Time flies when you are in the CSM, so do Skype channels, emails, forums, meetings with CCP, tweeting and other ways of communication evolving around a voluntary part time job, which has the tendency to suck you in full time. However I do still like to actually play the game I love so much, fly my fleets for Providence and my alliance. I am excited about Eversterdam, where Dierdra Vaal has asked me to do a presentation about CSM and to talk about myself, hopefully visitors will find it entertaining. You can find the trailer here:
and the website here: http://evesterdam.com/ where you can find more info and tickets, hopefully we will all share a beer on the 4th of October in Amsterdam! Good luck too Dierdra with the organising. Last year was great fun, this year will be even bigger and even better!
At the time of this writing there is a lot of heat on Somer Blink for the alleged illicit activities going on but let me assure you that CCP and the CSM are working on this together however due to the NDA I am going to say “no comment” for now. You should stay updated on the forum posts on the official forums and post what you feel should be done about the situation. Alternatively you can follow me on twitter @corebloodbro
A few short months ago I was elected with a lot of single votes, to the surprise of many outside, Providence voted united and in big numbers. Looking back now and chatting with some people, it’s not all that surprising. People wanted to channel their voice, they trusted me with their vote and cared enough about Eve and our beliefs that they actually hit the vote button. Providence had no interest in strategically voting for other candidates and with no other Providence candidate this year we channeled ourselves into voting for 1 selected candidate.
NRDS involves giving access to a large variety of people to null sec for a large range of activities, I am extremely proud that we managed to open up Planetary Interaction for people outside of holder alliance status in the upcoming patch. It was high on the list of priorities to my voters and i’m happy that i found a willing ear. I found it funny that some people from CCP assumed it was accessible already ☺. Also high on the list was standings slot numbers, unfortunately no change there yet. A lot of the upcoming stuff is as always NDA, but as CCP seagull announced on Reddit: there are changes coming to null sec sometime in the future http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/
CSM is involved in more stuff then I had previously thought. The changes with the freighters, low-slots & rigs were all part of a lot of team-work between CCP and the CSM, and in the Cirus release there were some excel/number-crunching by some CSM members which left me baffled. I am not an indy person but i have a lot of respect to the CSM colleagues who went into so much effort and got into so much detail to deliver the balance that was released so successfully however there is no doubt that future tweaking will be needed.
Lately on a lot of Eve news sites there have been a stream of proposals about how to fix and revitalise null-sec. Personally I feel SOV should reflect use, thus I am an advocate of a change of mechanisms that favour use as one of the means to get SOV, where a lack of use could ultimately lead to sovereignty falling back into the hands of NPCs or simply becoming unclaimed. Rising levels of player activity should make a system increasingly valuable. For me sovereignty and power projection are connected but 2 distinctly tackled subjects. No nerf to supers would change the sovereignty landscape in a way that it would become content driven. If u delete all the supers, all that would happen is capitals such as archons would take over that role, and the focus would shift even more to numbers. I dream of small entities harassing and taking sovereignty on their own with localised activity tied into the Cirus changes to industry to drive null-sec forward versus the current lack of anything.
When I started on the CSM I had this image of CCP and CSM being 2 separate entities but I could not have been more wrong. The dedication from CCP and the trust they have in CSM, the amount of time and work they put in is crazy. It’s normal to have a Skype chat with a CCP dude on Sunday evening and hear a “ok, gonna fix that tomorrow”. Unfortunately with real life I cannot make all the meetings however we get Skype recordings which help keep up to speed. Personally I find it still hard to “pick” a field that fits the expertise and interest I had this is because each field has players in our community (Providence), to which I care so deeply about. Waking up to a exploded Skype is normal and it’s a lot of fun but can also sometimes be very serious. As with the lay offs within CCP earlier this year, we get an insight into the impact of such events on the CCP employees we work with.
I get approached a lot by people with complaints but mostly by, beautiful and sometimes crazy ideas for Eve and its future and better yet, these ideas come from all parts of Eve’s player-base. Some of them match initiatives and developing ideas within CCP and the CSM, some are weird and some even funny. We try not to make promises we cannot keep so I try to at least be honest and communicate with the people who approach me which has allowed me to meet some interesting people and make some new friends. If you would of asked me before I ran for CSM9 if I would do CSM10 I would of said, I dunno, not even halfway in I can say but if everything permits and my voter-base supports me still then hell yeah!
Keep it up, convoy me, meet me in Amsterdam 4th October, go to forums,follow me on twitter @corebloodbro
And most importantly try to enjoy EVE as much as I do!
