34 Weeks of World War Bee

This past week saw Snuffed Out carry on with their prodding of the Tranquility Trading Consortium, the null sec coalition that runs the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter, among other things.  Having destroyed the TTC keepstar in Ignoitton last week, the group declared war on the TTC, leading people to wonder if they were going to actually assail the high sec trading hub.

This led to the push/shove scenario and answered the question as to whether the owners of the TTC… which includes both sides of World War Bee.. would cooperate to defend their lucrative market situation.

The answer was “yes” as both TEST and The Imperium joined the war to defend the TTC, leading to a set of instructions going out to Imperium pilots about how to setup their overviews so they could be allied with TEST in high sec yet still see them as hostile targets in Delve.

In order to declare a war in high sec a group has to designated a war headquarters.  In this case, Snuff’s HQ was an unfit (and perhaps unfueled) Raitaru in Ichinumi, which the TTC forces promptly destroyed.  That meant that the TTC “won” the war and kept Snuff from declaring war again for two weeks.  This quick resolution led some to believe that Snuff was just in it for the memes.

Meanwhile, in his weekly fireside chat on Saturday, The Mittani announced the F2 program, a call for members of the Imperium to step up and be more than just F1 monkeys in fleets.  The idea is to take an organization that, since the levee en masse inception of KarmaFleet, has often been seen to simply be about simply getting more people into fleets and pulling the few who show some talent into positions of responsibility, and get more people to step up into support roles in addition to going on fleet ops.  Scouts and spies were mentioned specifically, but were not the sole possible paths.  Mittens banged the drum for this through his whole speech and, though he vowed there would be no shaming of people who did not step up, wandered perilously close to that position a few times himself.

In the traditional Imperium way, having long adapted to the daunting complexity of life in New Eden and the running of a space empire, there was a promise of guides to help line members find that second role… the F2 button on the space career… to help support the coalition.

Delve Front

As we enter the eighth month of the war, Delve has now been in play for almost half of that time.  PAPI put down a Keepstar successfully in NPC Delve on their fifth attempt back in October.  That means that the invasion of Delve, the alleged final stage of the war, has now gone on longer than many past wars have taken all told.  I know everybody loves the “not winning fast enough” meme, but public promises as to when 1DQ1-A would fall have all proven to be pipe dreams so far.  The system, and the constellation behind it, remain in Imperium hands and largely unscathed.  But for PAPI to take Delve, they must evict the Imperium from 1DQ1-A.

That said, there isn’t a lot left of Delve in Imperium hands.  PAPI came in and took the 1-A81R constellation, home to The Bastion and Get Off My Lawn.  Aside from a few outlying systems near Querious, the 1DQ1-A constellation is all PAPI has left to take.

Delve – Feb 28, 2021

The hellcamp in M2-XFE carries on.  There were some operations by PAPI against the bubbles over the week, but no real break out attempts have come.  And the two metaliminal storms continue to wander the region, though the electrical storm looks like it might be out the door and into Fountain if it carries on in its current direction.

Other Theaters

In Querious Brave has managed to hold on to the systems they have been trying to claim.

Querious – Feb 28, 2021

That said, Siberian Squads hasn’t gone away either and remains in their own constellation as well as staging out of the Keepstar in W6V-VM.

In Catch however, Brave’s holdings are under siege as The Initiative and other groups have laid siege to and started taking what one might consider Brave’s core home systems in the region.

Catch – Feb 28, 2021

Brave is committed to Querious now because their backfield is on fire behind them.  Likewise, Immensea remains under pressure, and Federation Uprising is down to two ihubs and Warped Intentions has lost all of theirs.

Immensea – Feb 28, 2021

And down in Esoteria The Bastion has kept the pressure on TEST, though an incursion popping up in the region probably hasn’t made their life any easier.

Esoteria – Feb 28, 2021

There is word that Impass and Feythabolis may also start getting the torch soon, once some of the above regions are wrapped up.

My Participation

I was a slacker yet again this week, though I have to say that a lot of the ops I saw pinged were in EUTZ, which I cannot really go on unless I know they are going to be short.  I can’t go missing in the middle of the work day for long.  I did jump in when PAPI made a run at the bubbles at the M2-XFE camp, which put me on some fighter squadron kills.  I also got the final blow on a TEST Scimitar, so my Rokh has a kill mark on it now.

The M2 Keepstar abides

Other than that I ran around Delve and collected my PI.  PAPI hasn’t been after the customs office in the region, or at least not in the systems where I work, so that trickle of income has remained steady.  Oh, and I was on the Theta Thursday show on INN last week, proving that they are getting low on available guests.

With that my losses for the war remain:

• Ares interceptor – 15
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Drake battle cruiser – 4
• Scimitar logi – 3
• Ferox battle cruiser – 3
• Purifier stealth bomber – 3
• Guardian logi – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

This past week saw the Bastions of War update from CCP which introduced improvements to marauder class battleships.  Buffing 2 billion ISK hulls in the middle of their economic crunch seemed a bit comical to me, but the left hand rarely seems to know what the right hand is doing at CCP.  We will see if that changes anything in the game meta.

The update also nerfed heavy assault cruiser survivability, which will no doubt change the null sec war meta, which has largely been “HACs online” for most of the conflict.  It seems that Muninns and Eagles might fall by the wayside, though the speedy Cerberus might still be viable.  What will replace those as ships of the line remains to be seen.

CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson gave an odd interview about the EVE Online economy which was published over at The Gamer in which he went on about the New Eden economy in attempt to play up some bizarre connection to the GameStop short selling event earlier in the month, by describing things that don’t or can’t really happen in the game.  Has anybody, as an example, really been banned for margin trading?  It was really every bad interview I have ever witnessed where the CEO proves he doesn’t know his product and nobody is there to stop him.

And then CCP posted their Expert Systems dev blog, which in classic CCP fashion, uses words that sound cool but which do not mean what they seem to think they do. (see “logistics” meaning “repair” for another example.)  While lacking in details, this came off as a “rent a skill” program to get new players to pay money for temporary access to skills to try them out.  It seems like a complete non-starter to me, but I’ll have more words about that later.

And the peak concurrent users for the week rang in about where it did last week, with Sunday being just slightly ahead of Saturday this time around:

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671
• Week 13 – 35,618
• Week 14 – 39,681
• Week 15 – 40,359
• Week 16 – 36,642
• Week 17 – 37,695
• Week 18 – 36,632
• Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
• Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
• Week 21 – 34,888
• Week 22 – 33,264
• Week 23 – 33,149
• Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
• Week 25 – 31,611
• Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
• Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
• Week 28 – 34,713
• Week 29 – 35,996
• Week 30 – 38,323
• Week 31 – 38,167
• Week 32 – 37,259
• Week 33 – 35,886 (Saturday)
• Week 34 – 35,626

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 34
• TAGN – Bastions of War Update Summary
• INN – The Role of Tribe in EVE
• INN – Snuff Bluffs
• INN – WWB Thought Experiment
• They Greybill – The “Real Delve” is not in New Eden

Quote of the Day – The Hubris of a New Eden FPS

An Eve Online first-person shooter is CCP’s greatest folly

-Jeremy Peel, VG24/7

The money quote was actually the headline, but it will do.

Last month CCP announced changes to their first person shoot plans.  The work around what had been called Project Nova was going to move to a new team and be given a new name.

A number of news sites jumped on the news and declared that Project Nova had been cancelled.  Massively OP doubled down on that line and even brought up in their podcast.

In the end the problem is not that some web sites don’t understand what the word “cancelled” means or cannot resist a good headline.  The problem is that CCP did not simply cancel Project Nova, but kept the whole FPS idea alive with another team and under another (secret now) name.

The problem is that the only lesson learned after more than a decade (the initial DUST 514 announcement is coming up on eleven years) of thrashing and failure on the FPS front is apparently that they shouldn’t announce projects prematurely.  And they did this in the midst of telling us that the FPS project would keep going.  If you take the view that Project Nova was cancelled, then they effectively announced the new project right then and there.  They just were not going to tell us what it was called.  So we’ll make up something to call it I guess.  I’m going to keep tagging it as Project Nova just to maintain a thread of continuity.

And maybe things have changed.  Maybe being owned by Pearl Abyss and having its resources at the disposal of the project will lead to a different outcome.  Maybe better talent or a different vision will make it happen.  Maybe they will be less focused on tying whatever it is they end up developing into EVE Online and more focused on making a good game with its own virtues, a game that people would play even despite its connection to EVE Online.

But we won’t know until we see it, and the track record so far does not lend one hope.

Hat Tip to Wolf Brothers Inc for spotting this.

Reviving the 190cs and Some History

I’ve written some about my early days of gaming, days dominated first by the Atari 2600 and then the Apple II.  I have also written extensively about the era from EverQuest forward, when I was playing on a Windows machine of one sort or another.

But there is a whole middle-era that I have mostly left out, or only alluded to in passing, that involves me working and playing games on the Apple Macintosh platform.  And it was quite a big part of my evolution as a gamer.  Flashes of that have come through when I wrote about Air Warrior or when I mention things like Marathon or Bolo.  But it isn’t a topic I’ve delved into much, for reasons I will get to.  But first, some history.

Being in Silicon Valley and an Apple II enthusiast meant it was easy to keep an eye on all things Apple, including the coming of the original Macintosh.  But even though 1984 wasn’t like 1984, or so that ad told me, I wasn’t buying a Mac. (This is also why I have no Nintendo nostalgia.  Who needed a NES when you had an Apple II?)

I was still invested in the Apple II though, which had more software, did more things, and was all I needed at the time.  I played Wizardry and Ultima III and Bard’s Tale and Karatka and was happy.   Meanwhile, the original Macintosh was neat and all, but other that drawing pictures in MacPaint, there wasn’t much too it.

Time moved on, and new Mac models came out.  I used my student discount to buy my friend Kip a Mac 512Ke, but stuck with my Apple II.  Then two things happened.  First, somebody swiped a box of mine while I was moving out of the dorm at the end of the semester.  That box contained mostly Apple II disks, which cut the legs out from under my investment in the hardware.  I didn’t lose everything, but I a lot of software was gone and I wasn’t going to go buy it all again.  I wasn’t even sure I could buy all of it again.

Second, as part of a group project we did a bunch of work at one person’s office.  They did all their stuff on the Mac and so I did a bunch of the writing for the project on a Mac SE with an Apple Extended Keyboard on Microsoft Word.

The Mac SE was the first model to lose the already dowdy looks of the original Mac, a look that was still present in the Mac Plus.  The new Apple Desktop Bus keyboard and mouse that came with it were a lot better than the original Mac versions.  And Microsoft Word was really good on the Mac.  I really like the WYSIWYG aspect of it.  It was light and ran well.  Add in the ability to print your documents out on one of those new laser printers and I was sold.

In early 1987 I bought a Mac SE through a contact that was able to buy at the Apple developer support prices, which probably saved me $1,500.  Computers were expensive back then.

It was a dual floppy unit, because I came from the Apple II world and having two floppy drives was freaking critical… especially if you wanted to copy disks for friends.  (I remember sitting there with the cover off of both Apple II floppy drives, adjusting the speeds of both to get them sync’d up in order to get past some particularly gnarly copy protection scheme or another.)

But I still needed a hard drive.  You couldn’t get by without that even back then, those the sizes seem comically small by today’s standards.  A 20MB drive was a pretty common option, but I went out and spent all that money I saved on the Mac SE on a 70MB drive from Jasmine Technologies, a company I would later end up working for.

Anyway, I was committed.  My Mac era had begun, and would continue on for almost exactly a decade.  I ended up working at companies that did Mac products, even working directly with Apple on a few things.  I ran a Mac oriented BBS from 1990 to 1995, which gave me a knowledge of modems at the dawn of the dial up internet which got me a few jobs.

But Apple was a ship without a rudder in the 90s, wandering thither and yon, unfocused and living on its past reputation.  By 1997 the place looked doomed.  Michael Dell was telling people that the company should shut down and give the stockholders the proceeds.  The startup I was working at folded up shop and I had to take what little Windows knowledge I had gained to try and find a job elsewhere.  Having Macintosh on your resume at the time was only slightly better than having McDonald’s listed.  A lot of people I knew made the transition.

A year later I had a job in enterprise software, secured largely on my rather superficial knowledge of ISDN (I was hired to work on that, then never did, moving immediately into speech technologies), and a Windows NT Desktop machine in front of me.

Since it had always been my habit to have a machine similar to my work machine at home, I swapped over to Windows there was well.  I soon had a Dell Pentium II machine set to dual boot into either Win95 or WinNT.  It wasn’t my first Windows box.  I had a 66MHz 486 a few years back just to tinker with Win95, but it was the first Windows box set to be my main machine.  Somewhere along the line I got a 3Dfx Voodoo I card… I forget now why I bought it… some game needed it I am sure… so when EverQuest came out I was ready to go.

And almost all of that Mac stuff went away.  I kept that Apple Extended Keyboard for a long time.  It just sat on a shelf, gathering dust, but it was such a good keyboard that I hated to just toss it.  I got rid of the PowerMac 8500, the last desktop Mac I owned, and the Windows compatibility cared I had borrowed from a friend at Apple so I could run ZMud when playing TorilMUD.  After using it on that other Windows machine, I had to find a way to keep using it.

Other bits and pieces disappeared over time.  The TI MicroLaser Plus laser printer stayed a bit, but it was a decade old and supplies were getting scarce.  Boxes, diskettes, CDs, and manuals of various historical value got tossed as time went on as my wife and I moved, then moved again.

Now, more than a decade on there are very few things around to suggest I ever had anything other than a Windows box during my career.  There are some Mac World Expo badges hanging off a peg, a couple of really old CD jewel cases with titles like Spaceship Warlock or Pathways into Darkness (early Bungie title!), or my affection for the big ball Kensington Trackball that might give it away, but not much else.  I am in a constant battle between keeping old stuff and not having my office turn into a trash heap of old crap.  So I do my own Marie Kondo thing and sift through stuff and ask myself if it brings me joy or not, which gets me to throw things out now and again.

And I have forgotten much.  I am able to go write about TorilMUD as often as I do not because I played it so much during the 90s, but because it is still there and I can get ZMud to still launch, so I can revisit and refresh old memories.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was once again going through my office and throwing things away (like a Jambalaya MRE a friend brought back from the Gulf War) and in a drawer in a dresser that is stuffed in the closet in my office I found my old Macintosh PowerBook 190cs along with the power supply… and the receipt.  I paid $1,499 for it at ComputerWare back in early 1996.

I remember having this laptop… the only laptop I have ever purchased for myself, since work has always seen fit to issue me one if they think I need one… but I didn’t know I still had it until I dug it up.

It was a curious model, straddling the 500 series and 5300 series of Apple PowerBooks.  It had the then new simpler design aesthetic (the 500 series looks like Batman’s laptop) but was powered by the 68040 processor rather than the PowerPC processors then entering the Macintosh model line.

It was the last 68K series laptop Apple produced, and the last 68K Mac I ever owned, putting it at the end of a long line that included the SE, Plus (to run my BBS at one point), SE/30, IIci, IIsi, Quadra 700, and Quadra 800.

I pulled this antique out of the drawer and set it up on my desk, uncertain if it even still worked more than 20 years after I purchased it.  I had to figure out how to turn it on.  It was part of the ADB era, when Apple put a power button on the keyboard with a symbol I had long since forgotten.  But when I figured it out, the speaker chimed and the unit spun up into life.

MacOS 7.5.2 – And Look at all that RAM!

The motherboard battery had faded years ago, so the time and date came up as midnight on January 1, 1904, the default day zero of the MacOS at that time.  I was a little concerned as to whether or not it would recognize 21st century dates, but it seemed to handle that.

Digging through the drive, I found some old apps.  There was a copy of Eudora, my favorite email app of old, probably full of notes to my girlfriend at the time, now my wife.  I used to write her emails while builds ran.  Now I just text her.

There was a copy of Claris Emailer, which I used to monitor the support account.  At a startup you have to do all the things.

There were all sorts of little utilities.  A copy of Microsoft Word 5.1a, the last good version of Word.  At that point it had achieved a fullness of features yet still fit on a 1.4MB floppy.

And in a folder titled “Games ƒ” I found… some games.  Old games.  Games from 20 years back.

Not a lot of games.  This was my work laptop after all.  But a few goodies in there that I didn’t think I still had around.  So I have something from that era to write about, old games played on era authentic hardware.

But first I want to get the PowerBook on the network so I can get some screen shots moved over.  The 190cs didn’t come with built-in Ethernet, but I had a Global Village PC Card that had both modem and Ethernet support.  However, that needed an external dongle (referred to as Clyde by the team that worked on it for reasons I do not recall) and I could not find the dongle.

But a packrat friend and former co-worker of mine had one and sent it to me. Now I just need to get it configured.  As it turns out, MacTCP from 1995 was pretty primitive.  There is, for example, no support for DHCP.  So far I’ve gotten to the point where the router sees the 190cs and has allocated it the IP address it asked for, but it cannot ping anything and cannot resolve any domain names.  Launching Netscape Navigator 4.04, the only browser installed on the unit, yields no web yet.

At least I have a bunch of network utilities in another folder.  20+ year old network utilities, but maybe they will tell me something.  We shall see.

Also found in the same drawer as the 190cs:

Recorded off the air, circa 1980

Maybe I’ll get to that later.  I do still own a car with a cassette deck.

Spring Movie League – Cats and Birds and Bruce

We are back for a new season of Fantasy Movie League, the Spring Season which, like spring training in baseball, is a warm up for the real event over the summer.

I’m sure my hastily mocked up seasonal logo will give somebody a brain aneurysm, but it is what I have.  You can email me something better if it is killing you.

While the spring season may pale a bit when compared to the monster releases of summer, there are still some big titles coming up in the next thirteen weeks.  Those include:

• A Wrinkle in Time
• Tomb Raider
• Pacific Rim Uprising
• Avengers: Infinity War

The next Star Wars story, Solo, isn’t coming until the Memorial Day opening of the summer blockbuster season, but there are some interesting items on the list beyond what I have there.  The dominance of Black Panther will fade, the Oscars will pass, and we’ll be knee deep in strange new films.

But that is all in the future.  We have to get through week one first, and the lineup looks like this.

 Black Panther (SAT)  $351
 Black Panther (SUN)  $263
 Black Panther (FRI)  $205
 Red Sparrow          $176
 Deathwish            $167
 Game Night           $97
 Peter Rabbit         $94
 Annihilation         $53
 Jumanji              $42
 Fifty Shades Freed   $30
 The Greatest Showman $25
 Every Day            $17
 Three Billboards     $17
 The 15:17 to Paris   $17
 The Shape of Water   $15

For a third week running Black Panther is expected to dominate to such an extent that it is once again divided up into individual days.  Obvious anchor is obvious.

Joining the list this week are Red Sparrow and Deathwish featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Bruce Willis respectively.

The remake of Deathwish hopes to revive the Charles Bronson classic.  However the original came from a time of chaos and perceived lawlessness where we wanted vigilantes like Paul Kersey and rogue cops like Harry Callaghan to set things right.  In the current moment of gun violence I’m not sure how well that will resonate.  But it is Bruce Willis and I’ll watch any crappy movie he shows up in.

Likewise, I’ll watch anything with Jennifer Lawrence in it… I’ll watch her sell mops… though for somewhat different reasons.  Also, she looks good with bangs.  Take that Zooey Deschanel!   Also anything that has a hint of a return to the cold war reality when we all accepted the Russians were up to no good works for me.

But will either do well enough to make them viable alternatives to even a single day Black Panther?  The pricing will tell I suppose.

And then there is the rest of the list, which are all too low priced to anchor alone.  Three Billboards, having won a few more awards, returns to the list in the run up to Oscars this coming weekend, but is down there in the cheap seats.  Meanwhile, to my ongoing surprise, Jumanji is still holding its own mid-pack.  I might have to go see this movie that will not fall from the list.

Anyway, I’m leaning towards Red Sparrow as an anchor, but that might not be coming from the logical part of my brain.

And, as a review for old hands and those new to the league, here is a list of sites and tool I’ve been known to haunt in search of box office forecasts.

• Moovee Picker (tool for calculating your FML picks with some estimates)
• Movie Calculator (roll your own estimates, but gives you more options)
• Po Huit’s Python Tool (if you want to get your picks from the command line)
• Box Office Mojo (has the theater counts by Thursday afternoon)
• Box Office Pro (pretty solid on forecats)
• Variety Film (comically bad at forecasts, but will tell you what the studio thinks)
• The Numbers (current and historical box office results)
• Deadline Box Office (go here on Friday morning for the Thursday night preview results)
• Box Office Report (more predictions)
• Box Office Guru (forecast column on Thursdays)
• Movie Web (when you want a forecast that looks different than the others)

Good luck in the coming season.

BB80 – Oh That Crazy CSM Thing!

This is where most people would list their myriad reasons they are running for CSM. Maybe they would write out long platform statements with some overarching narrative. Their dreams of how to make EVE great again.

I am not going to do any of those things because I don’t need your votes you terrible pubbies.

-Aryth for CSM 12 campaign forum post

You weren’t going to vote for Aryth anyway, were you?

Here we are at the latest Blog Banter, number 80 in the series, and this time around the topic is the CSM.  Specifically:

CCP Seagull ecourages you to get involved in CSM12 and put your name forward to be a Space-Politician. On his blog Neville Smit noted that CSM11 had done a good job with minimum of drama. However he said he’d not be covering CSM12 like he has in previous years as he sees no point. The power-blocs will vote on who they want and unless Steve Ronuken manages to get on CSM12 it is almost certainly going to have every seat taken by the big null-sec blocs.

Is Neville right? Is the CSM moving more and more into just a voice for 0.0? Is this a bad thing? Are the hi-sec, low-sec and WH players going to lose out badly or is it really not an issue as its the same game? Could a totally null-sec dominated CSM 12 give a balanced voice for everyone?

I get to quote Aryth, pick on Neville Smit, and complain about the CSM?  Trifecta!

Anyway, in my usual style, I am going to spew forth a bunch of text and I hope, somewhere at the far side, to reach a conclusion.  I think I know what it will be, but won’t be sure until I get there!  The CSM 12 election is coming soon, so lets ramble.

Look at that CONCORD police Captain trying to suppress the vote!

I will start with the fact that I think electing what is essentially a focus group by having the player base vote is pretty silly.  You want to select by competence and core knowledge, not popularity for this sort of position.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way.  If you go look at the CCP historical timeline (preserved here) you will see this tidbit for 2003.

The historical record of sorts from 2003

Yes, players were chosen by CCP.  That is the way things are generally done in the MMO domain when you want a focus group or player advisory board. (SOE, Blizz, and Turbine all did it that way.)  But five years into the game and one T20 scandal later, CCP decided that elections would… I don’t know really.  Transparency?  Here is what they said:

During their six-month term, delegates to the council will deliberate on issues of importance to the EVE community and work with representatives of CCP on the future evolution of EVE Online.

Oh yeah, and the terms were for six months back then… more elections… and there were nine members of the council and five alternates.

Anyway, an election gets popular people and not necessarily competent people on the CSM.

That, of course, leads us to who is really popular in New Eden.  There are a few people in the EVE Online population that have achieved space fame and who could thus get elected on their own.  To get there you usually have to take things out of game by starting a blog, running a news site, being particularly notable on Reddit, or by creating some sort of additional functionality for the game.  And that is no guarantee you will get the votes.  Riverini took a couple of shots, but his EN24 fame wasn’t enough.

For the most part though elections go to large, organized groups, and there are no larger nor more organized groups than the null sec blocs.  The nature of the game is that to survive and thrive and hold space in null sec you have to be organized.

I spent five years bopping around in high sec and was never in a corp that had more than a dozen people and probably didn’t know what an alliance really was.  That didn’t harm my play style at all.  In the back woods of Amarr space, far from Jita, life was peaceful.  The one and only time I was suicide ganked involved traveling from Jita to our little pocket in Amarr space via Niarja, which is the gank pipe.  I interacted with more EVE bloggers on their blogs out of game than I did with players in the game.

And then I moved to null sec and am currently in one of the small alliances in our coalition, having only ~1,600 members, while the senior partner is Goonswarm Federation with 24K members.  Yes, the member count is probably between half and two-thirds alts, but every paying account gets a vote.  So when an official ballot is put out for the coalition… which we mostly vote for, though Goon uniformity is largely a myth and candidates like Xenuria have been controversial on the official ballot… that provides a pretty strong base of votes.  The question is never about whether somebody from the ballot will get on the CSM but rather how many on the list will make it.

So if you’re not in null sec, how do you break into what is now the top 10 of votes?

It isn’t easy.  There have been various attempts to get a wider group or play style to back a candidate from, say, wormhole space or faction warfare.  That has worked a few times, but often there isn’t a clear choice as multiple candidates vie for the same demographic.

And if identify with a nebulous group like high sec, and your space blog is only getting 30 page views a day on average, and you are in competition with a ludicrous number of opponents (64 total candidates this year) for those coveted ten seats,  you don’t have many options.

You try to get on everybody’s review list or podcast and you promise to do things in the classic quid pro quo of politics.  You promise to represent this community or that community or several communities or all communities.  You promise to champion certain features or resist others.  If you’re really crazy, you promise to get CCP to do something.  You have to stand out, and just saying your knowledgeable isn’t enough.

I quoted Aryth at the top for a reason.  He doesn’t have to promise anything.  If you’re not in a null sec bloc, you’re running against somebody who doesn’t really need a campaign to win.  And he’ll get on the next CSM because he’ll be the top slot on the Imperium ballot and there is nothing you can post on Reddit to stop that.

Unfortunately, promises are a show of weakness, a sign of desperation to stand out.  When I first mentioned the elected CSM on this blog, back in April of 2008, I called it the Galactic Student Council.  Just like the student council back in high school, candidates can promise all sorts of thing, but in the end the school administration controls the situation and can ignore or veto the student council at will.  Likewise, the CSM serves at the pleasure of CCP and, as we have seen in the past, can be ignored with impunity.

To have any power on its own, the CSM has to bypass CCP and cause players to follow them rather than the company.  That has happened exactly once, after the Incarna expansion, and was an extraordinary set of circumstances the root causes of which people disagree with to this day. (But it wasn’t about the price of monocles, I guarantee you that.)

Sion Kumitomo tried to do this again, tried to take his issues out of school, during CSM 10.  However, he faced two problems.  Well, three problems.  The first was being in GSF, which sets some people against him automatically, but that was really the least of his problems and could have been overcome with the right issue.

The second problem was his communication style, which is long and ponderous, and I write this with a straight face as I pass the 1,200 word mark on this post without reaching my point.  I am good at burying the lede, and often do it deliberately just to see who is paying attention.  But when Sion writes, he doesn’t just bury the lede, he kills it, buries it in an unmarked grave deep in the forest, evades the detection of the authorities, and only gives up the location 40 years later on his death bed.  But that really wasn’t his biggest problem either.

No, his biggest problem was that he was attempting champion an issue about which almost nobody gave a shit about, the CSM.  The dirty not-really-a-secret of the CSM is that, judging by voter turn out, most people simply don’t know or don’t care about it.  I mean, if go back and read my Galactic Student Council post from 2008, you can see that I had missed a lot of what was going on, and I cared enough to write a blog post about it.

And CCP can talk about the election all it wants, encourage people to get involved, put info up on the launcher, post on Twitter and Facebook, and it isn’t going to change much.  Even the highest voted turnout ever for the CSM was still a depressingly small slice of the New Eden population.  Part of that people will mind their own business because they just want to log in after work and manage their PI or run a mission or see what their corp mates are up to, while the CSM is this thing that we only hear about when things go wrong.

And even if they do decide to vote, they haven’t been listening to the podcasts or reading candidate summaries or review… the alleged “EVE Media” and those who pay attention are a tiny part of the game… you load up that voting screen and see that grid array of 64 candidates, none of whom you have likely heard of (unless you saw the Xenuria ad running in stations, then you might remember him… he does have a memorable avatar) and what do you do?  How do you pick one candidate, much less ten, out of a list of random strangers whose avatars (aside from Xenuria’s) mostly blur together in a mass of plainness?

So barriers to an informed electorate are huge and the benefits are nebulous at best.  And after the train wreck that was CSM 10, I was predicting that the institution of the elected CSM might become more of a liability than CCP was willing to put up with.  The end seemed nigh.

And then CSM 11 happened.  CCP Guard and CCP Logibro took over the CCP side of the relationship with the group and met with the mostly null sec members of the newly elected CSM and got to work.  Everything was mostly quiet, there were no controversies, the meeting minutes seemed to indicate that people mostly got along and that it wasn’t a null sec plot to turn the whole game into their favored play style.  As noted way up at the top, even Neville Smit, who was out agitating for the alleged 85% with his Occupy New Eden plan seemed pleased enough to simply vote for any CSM 11 incumbent that ran again.

So what happened?

I think CCP finally “got” what the CSM ought to be and how to handle it.  They listened, they didn’t take every piece of advice offered, sometimes to their regret, but no members of CSM 11 are out there raging about how CCP dropped the ball by ignoring the CSM or how CCP claimed CSM approval around things that the CSM never really endorsed.  CCP didn’t screw up.

Meanwhile, the null sec blocs seemed to have burned through most of their prima donna candidates who just wanted to be on the CSM for a forum badge, an ego boost, and a free trip to Iceland and elected a group that seems to care about the overall health of the game.  Somebody like Aryth understands the essential symbiotic relationship that exists between null sec and high sec and knows he has to protect both for either to thrive.  And somebody like Xenuria is there to get you new shoes. (He needs to work on hats though.)

So even the skeptic in me, who has long derided the CSM, has to admit that things are pretty good with the institution right now, in part because CCP decided that the relationship was important, and in part because CCP still goes outside the CSM to get opinions.

Of course, it could all go to hell with CSM 12, but we’ll see.  Right now the CSM is about the best we can hope for given the various issues and limitations I have rambled about above, even if it clearly isn’t covering all voices.  But you’ve seen that “things to do in New Eden” chart.  How could you get all of that covered on a panel with only 10 seats.

So I suppose we should enjoy this happy period while it lasts.

Anyway, there are others who have picked up the topic as well who probably have more cogent points to make.  Find some of them here:

• Jack Jomar – Is CSM Worth it?
• I Care A Lot – A Voice for All Players?
• Neville Smit – A CSM for All?
• A Missioneer in EVE – Voices and wrappers
• Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah – Voices