Do The Hokey Pokey

Sorry for the lame title of this post, but I thought I should make it something entertaining rather than boring. If you have no idea what it’s a reference to, check here

Anyway, back to the serious stuff.

I’m Omber Zombie aka Oz, or El Presidente Gallente to some. I’m running for a CSM position, ideally for the Chairperson position. I figure I may as well aim high. Some of you may know of me, I’m guessing most probably don’t. This thread isn’t really going to help give you a backstory on my life in eve, you can check my blog for more of that, but suffice to say, I’ve been here a long time and done a lot of various things and I think (and I hope you will think too) that I am the man for the job.

As you may, or may not, have noticed, I’m running under the campaign of ‘No major political leanings, happy to listen to everyone (even the conspiracy theorists)’ A lot of people seem to have issues with people saying they aren’t biased and neutral about things. I can understand that concern as everyone has some form of bias, it’s an inherent nature of us being human. So, I thought I would try and clarify my position and thoughts on the CSM in general with this wordy and lengthy post. I’ll try and keep it below Jade™ length, but it probably won’t be.

1. What is the CSM?
To me, the CSM is about distilling the communities fears, desires and angst down to key issues and changes to be presented to CCP by a council of democratically elected peers. Its’ mandate is to pass on community desires (or at least the 5% who voted agreeing with the issue) not debate their own pet projects.

2. Who should you vote for?
The obvious answer is me of course :p But, that comes with a caveat. Don’t vote for me if you don’t think I can represent the community as a whole. To me a candidate should be able to argue for or against any topic raised at the CSM meetings. They need to be informed, experienced, and to be able to critically analyse the topics raised. They need to love eve for what eve is, and what it could be. If you see that in a candidate, but don’t agree with their position to a specific topic, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t vote for them. Vote for their ability to argue a case, for or against.

3. What power will the CSM members actually wield?
A lot of people have written the CSM off as pre-nerfed or toothless. Others have stated that it’s just a free trip to Iceland for a bunch of celebrities. They are wrong. How’s that for a stance?
Now, let me clarify - you, the players of eve, are voting 14 people to represent you to CCP. There’s a lot of responsibility there, both from the community at large for electing the ‘right’ people for the job, and for the people that do get elected in representing the community faithfully. Of course at any point CCP can just veto an idea, but this will be the first time that they have to give a reason for that veto. What about the NDA I hear some people ask - well, unless CCP want to make a complete mockery of themselves not just to us, but to the general public, I’m guessing there is going to be very little they won’t be able to elaborate on for fear of turning the CSM into a pure publicity stunt that will horribly backfire. I guess I’m optimistic on that one.

now that I have that out of the way…

4. Why doesn’t Oz have a pet topic?
I do, but it’s the CSM itself. I have some severe issues with it’s current structure that I want changed. The details are as follows:

a. The voting system is flawed. The current structure doesn’t allow people to weight their voting. For instance, I like Hardin, I would vote for him, but as I only have a single vote, I’ll be voting for me. If the voting system was changed to a preferential system (specifically A Borda Count you would see a more balanced vote across the community rather than specific power blocks voting in their candidates. Then there is the tied vote issues, or the lack of votes issues under the current system. What happens if 3 people all get 5000 votes - are they all the chairman? What if only 8 people get votes, the rest 0 - how do you get the other 6 members of the council?

b. The chairman should be selected by the council, not by the person who gets the most votes in a general vote. You elected the council to represent you as a combined unit, yet they cannot even select their own chairperson?

c. 2 weeks of voting - can we change our votes over the two weeks? What if I decided to vote for someone on day 1 of the vote casting period, and that candidate drops out- is our vote now null? What if I change my mind? This either needs to be changed to allow us to change our votes up until the last second, or we are given a single weekend to cast votes. As most people know, 2 weeks is a long time in eve.

d. The lack of a CSM campaign forum. At the moment, players are being forced to create out of game websites, threads to collate other threads and generally, spamming of the eve general forums. A CSM forum was promised, but how hard is it to implement a single forum to the actual campaign, where all the campaign threads can be kept and people can go to look at all the information without having to resort to searching through the forums needlessly?

and that leads on to…

e. “A dedicated electronic forum will be provided for voters to formally present
issues to CSM Representatives. Because this is a “gathering place” where topics
deemed important to society are heard and acted upon by democratically elected
Representatives, moderators must be present to keep discussions civilized,
ordered, relevant, and lawful.”
Who is doing the moderating? Are you giving CSM members the power to moderate that section of the forum, or are you limiting their power by having CCP employees moderate a section of the forum that should be open to any and all ideas? Who decides what is relevent and not relevent? Wouldn’t having CCP moderators in this section mean that they are removing this community based decision making from the community?

f. “A meeting is not considered valid unless seven council members—in any combination
of Alternatives and Representatives—are present.”
Does this mean you can have a meeting without both the Chairman and Vice-Chairman? Hell, you could have a meeting witout both of those and both the secretary and vice secretary too. What kind of a minimal requirement is that? My suggestion is that a meeting would not be valid unless one of the Chairman or Vice-chairman is present along with at least one of the secretary or vice-secretary.

g. “The time limit of seven days applies to both Representatives and voters, meaning that a Representative cannot bring a topic up at a Council meeting without having it go through deliberation on the public forum. A 5% voter support is however not required for a Representative to bring up a topic to the Council.”
Wait a second, so a topic can’t be brought up at a council meeting uless 5% of the population vote for it to be brought up, unless of course a representitive wants to? Why bother having the vote at all?

h.“After each CSM member presents their opinion to support or disprove a motion, the matter is brought to vote; a majority rule passes the issue for escalation.”
Again we have an issue here - the ‘minimum’ requirement for a meeting was 7 members, what if 8 turn up and there is a tied vote? Does the chairman get the deciding vote? Or the vice-chair if he’s not present? What if neither are present? What’s the order of precedent here?

~~

I think that about sums up my issues for now. Again, I apologise for the length, but this is my pet ‘issue’ and I would love to see some feedback on it from everyone as my goal is to get this CSM to work whether I am elected to the council or not.

cheers,
Oz

Application Confirmed

I got an email today from CCP Xhagen confirming my application for candidacy in the CSM. \o/ More infor was given, but will be posted to the general public today/tomorrow.

oz

Mertannia from Caldari Navy Ibis: Noob Adventures has some questions too

Mertannia has a blog and has set out some open questions for candidates to answer

Who are you and what do you primarily do in EVE?
I’m Omber Zombie, and at the moment I market trade and run missions in empire. In the past I have been a pirate (as a member of m0o), an alliance landholder (member of Fountain Alliance and The Big Blue), producer (I’m pretty sure I built the first apoc in eve, it may have been the second), roleplaying an anti-mining evangelist (The Jovian Strain & Jericho Fraction), eve newbie helper (Eve University), stockbroker (Eve Galactic Stock Exchange) and generally trying out everything there is to do in eve.

Can you give an example, either from real life, from EVE or from another MMO of when you’ve had to remain objective in an issue that negatively affects you or someone close to you?
How did you react to that situation? Is there anything you feel you could have done better, now that you have the benefit of hindsight?
I don’t have a specific example as I get that on a daily basis at work. I’m the boss, I like all of my staff, sometimes I need them to do things they really don’t like, but they need to be done. Sometimes I do things that need to be done even though I know it’s going to hurt someone (emotionally not physically) as that is what is needed to keep the business running. Objectivity is required to keep a business stable.
As a pure example, imagine you were in Alliance A and a proposed change in game mechanics would be beneficial to your corp and allies but disadvantageous to your enemies, Alliance B who happen to outnumber you 3:1 in membership. How would you disasociate yourself from the pressures you might feel and ensure you are giving fair and unbiased representation of the player-base? How easy is it to put personal feelings aside?
Honestly I don’t understand how you can possibly make a change that only effects single entities in eve. Any change effects everyone equally. My allies in eve are the players, I won’t choose to vote for something that I think may negatively impact their play for the sake of the game company earning an extra 1cent a month. Personal feelings will always be there, we’re all human, but objectivity and a realistic outlook help to make those choices.

As a delegate to the CSM, what expectation of privacy and anonymity do you have? Using the example above, even the announcement of a unanimous vote without specifics could still cause Alliance A members to feel resentment toward you if they became aware that you had voted for an issue that ultimately benefitted your enemies in-game. How would you deal with potential backlash from friends and allies if you vote against what they believe is right?
Well, CCP have already announced that they will be telling people our names. So I expect a few people to send some spam my way as I will not be anonymous but hopefully people are mature enough to udnerstand that the CSM delegates are working for them and making their life harder doesn’t help their cause. As for friends resenting me - I hope that the CSM decisions will be made with full explanations rather than just final outcomes so that people can see the reasoning behind what was voted for. If there are issues after that, I’m always happy to talk to people and listen to their concerns and try to explain the decisions in more detail.

Again using the example above, what would you do if you suspected that a fellow councillor was abusing their position to try and manipulate decisions to their benefit, how would you address that issue and what do you feel you would need to be cautious of when doing so?
If I honestly thought they were trying to do that, I would confront them privately about it and hopefully resolve the situation. If that doesn’t work, report it to CCP. Final straw would be to make the issue public. The reasoning behind those steps is simply because I like to give people a chance to stop doing stupid things,  if they ignore that chance then I am happy to report them to the people in charge (in this case CCP). If CCP considers this a community problem, then it would go to the community.

However, I highly doubt you will find members of the CSM acting in this way.

I’m aware that you probably haven’t had the opportunity to gather feedback at this stage, but if you were to pick three topics right now that you feel genuinely warranted being brought to CCP’s attention, what would they be and why?
Well, assuming both lag and isk selling/farming are well known to CCP and being worked on, I’d suggest the following:

Suicide attacks and the profitability of it. this is something that does need looking at as while nowhere should be considered safe, there seems  to be a lack of genuine reprisal for suicide attacks.

Another topic closer to my heart is more to do with the functionality (or lack of functionality) of the market interface. For a game that is boasting about it’s own economist and people researching it’s economy, the market interface is woefully inadequate and needs some serious improvement.

I’d also like to take a look at POS mechanics as they seem to be a bit unwieldy and could be designed for far more diverse purposes and help solve a few issues with resource gathering, system control, and general functionality.

While we’re talking about feedback, is there any primary medium you believe you will use for gathering it?
The primary medium will obviously be the eve forums and specifically the CSM forum which is going to be set up soon™ However, I see no issue with the CSM having it’s own website set up and running  to gather and distribute information.

When reading EVE General Discussion to look for pertinent issues for the community, what one criterion would you feel was the absolute most important in deciding whether something is worthy of further discussion or not? Why?
The one critereon is obviously that the suggested change has reasonable backup as part of it’s description. There’s no point making a post saying “I want to give a deimos an extra turret” and leaving it at that. If you can show how it won’t unbalance the game, be balanced towards the rest of the ships in it’s class, and basically show some thought behind it, I’m willing to look at it. Well reasoned suggestions is what I’m getting at here.

Do you believe the CSM’s role is to be exclusively about in-game issues (or those which affect in-game issues such as abuse of Dev powers) or do you think there will be some effect on the community side of EVE such as, for example, EVE TV, Alliance Tournaments, Fan Fest, etc?
The CSM is supposed to exist as a filter for community views, issues, and suggestions from the community and to communicate the ones it feels are most important and/or necessary to CCP. As such, the community side of eve (tourneys, eve tv, etc.) would in theory come under the jurisdiction of the CSM, but in practical application I don’t see the CSM being a useful tool for thosetype of things as the CSM would only be meeting infrequently (3 times per term) and as those activities tend to iccur in the short term, and suggestions/changes put forward by the CSM would come in after the fact. It’s definitely something worth thinking about.

Please sum up the key messages of your candidacy in 100 words or less.
To put it simply - I have the community experience I think is needed to help mould the CSM into something that can act as a tool for the community. I’m not going to say i’m completely unbiased, but I will try to be. I don’t consider myself to be representing anyone other than eve players as a whole, solely for the benefit of all of our playing experience.

 Anything else you’d like to add?
This may be a little weird, but I think a lot of people don’t really understand what the CSM is. The CSM members will not have the ability to make wholesale changes to the game, they are not devs. The CSM exists simply to help act as the sharp point of the stick when it comes to community views, concerns and suggestions. People really do need to read the CSM documents published by CCP (and Xhagen) and understand that.

Interview for Evemag

Ikki Phoenix from Evemag asked me to answer some questions for his next issue - I thought I may as well make it a public Q&A

1.Please introduce your eve character.
Hi, I’m Omber Zombie, most people call me Oz as it’s easier. I’ve been around eve since a couple of weeks after it launched (I had a different character name in beta). I’m Gallente, Industry/Miner/Prospectors path, current Security rating of 4.98 and I tend to live in Everyshore.

I can usually be found flying a Dominix (Madame Spank) or a Guardian-Vexor (Oooh Shiney) and tend to spend my time market trading and mission running in empire. I take the occasional road trip to pve in 0.0

 2.Please introduce your “true” self (real life).
In RL my name is Jeremy (most people call me J), I’m 29 and run a jazz club in Melbourne, Australia. I have a double degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering and a Diploma IV in Network Systems Administration. As you can tell, I don’t really use my qualifications much in my daily job

I like pretty much all styles of music,  but tend to not listen to much Rap or Death Metal. I’m not a huge fan of Dixieland and Country either. I’m also the manager of a indie band called The Conglomerate

My favourite movie is ET: The Extra Terrestrial,  I was a big fan of Babylon 5, and am slowly getting converted into the new series of Battlestar Galactica.

My favourite book is Through the Looking Glass (Alice in Wonderland), and the last book I read was the last book of the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson (The System of the World)

3.Why are you interested in serving in the Council of Stellar Management?
I’m always interested in helping Eve evolve into something greater, it’s one of those games that everyone pretty much sums up as “It’s great, but it has so much potential to be better” - I want to help it someway down that path. If it means allowing the devs to concentrate on what they do best while the CSM filters out the better community ideas from the general spam, I think that will go a long way. I think I’m capable of doing that, I want to do that, here’s my chance.

A lot of people are already calling the CSM toothless or a waste of time, I can see where they are coming from, but I’m also optimistic about what the CSM can become, and that’s why I want to be part of the first CSM - to help mould it into something worthwhile (and possibly give it some sharp teeth)

4.What qualifications do you have to serve in the Council of Stellar Management? Please include in those qualifications any gaming experiences. If you have previously worked for gaming companies, please explain how has that shaped your player experience.
I’ve never worked for a gaming company before, but I have been a part of eve’s volunteer department. I was a member of Aurora (events) for a short time and unfortunately I decided it wasn’t for me as timezone issues forced me to miss out on too many events. As mentioned above, I have also been playing eve since beta and watched it evolve into the game it currently is, so while my insight into the game progress isn’t unique, it is starting to get rare as most of the old-timers leave the game. I think I can bring both that sense of history and and an understanding of the game’s path to the CSM.

5.Throughout Eve’s existence, the common word used to describe Eve has been complex and that has sometimes pushed potential new players way.
Would you please explain what steps(if any), you would recommend to CCP in order to grow the player base and attract more new players?
I think CCP and the community are doing quite well in attracting new players to the game, I think the issue here is more keeping those players playing the game. I think Eve being complex is a good thing, people get bored of simple and need challenging. I think making eve less complex would actually hurt the game rather than help it. Keeping players on the other hand does require a bit of effort. ISD STAR do great work welcoming people to the game, but I think getting players involved in the community through asking for corporations to volunteer to adopt new players would help a lot. There doesn’t need to be a huge reward for that, but some reward (like free office rentals for adoption corps) would help newer players adapt to the game faster. Eve’s best resource is it’s players, they should be utilised to help keep new players in the game.

Another thing CCP could do is finally implement the wiki that they have been promising for a long time. The sooner people can get access to up to date information about the game, the better off everyone will be.

6.In the recent past, there has been a few scandals involving CCP employees and CCP has seen players confidence diminish. What steps would you advise for CCP to take, in order to restore the community’s trust?
Unfortunately trust is a one time thing. Once broken, it can never truly be gained back. That said, I think CCP bringing in an Internal Affairs department has helped restore some of the confidence in them. Time is the only thing that will help that trust get repaired, as long as no more incidents occur, I think CCP will be fine.

7.One of the major issues in Eve is isk farmers/buyers/sellers. As a member of the CSM, what steps would you take to try and resolve this major issue?
Well, as I’m not a dev, very little. Obviously CCP are taking isk farmers/sellers seriously, the introductionof GTC for isk has helped devalue isk for people to sell and the planned introduction of all asteroid belts being non-static should help stop the farming aspect.

8.Eve is divided into 3 parts: high sec,low sec and 0.0 .As you have probably read on the official forums, many high sec pilots are worried that the CSM members will work on balancing the game toward low sec and 0.0 .Could you please elaborate on your position regarding Empire and low sec/0.0 .What would you like to say to Empire pilots to reassure them.
There is no real divide other than in the players minds. All 3 areas are neccessary to everyday eve life as they are intertwined poltically, economically, logistically and ‘physically’. Trying to give one of the areas more ‘balance’ while ignoring the other 2 is quite simply, impossible. Changing anything in eve effects everywhere so people really shouldn’t be worried about the CSM balancing things out to a specific living space. Hell, I doubt CCP would allow the CSM to make game breaking changes anyway.

9.In your opinion, what is the most important issue facing Eve Online? How do you propose to fix or try to fix that issue
Lag is obviously the most important issue, but as I’m not a dev, I can’t fix that. Helping balance out the ships/modules based on community input would be my biggest issue. Players can provide far more testing than the devs and QA ever can in the game. Players try things that devs never even considered as options. Using that player experience, the CSM can bring those balance issues to the devs and finally sort out this constant nerf/boost time wasting and allow the devs to start concentrating on implementing some of the things they have on the drawing boards like factional warfare and planetary habitiation.

Hello citizen!

Welcome to my blog/website for the CSM 08 elections. Here you should be able to find anything you need to know about me, and if not, ask some questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

cheers,
Oz

Verone asked some questions, here are some answers

What do you feel the CSM should be, in respect of it’s intended role and how it interacts directly with CCP?

Based on the documents released, to me the CSM is about a group of players elected by the rest of the community dealing directly with CCP about concerns, issues, and suggestions from the player base rather than the devs having to spend hours trawling the forums trying to understand what everyone wants. Through the filtering of the CSM panel, the most relevant and requested topics will be focussed into a proper discussion and CCP can then look at those issues and either deal with them or not, and if not, explain why.

What do you feel are the types of concern and idea that should be brought to the CSM to relay to CCP? Potential Exploits? Game Changes? Content Ideas? Concerns for Internal Affairs? It’s your choice.

If anything has enough people concerned, no matter what type of concern it is (as long as it is game related) then the CSM should look at it. There should be no limit, other than common sense.

How much power do you think the CSM should have, with regards to being able to audit what CCP do on a day to day basis, as was originally proposed when the CSM was first announced as a work in progress?
Moreover, there’s a lot of concern about “yes men”, and the CSM not being able to look at certain aspects of how CCP works.

The CSM should have no power other than mentioned above. They discuss what are the most relevant concerns and suggestions based on how many people are affected and present those issues to CCP. Asking delegates who may have absolutely no background in security or business management to audit a highly successful game company is ludicrous. The CSM to me is about ingame or meta-game concerns not business practices.

How do the community think that the CSM could be structured to prevent the likes of favouritism, and biased opinion?

The only change I would recommend at this point is during the voting stage in that people are required to rank their top3 (or 5) candidates, rather than just pick one. This will give a more balanced voting system rather than powerblocks voting through their corp/alliance mates.

Favouritism shouldn’t be an issue, the delegates are there to serve the community, if people have serious issues with delegates those concerns can be raised with CCP who I believe have the right to remove delegates that are corrupting the system.