CSM9 Report: Week Forty Five/Forty Six

  
Gonna cheat this week by doing this one final CSM9 Report covering the last two weeks on my tenure on CSM9. I would have written something up last week at Fanfest but, you know, Fanfest~. I had the most amazing week in Reyk and I’m now on the comedown and still physically exhausted as I write this.

CSMX

First thing to say is a huge congrats to both the incumbents on CSMX. I think it looks like a fantastic CSM personally and I am very excited to see what they achieve over the next 12 or 13 months. I took the time to personally congratulate all those from CSM9 who made it back on again (yes, all of them!), commiserate Gorski who like me didn’t make it in and shake hands with those standing down such as Mangala and Asayanami for a job well done. 1426800237379Secondly, I want it made very clear that I am gutted I didn’t make it back on. I knew my chances were more or less zero but still held out a sliver of hope. Alas it wasn’t to be, but I had already made my peace with the fact and didn’t let it affect what was a super-fun week in Iceland. My wife is over the moon, as is Niden here at CZ, because I now have a bit more time to spend with them as well as, you know, actually playing EVE Online. Couple of observations about the final 14 that made it in: – It’s very 0.0 friendly. Null clearly came out in force and are represented on the Council as such. Given what is likely to be an incredibly important year for nullsec, it is imperative we have people like Manny and Endie on there. That said, what with Corbexx defecting to GSF, that leaves by my count, five out of 14 people from outside 0.0 – a painfully low number. But ultimately, with STV, the Council will always represent those that went out to vote – The above point notwithstanding, CFC not getting a permanent seat is unbelievable and a massive shock. I can only presume CFC didn’t turn out proportionally as much as the rest of 0.0. Manny getting more #1s from throughout New Eden despite being in alliance with (according to Dotlan) 2316 members as opposed to the 40k+ of the CFC ballot is simply insane. – I can’t remember the exact final ballot numbers from Leeloo’s CSM presentation but it was ~38k as opposed to ~33k from the previous year. While a rise is clearly a good thing, I had hoped for a lot more. My presumption was based on the fact that the vastly increased number of applicants would somehow be proportional to the final vote. Not so much. Still, the downward slide has been stopped so hopefully CSMX build on that.

Fanfest Announcements

I’m not going to spend forever dissecting the details of new-sov. It’s been talked to death up until this point and nothing new with respect to the actual capture mechanics was raised at FF. The big reveal for Fanfest this year was a whole suite of new structures. I highly recommend familiarising yourself with CCP Ytterbium’s dev blog on the subject if you haven’t already. I can tell you that the initial response from myself and most of CSM9 on seeing this dev blog for the first time a couple of weeks ago was ‘holy shit ship this right fucking now’. The general vibe I got from Fanfest from speaking to people is that they wanted to speak more about the capture mechanic stuff as opposed to the structure stuff despite the latter being the new, ‘shiny’ stuff for Fanfest. I strongly suspect that’s because most people don’t have any issues with what was announced with respect to structures but there are still some concerns about capture mechanics. The good news is CCP are listening. Lots of words have been written about concerns with the various aspects of the technicalities of the Entosis system. One of the key ones appears to the be the concept of the of the vulnerability window, how long it should be and whether there should be any option to reinforce a structure outside of that window but perhaps at a slower rate. One of the key pieces of feedback CCP will use is a survey they are asking people to fill in. Please go and full this in and give CCP better information to refine the system. Those of you still asking about capitals, supers and titans in this new system – your concerns are valid and CCP made it clear at Fanfest that they will be getting a deserved top-down rework in due course. Keep feeding back, keep asking questions, and help CCP make the new sovereignty system the best it can be.

Final Thanks

I’m not gonna stretch this one out too much longer so here are some final thanks: – If you voted for me last year or this year, thank you. It means the world to me to think that you felt I could improve your EVE experience in some small way – To the rest of CSM9, thank you for being a group who challenged me, listened to my ideas, gave me plenty to think about and made EVE better than it was a year ago – To the devs who listened to my ideas, good or bad, thank you for your patience and dedication to the game. I thought I appreciated how much you all cared before I was on CSM – I was wrong. Your love for Eve is way above and beyond what I could ever have imagined – For those of you who mailed me, tweeted me, messaged me, replied to a forum post of mine or interacted in any real way with respect to CSM, thank you – To my wife, thanks for being understanding in what was an incredibly busy year for us. Couldn’t have done it without you! And with that, my CSM is more or less over. We have a week or two to get CSMX in the saddle but given there are six incumbents, I shouldn’t imagine there will be any huge issues there. Please give all the support to CSMX that you gave to CSM9 and ensure that it can be the best Council yet!
Tags: csm, csm9, CSMX, fanfest, sovereignty

About the author

Xander Phoena

The good looking, funny, intelligent member of the team, Xander set up Crossing Zebras with Jeg in April 2012 mainly because he was talking too much about Eve on his other podcast. Playing the game for almost five years, Xander still has absolutely zero clue about how to actually play Eve but somehow still manages to talk a good game.