Kalbuir Skirate
Country: Netherlands
Character Created: 2013/11/29
Corp/Alliance: Pandemic Horde Inc./Pandemic Horde
Reddit: DefianceKal
Twitter: @KalbuirGaming
Eve-Who: Link
Eve Forum Posts: Link
zKillboard: Link
Ballot Statement
At Pandemic Horde my focus is on our new player experience. What this means is that I spend all my free time helping new players. I want to broaden those activities to the rest of EVE through the CSM. 2017 is an important year for the NPE and I want to do everything possible to contribute.
My passions are online communities, technology and online games. I believe in the concept of the CSM as it contributes significantly to making the gap between players and developers smaller which is important for a game like EVE.
However all of this stands and falls with having the right CSM members with the time, intellect and motivation for the job. I believe I can be one of the CSM members that has a positive effect on the game and provide something that I already offer my alliance, a funnel for feedback regarding new players.
I can confidently say that I’m one of the few people in EVE that experiences the struggles of new players and works towards improving them daily.
I don’t have the delusion that I alone hold the answers on how to fix EVE’s NPE. A CSM member is only as good as the people he is willing to listen to. I want to broaden my horizon by not just focusing on Horde’s NPE but look at the bigger picture together with anyone willing to contribute to it.
Heya Folks,
I’m Robin, my character name is Kalbuir Skirate and I’m hoping to become part of the CSM this year. In this post I will introduce myself, and explain my platform, credentials, passion, and focus.
Intro
I’m a director at Pandemic Horde, where my focus is on our new player experience and our tooling & analyses (Square).
What this means is that I spend all my free time helping new players in various ways:
- I founded and actually run the NewBean Initiative (NBI) which is our “new player” helpers group within Pandemic Horde. A collection of super useful people who spend all their free time helping new players.
- I've worked hard to find ways to improve Horde for new players, in shape of our flight schools, classes, centralizing information and ways to distribute ISK towards new players.
- I’ve discovered ways that enable us to help more people, faster, and more efficiently. This focus is the only reason we were able to cope successfully with huge influx of new players during WWB and Ascension patch. To put it into perspective we handed out 10,000 ships and 50,000 skillbooks In the first two week of the patch.
- I collect and process feedback on Horde specifically as a means to improve our alliance.
- I run all the industry for the ships that gets handed out to new players.
- Finally, helping new players in-game (duh).
It might not look like it but much of this collides with our tooling and analyses. This allows us to gauge if changes we make have any effect on metrics. We also automate a lot of mundane tasks through the EVE API which allows us to spend more time on stuff that is important rather than tasks that just needs to be done.
I’m not going to talk too much about tooling as this is not why I'm running for CSM. For me EVE’s API’s, analyses and tools are a means to free up as many useful people so they can do what they truly enjoy: Help New Players.
Why the CSM
I’ve had an interest in the game industry, online games and online communities for much of my life. If we go back about 15 years, it wasn’t uncommon at all for a game company to have a council of players, class leads or community representatives. Skip forward and to my knowledge CCP remains one of the only companies that upholds this practise to a high level.
I believe in this concept and have a huge passion for online communities which for EVE the CSM is a vital part of. While it is a lot of work both for CCP and the players involved, it is my opinion that this collaboration contributes significantly to making the gap between players and developers smaller.
However all of this stands and falls with having the right CSM members with the time, intellect and motivation for the job. I think after 2015’s CSM a lot of us were starting to wonder if all the effort and time put in was worth it.
I can confidently say that 2016’s CSM proved to us that they can be useful and contribute to EVE’s developments cycle in a meaningful way. For 2017 it’s important we continue this trend and elect competent CSM members.
I believe I can be one of the CSM members that has a positive effect on the game and provide something that I already offer my alliance, a funnel for feedback regarding new players. Much of the analyses and ideas in Horde are things that we can only take so far without running into game limitations.
My hope is that by broadening that scope of feedback to all of EVE’s players we can work towards solving some of these issues or at the very least get them on the agenda to be discussed.
Importance of CSM this year
After phase 1 of the NPE last year, 2017 is going to be a very important year for the success EVE has with new players and potentially the future success of EVE. From what I heard at EVE Vegas, Phase 2 and 3 of the NPE are going to completely change how new players learn the many aspects of EVE. While I’m very excited about this new direction, I also feel strongly that CCP needs all the help it can get to get it just right. I will say it again for emphasis: CCP needs all the help it can get to get it just right.
You could argue that running for CSM with a voting platform that almost solely runs on new players is a waste of everyone's time. Many old players (cough BitterVets cough) don’t care about new players, and many new players don’t know about the CSM - well let's change that!
The real kicker however is that we should all care. If EVE is to exist for another 13 years. The NPE that both the EVE community and CCP provide go hand in hand with retaining more players. EVE’s biggest issue isn’t pulling in new players; the issue is holding on to them and introducing them to enough core features that will get them hooked and in love with the game as we all are.
In my opinion one of the biggest struggles of explaining EVE is that both CCP and the community have been playing this game for so long that there is so much knowledge that is implied and accepted to be common knowledge that it gets skipped over when trying to retain or explain things to new players. Luckily team Genesis has been taking a good hard look at that and is definitely on the right track.
If we look at the last 2 years CCP has been on the right track in my opinion with Ascension. However, beyond that we have the smaller changes such as the adjustment of starting skills, Inject All Skillbooks feature, multi buy, multi-fit and Skillpoint injectors that allow new players to customize their character a lot better than the character bazaar offers. There is a lot left to be done and I wish that there was more room for smaller changes like those mentioned above that would do a lot of good for the quality of life of new players.
I want to contribute to the NPE as much as I can and feel it's something every player in EVE should at least slightly care about. Attracting new players to EVE keeps the game going, creates more content and most importantly fills up the galaxy.
I'm not running based on an idea that I'm single-handedly going to save EVE or make EVE’s meta great. I think it’s rather delusional that you’re going to achieve that as a CSM member. Your role isn’t to be a game designer but a player with an opinion and the ability to funnel other players feedback.
Instead, I'm running based on something I am confident in, have expertise in and care deeply about. I already spend all of my free time on the NPE, with a lot of enthusiasm and joy, adding a CSM perspective to would be another great motivator and something I would do with a lot of satisfaction.
The key to the CSM in my opinion is this: the ability to deliver proper feedback, able to keep an open mind about changes, but most importantly remember that you’re not there for yourself but for the community. Meaning that staying in touch and true to the community that is key.
My Expertise
In two words my expertise and value to the CSM are NPE and Tooling
NPE
I can confidently say that I’m one of the few people in EVE that experiences the struggles of new players and works towards improving them daily.
In the nearly 2 years that I’ve been trying to improve Horde’s NPE, Horde has been improving bit by bit, tweaking and streamlining things to affect our retention and success of explaining EVE. We’ve come a long way but at the same time I feel I could quit my job spend 112 hours a week on improving Horde and still have a lot to do.
There is plenty of overlap between new players struggling in Horde and in EVE in general; such as the UI, what is and isn’t explained, reliable ways to make ISK and how they are taught (or aren’t). However there is also a lot of differences, for one thing EVE’s new player experience in Nullsec is entirely different from the experience in Wormhole space, Lowsec and Highsec.
I don’t have the delusion that I have the answers on how to fix EVE’s NPE for all these playstyles. A CSM member is only as good as the people he is willing to listen to. I’m willing to listen to everyone who can take the time to phrase his ideas and constructive criticism properly. I want to broaden my horizon by not just focusing on Horde’s NPE but look at the bigger picture together with anyone willing to contribute to it.
If going to Fanfest, Eve Vegas and other fan gatherings has taught me anything, it's that there are a lot of smart and passionate people in EVE’s community. All of which love to talk about their space hobby (or job :) ). I enjoy listening to those people more than learning about new features or announcements, because that isn’t what fan gatherings are about. In my opinion they are about making new friends, meeting existing ones and sharing a hobby.
I want to listen to as many of you as possible and have some ideas on how to do this effectively if I am fortunate enough to become CSM member.
Tooling
As for tooling, being a middleware consultant and full stack developer in real life I am someone that looks at data as a valuable asset that supplements a process, the process in Horde’s case is turning a new player to a long term EVE player.
EVE has such a wide range of publicly and privately data available that it becomes an awesome repository for analyses and tooling. Horde uses much of this data to save valuable time and help new players.
This is something I could write a long article about but I’ll do that another time, a quick TLDR impression you could obtain from the screenshots below.
Having spent almost 2 years integrating data and tooling for Horde I can confidently say I have a firm grasp of the various API’s EVE offers(CREST / XML API / ESI) as well as the limitations and potential growth it could make.
Thank you for considering me as your CSM member and please feel free to ask me any questions. I look forward to answering them.
Regards,
Kalbuir Skirate
Robin