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CSM Soelent: because Diplomatic incidents are just no fun any more!.
Well that being said I am a slight latecomer to the CSM runnings.. lots of rhetoric, lots of old arguments, lots of regurgitated facts about how life is living in nullsec, or high sec, or in between, is and how it should be fixed.... or what is broken and what is working just fine (usually for the person running for CSM i might add).
Loads of comments about how "i added loads of people to eve" probably most of whom just simply burned out after 2 weeks and never played again, but this is a bigger issue, these issues are ones that affect all of the regular accounts, old or new, that log onto eve, not just new players, not just null high sec, not just ratters or scanners...
Who am i? in game I am Soelent, I have played eve on and off for the last 10 years or so, i had an account back in the days of bob and was even involved in the beta at one stage but that email, and sadly that account, were lost a long long time ago (How upset i was at the fact that my piece of steve that i had from BOB era wars was devalued so greatly. I am also the only member of the CCP Guard Appreciation Society, but couldn't get anywhere to print his face on a TShirt for Eve_NT this weekend.
Outside of game? I am Mike. 30 year old science teacher in one of the most difficult areas of South Wales in the UK.
Eve for me is more than a game. First and foremost i log on to eve to socialise with my friends, and as i am sure you can all relate to, i end up spinning a ship whilst i am doing work for work or marking or otherwise being busy with other non-eve-related things.
The game has allowed me to build up solid, multinational, country friendships all over the world.
Most importantly the game allows me to Explode things, whether this is a rat, another player in PvP, an asteroid or isk from my wallet replacing the stupidly expensive ships i just warped into a gatecamp with, there is no other game that requires this level of skill, and/or planning at "my" point in the game, as with any others.
Why CSM
Well, i did ask myself this, and then when i thought about it and the conversations myself and alliance mates, and corp mates and friends had had it turns out that actually our ideas aren't to far different.
So why not. Why would any person NOT want to take the opportunity to contribute positively to a spectacular game that has so much more potential than it already has. I want to see eve fresh for the next 10 years.. its been going strong for over 10, why not another.
Without trying to sound arrogant or egotistical, I feel i am pretty good at sorting problems out and actually enjoy it. I have an inherent ability to look at a situation and see what is most often the simplest or most appropriate solution to it, I am good at it.
Combined with my passion for this game i think i would be pretty good at this and representing the interests and needs of the players
Of course I have my own personal ideas and agenda for the game which are probably shared with a lot of other players. Who wouldn't want it slightly different in some areas if asked? and i am sure people would all have their own way of doing things if they had creative control. BUT BUT BUT that is not what i feel being a CSM is about. Being a CSM is not about one's self, it's about representing my "people" (to be read corp, alliance and eve-mates in no particular order) for the best possible outcome for everybody after all pro's and con's of suggestions have been weighed and all affected parties accounted for.
One of the greatest challenges facing eve is New players. Not one CSM candidate, veteran, or even CCP dev can agree otherwise. I have been playing solidly (after i returned) for the last 3 years. i am competing with players who have 150+ million skillpoints and i feel the pain as a reasonably well equipped, well off and skilled pilot.
It is difficult for even veteran players to easily train into a different skillset, let alone a new pilot starting the game with no vision or idea of where to go.
they are 10 years behind. 100million skillpoints under and simply cannot compete in a lot of areas. This needs to be addressed.
My Ideas and suggestions - Well, when i say mine, i mean the ideas of the people whom i play eve with as much as my own.
I appreciate its not new players that will be voting in the CSM elections.. but Starting areas, Starting quests, and a return to the race, Bloodline and ancestry based bonuses i feel could be looked at.
Currently you start as a new player and are thrust into this astronomically complicated world as i mentioned above. Elite Dangerous has a lovely set of offline tutorials which would be so beneficial to new players in eve it cannot be ignored. You would get the game and spend the first 2 weeks or so playing through these tutorials, online of course, racking up skill points for rewards, learning the crafts and piloting skills and forming a solid basis in eve. the idea being that when you leave, you would be a freshly trained and knowlegable pilot with a little bit of isk, enough skills to be a viable character starting out wherever you may choose and enough knowledge of the game to be able to make reasonably informed decisions about where to go and what to do.
The skillpoints would not be allocatable until the completion of the tutorial (say a total of 5million or so if you played through the whole lot) and a set of cheaper implants. A small token of appreciation would be a ship of your choice (up to say, a T1 cruiser) with fittings of your choice to float you out into the universe.
Also, and in addition to that, a lot of pilots, including myself, trained some skills with no particular vision or direction and are, for the most part, completely useless (how many of you have a small tangent of trading skills or mining skills on your PVP pilot etc) We get a yearly reset of attributes. Why not a yearly reset of one or two skills to relinquish the skill points from said skills to be reallocated elsewhere as we see fit. - certain skills would be exempt from this, for example Combat ship skills,
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Station dockable supers - now dont get me wrong the station is a finite resource. But the ultimate end game in Eve is a supercarrier and titan for a lot of pilots. As soon as you get into one, that is effectively it for that pilot. you are locked in, Now, most are kept with holding toons, and/or on a specific "super" toon and require huge efforts on an alliance and sometimes individual scale to build, and then fly. They are the reserve of the rediculously rich, and/or the well catered for alliances.
Why not change the station mechanics slightly to allow a limited number of supers to dock on the outside of the station and become a feature of that station itself - Imagine a marina with 5 or 6 huge yachts docked up along side and then replace that image with a station with 5 or 6 supers It serves a number of purposes. the first, it allows people to utilise super toons outside of actually flying the super, and second it would serve to spread a corp or alliances supers out around sovereignty within eve.
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Interceptors and frigates vs battleships? A lot of my corp, alliance and people chat to generally feel this needs a bit of a rebalance. Lets put this into perspective, I LOVE flying my interceptor, and frigates around, but if i, and a group of friends were running around as soldiers in real life, and came upon a tank (i.e. battleship) and pull out their pistols it isn't even going to scratch the armour let alone blow the thing up.
There is no reason an interceptor, frigate or otherwise shouldn't be able to pin that battleship down.. none at all that i can see, even start to eat away at the shields but considering the battleships would have shield generators the size of half the fleet it should be near impossible for something that small to explode it. That's what cruisers and destroyers and battle-cruisers are for.
Now, the simplest approach we came up with was having a damage modifier on weapon size vs sig radius. Ie, if you are shooting a battleship with a frigate size weapon it will reduce the damage accordingly
There will of course be much more to follow.. I can always be reached in game if i am on just chuck me a question. If you want to mail me thats great too, or just post in this here topic and i will reply ASAP.