! You need to pick your music PROPERLY and actually edit your fights. You can make half an hour of video that people will actually watch more than once and then subscribe to you! Come on. The payoff is huge.

If you’re still interested, here’s a few of the first basic rules of a compendium video.

  • DON’T pick your favourite music
    Your favourite music sucks. Well it doesn’t suck, but it SUCKS in an eve video.
    Don’t ever pick music just because it sounds good. Sure that’s an important factor, but more important than that is that it fits the feeling you’re trying to evoke.
    Make sure the music has audible points in it that you can choreograph on-screen events to.
    Try choosing a standard genre of music throughout the video.
  • Don’t be afrid to lie
    I don’t mean you should pretend certain events happened or didn’t happen, I mean don’t be afraid to pull in a close up of the wrong part of the timeline to show a sexy shot of a fleet in the middle of the battle. It’s fine, you are creating entertainment, not a sterile beurocratic record of what you filmed.
    Also, please, desperately do not be afraid to shorten a fight. If the battle lasted half an hour, no-one wants to see that – even if you speed it up x4. Get out of here with that lazy boring bollocks. Show the important bits of the fight – how it began, how it progressed, how we dropped in far too many titans for the situation. Focus on the bits everyone gets horny for.
  • Tell the story
    You don’t have to laboriously spend four hours slicing in the correct comms for the correct part of the fight. Clip out the important bits, line them up where it appears to be correct and dull the music volume when you play the FC giving orders. It’s extra work, but it’s well worth it.
    DIRTY SECRET: You don’t have to do comms if you don’t want to, but your subtitles had better be bloody good. Make sure they are short, to the point, stay on screen for the right amount of time and DON’T INTRUDE UPON THE ACTION UNFOLDING.
    shove them in a corner, on a nice plain black background. Keep it readable. Half your viewers can’t read anything longer than one sentence at a time because they have ADHD.
  • PACING
    Just because I banned you further up there from using meme music doesn’t mean you can’t have some humor. Put in anything you like that people will actually enjoy, but keep these short and don’t use in-jokes unless the audience has something else to suck on while you self-indulge. If you put in a section that no-one outside your circle understands, you just appear to be a insuffrable void of personality. Oh also, make sure your video has an ending. with credits. (NOT just a black screen with names)
  • Viewer attention span lasting only 10 minutes is bollocks
    People crave long, interesting videos. The reason people get bored with 10 minute videos is because 10 minutes is either not enough time to tell a story or it’s just a sped up unedited bracketfight.

 

So please, give us all what we want and go down in history by producing something everyone can be proud to have been a part of. You can do it. You can do it better than any that have come before. Don’t be lazy, get your reward.

Some small (but important) things to be aware of:
Recording eve in 4k is trash for eve videos, the vast majority of your audience will be using 1080p screens, and CCP has been useless at UI scaling since forever. Almost all your viewers will be unable to read the UI text, and this is a giant frustration. No-one in any good numbers will be able to enjoy your video. Please, if you’re serious, run your client in 1080p.
Do not add black bars and do NOT record in a res LOWER than 1080p either. It’s not 2004.

Render your video properly or do not bother making it at all. All the game text, never mind your own, MUST appear RAZOR SHARP once youtube has processed it. Render natively, do not cut any corners with this. Eve struggles with this more than most other video games, as eve is ENTIRELY about what is going on with the UI.

Feel free to contact me for any advice, and i’m sure some actual professionals will be ready to help with nittier-grittier issues. 

 

 

…Your corp.

 

Something I feel safe to pat myself on the back for is my ongoing ability to leave behind an entrenched lifestyle with whatever my current group in Eve is, if the fun is elsewhere.

It’s hard to do that. You have a ton of ships, you often have a ton (or a few) close internet nerd friends in that group. You joined them in the first place to violently socialise, to build your wealth and to have a good time. Because this is an entertainment computer video game.

I was lucky, in that my first group in Eve cemented my first batch of lifelong nerdfriends. We were a small corporation, most of us relatively young in the game with a long spacefuture ahead of us. These people pushed me forwards, teaching me the basics, and learning and growing with me mainly in the PvP scene.

At the time, My first group pushed forwards faster than I thought was wise – but it always worked out. After that era’s “golden age”, came the inevitable decline – this is natural for Every group in Eve. Every group waxes and wanes, some multiple times, at varying scales.

Myself and just two of the group felt the declining activity, and we jumped ship – leaving behind everything we knew and still loved, a bond based on what was now the past. This was my first of several efforts over the following 15 years to reinvent the fun I was looking to keep alive.

 

It’s a big risk, leaving the certainty of your familiar but declining Corporation/Alliance. We all look back at the past in Eve through rose-tinted glasses, and while we ask a lot of very reasonable things of CCP, the other half of the puzzle is to recognise that CCP fixing or improving aspects of the game is not going to magically bring all of your Golden-era Eve friends back together to give a serious go at finding the fun. You have to do that.

Because of the multiple, often multi-year jumps I’ve made over my Eve career, I’ve made far more in number, opinion and playstyle friends – many of whom have variously accompanied me to one group or another. Sure, half of them won’t be coming back to Eve, but the ones who have survived over a long period of time have managed this by having the balls to start new relationships and endeavours, in the pursuit of finding where the fun is and getting up and going there.

Leave your dead corp from 5 years ago. It’s not going to come back in the manner you hope it will.

But you will find the right set of people and content if you let go. CCP has a lot of work to do, but you can find the fun now if you’re willing.

 

 

Full disclosure, I am actively recruiting for my Corp and Alliance. During my recruiting efforts, I have had conversation with a large number of people insistant that they would rather stay in their long-time dead corporations for senimental reasons, which made me think on this issue.

 

 

Here’s my recommended ballot. As ever, you should make your own choices based on your own research.

PLEASE DO FILL YOUR BALLOT.

Click here to pre-select

1. Phantomite
-End the powerblocs through removal of strong foundations. Instability creates content.
-Offer income and content outside of joining large groups. Chances for new groups to form and new stories to be told.
-Blended PvE and PvP to offer income while fighting, rather than having the two be endlessly separate.
2. Mark Ressurectus
-Mark offers experience for wormhole balance, but understands combat all over Eve.
3. Torvald Uruz
-Torvald spearheaded what would become this year’s focus on a major FW revamp, and is a strong voice against other CSMs who aim to maintain their status quo.
4. Ithica Hawk
-Subject matter expert for tournaments and smallgang PvP
5. Drake Iddon
-Drake brings enthusiasm and Pochven-style experience and can champion similar mechanics for the rest of Eve.
-Stands up against blatent lies
6. Arsia Elkin
-Voice in favour of FW and pro small-group
7. Stitch Kaneland
-Expert theoriser for ship and weapon balance
8. Baldin Tarmain
-Industrialist who can tell the difference between entitled risk averse opinions and the true nature of Eve.
9. Keacte
-Approcahable and enthusiastic with content creation
10. Jinx De’Caire
-A very unbloc-y bloc-alike candidate

 

 

As ever, please do join my discord, please do vote for me, and please do vote for me WITH ALL of your available accounts!

Your accounts must be older than 60 days. Your account must be an omega at the time of voting.

Hello,
Given recent events, I have decided to leave Snuffed Out. For the past few months I struggled to ignore the toxicity of an unsurprising lineup of “boy’s club” Snuff members, and the exploitative and dishonest behaviour of Hy.

This toxicity and dishonesty lost any subtlety a few months back. A Snuff member sent me an evemail me just to say “no-one likes you”. Hy messaged me to say “people are saying CCP doesn’t like talking to you”. Hy knows this to be false as a result of my repeated attempts to reach out to him to try and involve him in the CSM process. I let him know that I was making contact and good progress with CCP devs.

A few days later I hear from several other alliance leaders that Hy himself is soliciting them for votes. He spread this lie amongst them in an attempt to redirect votes from myself. He himself was the source of this lie, spreading it while knowing it has no base in reality. Yes Hy, I’ve known for a while.
I have involved myself in helpful activities in the alliance wherever possible. I volunteered my help with first-port-of-call recruitment, finding content and leading smaller fleets, and doctrine discussion. My thanks for my efforts was laughter and mockery when asking for help killing a tackled Kronos. Fortunately, a handful of Korean Snuff members were more enthusiastic and came to assist.

I knew a few weeks ago that I was no longer welcome, but didn’t leave for fear of it appearing to be a cheap move for votes. The reaction I saw today to the offer of a Kronos kill made staying an impossibility. I’m sick of this alliance’s hellish toxicity.

To anyone from Snuff reading this, it’s not the majority of you. As ever, an entrenched toxic minority spoiled it, and will continue to do so indefinitely.

I look forward to engaging with Faction Warfare whether or not I get the opportunity to help guide it on the CSM.

 

On Friday the 22nd April, 2022 CCP announced an up to 33% price hike for subcriptions to Eve online.

Times are financially difficult for most people and some businesses. Regular people are rapidly find their disposable income dwindling at best, many others now have no disposable income and can’t even afford regular living expenses.

CCP is also affected, with inflation making their income not as large, and the total loss of all income from the Russian market due to sanctions. So what are they going to offer us for this higher price?

Eve was never a particularly cheap game, and now it’s the most expensive “premium/traditional model” MMO on the market. What exactly are we getting for this incredibly steep price? Since the advent of multiple chilling-effect changes to Eve, primarily the anti-content design of Citadels, action in Eve online has been in a endless boring decline. CCP puts plenty of resources into CCP-Curated content, which does indeed include some PvP – but it lasts as long as the event, doesn’t spur war and is navelgazing when it comes to the problem surrounding chilled player created content.

If you check the video above, you’ll see CCP Paragon reading and slightly answering my question. During the Q&A surround the price hike, he kept promising that there would be a reveal at fanfest which “justfies the increased price” of Eve.

 

If they announce another CCP curated content event, it means utterly nothing. The only thing that can save Eve is a total revamp of multiple areas of the game ro reverse the stagnation and get groups to be endlessly, meaningfully at real war again.

I will be there to make them answer for their lack of care to the single thing that drove Eve: The players. Not their events.