Surfing the Sea of The Mittani's Mud

Over the past few days, I've been the target of a big smear campaign by The Mittani and his goons.

It's the usual bullshit. Quote mining out of context, character assassination, ad hominem attacks, the big lie -- all the classic techniques. They even started a campaign to have my wikipedia page deleted (currently failing horribly) and twice vandalized the page.

The Mittani is running on a platform that only he and his friends can make the CSM effective, so it's vitally important to discredit anyone who can put the lie to his fundamental argument. The truth is that CSM 5 has been extraordinarily effective, and I was one of the biggest reasons why.

CSM Chair Mynxee says my performance "should serve as the Gold Standard for CSM delegate performance." Even Vuk Lau, whom I had numerous disagreements with on CSM 5, agrees that I was "[the] most dedicated delegate of CSM 5 and CSM 6 will be blessed with him on board." And so do a great many players, judging from their supportive mails, PM's and forum posts.

And that is exactly why The Mittani and his buddies are running for CSM. He's realized that it is actually very, very effective at influencing CCP, and he wants to try to use it as a vehicle to advance his own petty in-game interests, at the expense of the vast majority of the players of EVE.

You would think that nobody would trust the word of EVE's most famous spymaster and disinformation artist, but as any student of history will tell you, if you repeat a lie often enough, people will start to believe it. And The Mittani has lots of weak-minded parrots at his beck and call.

But you can put a stop to this. You can teach The Mittani a lesson in civility.

I've spent 2-3 hours a day working to build the CSM over the last 10 months. Now I'm asking you to spend a few minutes of your time to make sure all that work doesn't go to waste.

Please send the following evemail to all your corpies, alliance mates, and friends. Spread the word! Blog, Post, Tweet and Facebook. Go Viral!

The choice you make right now, at this very moment, could decide whether CSM 6 continues to build on the hard work of CSM 5, or becomes the forum for The Mittani's attempt to twist EVE to his own advantage.

If you make the right decision, then this YouTube clip should give you an idea of what you'll do to The Mittani's plans.

My most appreciative thanks, in advance,

Trebor

PS: If you want to drop everything and vote for me right now, just click here.

Hi,

I just wanted to drop you a note to let you know about something really disturbing that's going on in the CSM elections.

The Mittani is so scared that Trebor Daehdoow is going to get re-elected that he's unleashed a massive troll and smear campaign against him. It's classic goon bullshit.

See: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1472157&page=1#4

But as Trebor points out in "Trebor's Complete Guide to Mud", he is not the real target of this campaign. The real victims are a bunch of good candidates who deserve to be on the CSM - guys like Seleene, Ripard Teg, Meissa Anunthiel, Jonathon Silence, and Roc Weiler.

See: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1479234

Please do me the favor of checking out the threads, and consider voting for Trebor Daehdoow, or one of the guys listed above. And pass this message on to your friends.

The Mittani claims that he, and only he, can make the CSM effective. But the truth is, the CSM is very effective, and that's the reason The Mittani is running. Don't buy the lie!

Thanks a lot!


You can vote for Trebor by clicking this link: http://www.eveonline.com/council/voting/Vote.asp?c=358

The Polls are Open! Vote Early, and Often!

The polls are open in the CSM election, so please take the time to vote. While obviously I'd like you to vote for me, the most important thing is that you express your opinion. Remember, if you don't vote, don't bitch. Here's a nice easy-to-click voting button you can use:

(note: you may be asked to log in when you get to eveonline.com;

after that you'll go to my voting page)

On a side note, the CSM is not all hard work. CCP Diagoras foolishly asked the CSM to come up with slogans for CSM-related election banners. Here is one of mine that just started running.

The HOPE poster, it is not...

Several people who apparently think I should be re-elected have been exercising their rights to free speech in poster form.  Enjoy!  Perhaps I should offer a prize for the best poster?

This is from famous shadowy Secret Master of EVE, Virtuozzo, a man renowned for never using one word where five will do just fine. The reference to "Team Awesome" is perhaps a bit rude, Virt...

Don's contribution will perhaps appeal to the more algorithmically-inclined voter...

Campaign Page (with free lottery!) • EVE-O Campaign Thread

Billions in Bribes for Ballots

One of the cute things I decided to do with my CSM6 campaign is get a little viral mojo going with a lottery. The top prize is 6B ISK, but there are two twists: first, the actual top prize depends on how many votes I get (1M ISK per vote), and second, you can win sub-prizes by being the player that recruits the actual winner -- multiple levels deep.

Obviously, my evil plan is to get people to fly all over the game promoting my candidacy in local, pestering their corpies to vote for me, sticking links in their forum signatures, mention it in blog posts, and so on.

Will it work? That's up to you -- you can find details on the Billions for Ballots Lottery here. Attempts to "honestly" cheat to gain a better chance of winning the lottery are encouraged (this is EVE, after all!)

My thanks to Mynxee for donating 4B ISK to the prize fund. The endorsement she gave me was great, but money speaks louder than words!

Let the trolling begin!

Since several other significant candidates have kicked off their re-election campaigns in Jita Park Speaker's Corner, I've joined in by creating my official re-election thread there. I look forward to a robust discussion of the issues that affect the lives of all citizens of New Eden, so don't be afraid to ask hard questions.

And don't forget to visit my official manifesto page and sign up for the free lottery!

Glutton for Punishment

Having apparently not yet plumbed the depths of my own masochism, I find myself unable to resist the compulsion to run for re-election to the CSM. You can find complete details on my campaign platform on my official campaign page.

I won't spoil all of the goodies in this post, but my diabolical re-election strategy involves both massive bribery and bunny-slippers.  To find out more, you'll have to click the link.

I hope you will all honor me with your votes, and permit me to continue serving the EVE community as a CSM delegate.

December Summit Quick Report

Here are my quick observations of the summit meetings; we are currently hard at work editing up the minutes and hope to have them out by then end of the year.

To toughen us up, CCP put us in a hotel twice as far away from their offices; this wasn't a big issue until the day when we had to walk there and back in sub-freezing weather with the added bonus of a 50 mph+ wind; several of the lighter CSMs were in danger of being blown into the ocean.

Carbonation and Core - a useful session that shed some more light on what this team of devs do; well received devblogs will no doubt continue to emanate from this group.

Incarna - After having done a lot of framework development work, CCP is now finally able to turn to the task of implementing this aspect of their Ultimate Sci-Fi Simulator. But what this means is that any player who expects something epic this summer will likely be disappointed.

With respect to this initial release, my personal opinion is that they should ensure that the initial entry area is polished until it glows, as opposed to a more extensive release. After all, this will be the first time that all the new framework stuff is truly battle-tested, so some caution might be warranted.

CSM was united in insisting that no current gameplay be shifted into Incarna (to force interaction with Incarna, for example), and that players should have the option of entering Incarna when docking in a manner that is functionally equivalent to the current docking hangar display (such as, for example, looking out a window at your ship, or being on a balcony looking up at it). Furthermore, it was considered essential that there be no performance hit when doing a fast dock/ship change/undock as compared to the present day.

CCP seemed to be very receptive to these suggestions.

CCP's tentative plans for some additional gameplay that spans both Incarna and in-space EVE could be quite interesting IMHO, but it is too soon to make a solid judgement on them.

We further urged CCP to communicate to the players as much information about Incarna and their roadmap as soon as possible. However, one concern I have is that as this roadmap develops, ideas will be adopted just because they are "awesome". I am of the view that :awesome: is not a reason for doing something; it is the emergent result of hard work and careful thought.

As urged by the CSM in October, microtransactions will only be used for vanity items. Some of the vanity goods that were discussed will most likely be well-received.

The discussions on the EVE economy and RMT were quite detailed and also spawned additional discussions over food and drink. I look forward to seeing what develops from these.

Forums - the Next Generation look very nice, and have some features that I personally like a lot. I plan to lobby for additional features that will be of use to everyone but can also be adapted to assist CSM functions (ie: having cake and eating it too)

We had an unannounced, and productive session with Hilmar. However, one thing he said -- that CCP likes to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks -- gave me some pause. That kind of approach is fine for a small company where the costs of failure are low. However, with over 600 employees, throwing stuff against the wall is not enough; you have to check and make sure that what is sticking to it isn't crap.

With respect to the new NEOCON feature, it seems very nice, and bears close inspection.

I was particularly impressed, once again, with the UI team, who came to our session incredibly well prepared. No doubt Bara and Katrin will in the near future not be the only members of the team to belong to the Order of the Spork, and they can expect some serious :csmlove: in the minutes.

The 3-hour nullsec meeting with Arnar and Matt (Greyscale) was a really intense and productive one.

I'm not going to spill much about that meeting, except to say that the minutes of it will be extremely interesting, and that I now have a metric for a productive CSM meeting -- it's one where we try and convince the devs to do things that will render them unemployable, and they try and convince us to agree to things that will render us unelectable. I heard things in that meeting that I didn't expect to hear. Epic stuff, trust me.

The meeting with QA was also quite enlightening; Mynxee managed to skype in from a Starbucks, and was represented at the table by a small red pod-shaped sugar-substitute dispenser that acted as a non-maskable interrupt.

In the CSM issues meeting we played a really interesting development resources allocation game that will feed back into resource planning. I have some quibbles about the game-design of this game-design game, but it might have some broader applications if they ITERATE on it.

We finished the summit with the Fanfest meeting; we advised them that the players are coming for face-time with the rock-stars (devs) and not the roadies (us). Some interesting new possibilities for fanfest activities were discussed.

In small ceremonies, CCP PrismX and CCP Fallout were inducted into the Order of the Spork, PrismX for doing the hard work on removing learning skills, and Fallout for general long-term awesomeness. I hope they use their Sporkholder status for good and not evil.

I must however end on a disquieting note: at dinner on Wednesday, CCP Explorer and I found ourselves actually agreeing on some issues. This was extremely disturbing to both of us at the time, but I can report that by the next day, the improbability field collapsed to 1:1 and normality resumed.

The Department of Difficult and Embarrassing Questions

In just a few days, the CSM will be off to Iceland once again to do battle for Truth, Justice, and (in my case) the Gallentean Way. So it occurred to us that it might be useful to ask the players what questions they'd like us to ask CCP.

To that end, we have posted on EVE-O and Scrapheap Challenge the current meeting schedule, and you are invited to give us insights, lists of hard questions to ask, and so on.  Enjoy!

The Great Learning Skills Massacre

As practically everyone has heard by now, CCP has decided to remove learning skills. While my personal opinion is that this is good for the health of the game (in particular, by making the game much more noob-friendly), there are certain aspects to the way CCP is doing things that have some players upset.

Most of the complaints are coming from players who have trained advanced learning skills to V. Under the new system, those players will train at a slightly lower peak rate, and despite the fact that they will be getting millions of skill points to reallocate now into skills that affect their gameplay, they feel this is a nerf.

Additionally, and perhaps more crucially, they feel that everyone who didn't bite the bullet, take the long-term view, and train the advanced skills is getting a huge buff, while they are getting nerfed, or at best, treated neutrally. While I can understand this feeling, I think it is a bit overblown -- after all, they have had the benefit of faster training up until this point. So the nerf, such as it is, is that they will no longer have a long-term training edge.

One thing to keep in mind is that while CCP has implemented most of the CSM's Remove Learning Skills proposal, they left out two small but important elements -- allowing attribute remaps to be slightly more extreme (which brings the max training rate to within a few SP/hr of the previous max rate), and providing an extra remap (which lets thoughtful players maximize the benefits of the change as soon as possible). The stated reason for this is that CCP did not think they could get a bigger package of changes through QA in time to meet the release deadline -- and to be honest, I have no reason to believe they are being disingenuous about that (quite the opposite, in fact).

However, those two changes would have soothed some hurt feelings, and it is important to note that they could be implemented at a later time, independent from the currently planned changes. I for one hope that CCP will recognize this and commit to doing this if possible.

With respect to how to maximize the benefit you can get from the death of learning skills, it should be obvious that if you can train learning skills at a high SP/hour rate, you should do so from now until they are removed. You will then get those skillpoints back, and can apply them to skills that would train at a lower rate. As one poster on SHC remarked, "Half the game is training Clarity V".

I would also recommend that you consider saving some of the skillpoints for a rainy day -- they will come in very handy when you want to train for a flavor-of-the-month ship, or when CCP introduces new skills into the game.

Prioritization Season

I must apologize for the lack of posts recently, but at least I have the excuse that I have been busy on CSM-related activities. By now everyone should have read the devblog on the October meetings, and now that that is done, CSM is looking forward to two important events -- the December Summit, and the Winter Planning Meetings.

At the Summit, we will be discussing a variety of topics, with many of the usual suspects getting their own meetings. But arguably just as important are the planning meetings.

CCP uses the planning meetings to decide what gets onto the schedule for the next 6-month development cycle, and CSM competes for time and attention with all the other stakeholders. While CSM members are not present at the planning meetings, we are represented at them by CCP Xhagen, and in order for him to do that job well, we need to provide him with some marching orders in terms of what we believe needs the most attention.

This is where you come in.  Just like we did in August for the previous cycle, CSM is soliciting feedback from players as to what items in our list of passed issues are most important to you. With over 200 items to choose from, we've got a better selection than you'll find at the famous  buffet of the Golden Trough. So head on over to the November 2010 Prioritization thread and let us know what issues are most important to you.

Voting ends at DownTime on Thursday the 25th.

Lagnarök

The second day of the CSM summit kicked off with a 2.5 hour meeting on CCP's lag-fighting efforts. CCP Veritas keynoted an extensive presentation on not only what CCP is doing, but the procedures they have put into place to improve the efficiency of their efforts.

I will not go into great detail here, because I don't want to steal their thunder -- there was enough for several devblogs, which CSM encouraged CCP to produce, of course. However, I will hit some of the highlights so you have some idea of what to expect.

In the short term, CCP is working hard on issues like Session Changes, Module Cycling, performance improvements on heavily loaded nodes (such as Jita), and general performance improvements that provide more headroom (which means a server node can handle more people). These changes have both direct and indirect effects on fleet fight performance, often in ways you might not expect.

In the longer term, CCP wants to ensure that heavily loaded nodes exhibit graceful and predictable performance degradation (as opposed to suddenly falling off a cliff and dying horribly), increase performance limits, and transition to running systems on multiple cores.

None of this is really new, but what made a particular impression on me is the obvious seriousness of the effort being made to address lag; it was serious before, but now it is deadly-serious. The lag-fighters are no longer just an ad-hoc task force, but a full dedicated team.

With respect to the oft-expressed opinion of the player-base that Dominion caused a huge increase in lag, CCP Veritas presented a very interesting analysis of what actually happened that I think everyone will find fascinating when it appears (hint, hint) in devblog form. Was there more lag? Yes. Did it happen for the reasons most people think? Nope. Ah, EVE, "Unexpected Consequences Online" -- gotta love this game.

Ragnarök in Reykjavik

After a truly epic journey involving an absolutely excruciating flight on IcelandAir, whose seats should be outlawed under the Geneva Convention as instruments of torture, your humble correspondent, jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated, and under-medicated, girded his loins, and, in the brave company of the rest of the CSM (doughty forum-warriors all), descended upon CCP HQ for the first day of our special bonus summit, armed only with his trusty Gallente Navy Tritanium Assault Spork, the Official Weapon of the CSM™.

Three times did we clash with the fearsome Jötunn of Iceland in furious meeting. When the sun set, blood red on the horizon, many were the powerpoints that lay broken and bleeding on the floor of the conference cave. One day, the bards will sing of the many brave deeds of your elected representatives, but that day will only come after expiration of the fearsome NDA's, which even the bravest heroes dare not challenge, lest they be cast into the outer darkness.

Each CSM, in turn, stood at the vanguard, hurling sharp comments at our opponents, and yeah, let it be known that no trolls were to be found on either side of the battle. The fight was fair, the combatants cheerful, and the most skillful blows were rewarded with the applause of all involved.

But what, you ask, was learned this day? What plans do the Jötunn have for the future of EVE? To find out these things, the CSM captured and interrogated King Hilmar himself. We will provide more details later, but in summary:

* Production of shiny new things will be reduced, so that more polish can be manufactured and applied to that which already exists.

* The Jötunn will apply dark knowledge they have wrested from the Camarilla to make possible even more titanic battles in New Eden, and have developed ways to administer additional cures for the mysterious malady known as "Lag" more quickly.

* Player (and CSM) complaints have moved the stony hearts of the Jötunn, and they will endeavor to be more responsive to our desires in the future.

The burning question of the day was, of course, that of microtransactions, which, despite several hours of trying, I cannot cast into faux Norse mythological allusion; therefore the last part of this report will have to be delivered straight. The CSM expressed in no uncertain terms the player reaction to the introduction of PLEX for Remaps, and listened to CCP's rationale for introducing them.

CCP stated that PLEX for Remaps was not the first step of either changing EVE to be a microtransaction-based game, or making additional microtransactions effectively required for competitive gameplay. They viewed it as a very small experiment to expand the utility of PLEX and honestly did not think that it would be considered a significant gameplay change, or be widely used except as a repair mechanism.

The CSM explained why the players believe this was a mistake, and made several suggestions about possible solutions. CCP seemed to take these suggestions seriously, but no commitments were made. However, we will be having a second meeting tomorrow with Count Eyjo, Chancellor of the Exchequer, that will touch upon this issue, and we may be able to report further progress at that time. In addition, King Hilmar asked the CSM to prepare a detailed report upon this subject, which he promised to consider most carefully.

At this point, we released the King from the bonds we had placed upon him, in part because he was being quite reasonable (for a Jötunn, anyway), but mostly because we were getting hungry and he promised to buy us lunch.

Bára Gunnarsdóttir and the Menus of Doom

Something interesting has just gone live on SiSi, the EVE Online Test Server.

Over the past few weeks, CCP karkur has been implementing a cunning little hack to restructure the EVE contextual menus, making the groupings more coherent, and reordering the groups in a (hopefully) better way. This is a skunk-works project that the CSM ("Your tax ISK at work") has been helping out on, by generating some rough menu categorizations, and providing feedback as to possible ways to handle some of the issues that arise.

However, at this point, CCP karkur needs your help. If you have the time, please log on to SiSi (instructions here), check out the new menu layouts, and give her feedback in this Test Server thread. The current layouts are just a first draft, and your feedback can really help improve them.

There are more details in the forum thread, so please read it before jumping on SiSi!

Ask not what you can do for CSM, Ask what CSM can do for you.

Well, it has taken a while to pull together, but today marks the publication of the first CSM5 devblog. In it you'll find quite a few tidbits of information, such as what items in the CSM backlog are in the process of being implemented in the Winter expansion, and the news that CCP has invited CSM back to Iceland in October for a special summit aimed at working out the best way for CSM to use its fabled "stakeholder" powers.

To be honest, at this point I don't know exactly what to expect next month -- will our fat asses be kissed, or spanked? But this meeting is a very interesting development, and the request for it originated with CCP, not CSM. We weren't kidding in the devblog when we said that CCP has done more communicating with CSM5 than with all the previous CSMs combined.

This is a very encouraging thing, to be honest. It doesn't mean that CCP will be delivering puppies and kittens to the players as fast as we'd all like, but it appears to represent a significant change in CCP's relationship to the players, a reversion towards the way things were in the early days (or so I'm told -- being a Mac weenie, I only started playing in late 2007).

The trick, of course, will be to get in place procedures that reinforce this new open attitude, and make it obvious to CCP that this new direction is a win for them.

PS: subscribe to the CSM-NEWS mailing list in-game for occasional updates from CSM about such things as mass-testing.