CSM Campaigns

I hope that there is no need for the CFC at some point. I think that a lot of alliances in the CFC and N3 huddle together because they know that by themselves, under the current sov mechanics, they are just targets to allow the big boys to have a merrie weeke of low-risk entertainment.

That's why I think, counter to received wisdom, that the new system should not make it easier to take sov. People are risk averse and if you make it easier to take sov then you just get even bigger groups. Make it harder to take defended sov and the need for huge blocs reduces. I don't think you'd have mass resets the next week (although PL showed the way on that with Phoebe, and are profitting by it) , but I think that without fear, you lose the major centripetal force that holds together otherwise-unstable blocs.

Hell, in most MMOs you can't hold a 50-person guild together for a few months without drama and schism. I want Eve to return to that default state of human turmoil and drama.

If you make it easier to take undefended sov, but extremely hard to take defended sov, then the PLs and the BLs get content : because people think it is worth keeping showing up for fights, and that they are safe if they do so, even if they lose; but they also know that if they blueball or punt timers then they will swiftly lose what they have built up.

Edit: I just remembered you asked about BNI. I thin that they are in a huge group for two other reasons: the first is that they actually want to be together because they have fun, much like with Red and Blue. The sandbox being what it is, I think that is great and to be encouraged, not artifically nerfed.

The second is that kicking inactives on a grand scale is horrendous: BNI are not as vast as they look on paper, huge as they are. That is something for the CSM to keep raising with CCP.

Endie is awesome, you should vote for him.

Yeah I am standing, not anyone else, and I have nothing to do with counter-intel. If anyone from that side of Eve runs then I am sure that they could quite reasonably expect to be asked about what they do and to answer for their decisions, but to ask me about it in the hope that someone out there gets confused and thinks I play that side of the game would just be dog-whistle politics.

I'm on good terms with plenty of people in hostile blocs and alliances (one of whom has been good enough to post in this thread while others have been very generous on twitter about my decision to run) and that is partly because they know my views on keeping what happens in-game, in-game.

I am a huge fan of S*&^ on Zulu and Doink has been kind enough to host it early - sometimes as early as 2pm EST when Jeffraider has barely finished his second bottle - in order to let me join in from my filthy European Ruritania.

But Doink is also an unreliable shirker who hasn't arranged a podcast in weeks and who only serves to remind people how awful SA Goons are these days by inviting terrible Star Trek Online people on to make 2006-era jokes about gamers with a blithe lack of self-awareness.

To expand upon my earlier comments about friends across the game, Doink is a Pandemic Legion member who also has a character in my corp, Bat Country, where he could spy on us if he wants: I trust him to behave. We like to talk to our friends and Eve Online is just a silly game which isn't worth getting rawr rawr angry about over. We also have a very senior BNI leader in corp for the same reason, and a couple of others from the red side of Eve. Contrary to other peoples' fear and paranoia about Eve I've never been let down by any of the hostiles I've had in corp and I've made friends I wouldn't have otherwise, as a result.

Why are you running for a CSM seat with an alt and not your main character?

If you try and read the last part of he's post you see that he don't own the real Endie character

I answered this in the OP: I play Eve a lot, whether in mainfleet, mid-sized EG stuff, or roaming with Bat Country in small gangs.



Again, as I explained in the OP, I don't own the character Endie, nor have I ever. Since quite a lot of people know who I am as "Endie" and not by the name of any of my 20-odd Eve characters, I decided to make a character that clearly identified me so that there was no confusion.

I think that if someone has their private, personal details released without their permission then yes, that sounds like real life harassment and if CCP feel brave enough to enforce that then I would entirely welcome them doing so. Of course, someone could rules-lawyer that with specious "what if" hard cases, but I hope that I'm being pretty clear on the principle. I think that I've been extremely clear on my distaste for such practises.

Personally, I can only remember this happening once in the last couple of years, but that once was too often, and I hugely regret that it was by my alliance.



If CCP assigned some unique numeric ID to each player, and made it a strongly-enforced contractual term that you do not attempt to register with more than one such ID, and made public the characters linked to that numeric ID, then that would do what the counter intel guys do. But that would be such a huge and dramatic shift in the nature of Eve that I am not sure that the playerbase would accept it, and it would certainly strip away most of the backstabbing, convoluted, spying metagame that draws many people to Eve in the first place. I suspect that it would also not be even 80% effective.

But lets be clear: the spying metagame does not justify doxxing. It explains why counter-intel people try to find out if a given friendly character is owned by the same person as a hostile character: every major nullsec power has to do this to survive. But it does not justify publishing those details. So finding out that Manny was flying a titan for a CFC alliance and blowing it up? That's an in-game consequence and entirely fine. Publishing some of his details just to show off that it was him? Totally and utterly out of line.



I'm not at all annoyed, and those are very fair questions: given that most of Eve probably thinks that Mittani still runs the GIA (something he happily encourages people to think), it is not surprising that plenty of them think that Digi has something to do with it. I imagine some CFC members do.

In fact, Digi is not in the GIA, and his only interaction with our agents is when he bans them and I have to tell him to leave them alone and unban them because they are our brave patriots fighting the dastardly enemy in his fiendish, underhanded war.

Thank you for those answers.