Why Elect Me?

I've said it before but, like all good politicians, I like my own voice enough to say it again:

Firstly, and most importantly, I am an Eve player who plays the game via the client rather than the Eve-Online forums. While the forums are important and entertaining, they are for me a poor second to achieving things in-game. CAOD occaisionally appears to me to be nothing more than a really bizarre scif-fi flavourerd WWE rant, one that I observe but studiously don't participate in.

Secondly I play the game in very broad ways – I’m involved in invention, manufacturing, research, NPCing and PVP. I speak to people who do the rest (mining, complexes and so on) so I feel that I have a good grasp of the mood in most areas of Eve.

I have ample experience of 0.0 life, including operating alliance structures; I ran FIX for a while, I have been instrumental in setting up PURE. This has involved an appreciation of how to create and operate trans-national social structures to provide a kind of coherence for the entity across 23/7. I should add that this issue fascinates me.

Fourthly I tend to look at issues from a macroscopic level while culling data from people on the ground. In PURE this means I am looking at issues surrounding money supply as part of broader trading strategy in which I and others are involved. This appreciation for how large and often semi-imperceptible issues affect individual pilots is, I contend, something that we as players definitely, definitely want to see on the Council.

Finally I promise to be an effective representative. I really want the CSM to live up to its promise for useful and frank dialogue between Players (paying customers) and CCP and believe that I can help to ensure that this is what happens. I will not be party to any whitewashes or tolerate corruption such as we saw last year. I will always try be available for contact so that I may represent your views (whoever you may be), or an echo of them, to CCP at meetings. And I promise not to be partisan or to try to abuse my position to benefit myself, my corporation or my alliance.

Concrete Proposals

These are things that I want to try and get adopted, should you elect me to the CSM.

1) Greater transparency in the petitions process; some kind of record noting who's petition gets nodes rebooted for instance, viewable by people affected by that decision. If you are affected by the resolution of someone else's petition, you should have a right to know who opened it and which GM answered it. The benefit here for players is that you get less worked up about collusion/corruption because you can sort of see what's gone on which shouldn't really be a secret thing in matters like node reboots and yet right now, as we've seen, they are. The advantage for CCP is that they get to conclusively nail another irritating ghost that's been lingering post BOB-Dev scandal.

2) Improved corp and alliance tools, specifically the ability to grant roles to individuals not in your corp, communications streamlining and perhaps the ability to set departmental budgets. Perhaps allowing alliance-wide 'blacklists' of dodgy pilots automatically unemployable so long as their name is on an alliance-administered list. Things to better integrate corp systems and alliance systems. All sorts of things, really.

3) Push hard for improved node-support for system populations > 250 so that the mere arrival of a fairly average fleet doesn't tank the node. Similarly make the usual gripes about lag. Failing that, push CCP to make public what's known about where's laggiest/most unstable to level the playing field for all concerned, possibly via some kind of traffic report when you log in.

4) Lobby hard for the insurance system to better reflect the true costs of purchasing T2 ships.