Campaign Promises, oh boy.

For my blog post today, I’d like to detail some issues that, if elected, I would work to address – though even if not elected, I still hope to bring them before the CSM, and hopefully they will deal with them. Running for election is turning out to be a great experience, I’ve had the chance to get to know some of the other candidates, and while I hope I get the chance to work with them on the CSM, I’m sure we’ll be able to work together on some of the issues we have in common. Being a member of the CSM, however, will be of great help to me in bringing these to CCP's attention.

Now, in no particular order:

– General Forum Improvements
CCP has been changing the forums around a little lately, trying to improve them. I’m reserving comment on whether these changes really improve things or not, but we need some other changes that I haven’t seen any indication CCP has planned. As in, the best way to do it would be throwing out the current forums and just replacing it with better forum software – though if that would be difficult due to linking forum accounts to Eve and the rest of the site (I’m unsure of the technical side of this), just a few simple improvements like increasing the post length limit (4000 characters? Maybe I just like to talk, but personally I find this a bit low), adding a PM ability, and a better search function. And doing away with the profanity filter, which doesn’t screen a lot of profanities, and screens a lot of things that aren’t profanities (granted, a number of them can be, but not in the context they’re most commonly used in – and certainly not when they’re simply part of a larger word). Making it In Game Browser friendly would be really nifty, too. I’m sure there are other things, too, maybe you can suggest some!

– While we’re talking about increasing the character limit on forum posts, what about increasing the limit in Eve-mails? I routinely find myself having to break up a mailing into two or more parts, which is extremely annoying, and creates unneeded clutter in mailboxes everywhere in Eve.

– Also in regards to Eve Mail, the ability to dump it to a text file on one’s computer would be nifty, and make archiving things much easier. We have chat logs – why not mail logs?

– Not just more space for Eve Mails, but in bios, too.

– Ability to kick players from a corp while they are in space
Oddly enough, you can’t kick players from a corp while they are in space. Which opens the door to all sorts of griefing, as players can enter a corp under false pretenses, open fire on corpmates without CONCORD repercussions, and remain in space as members of the corp to shoot any other corp members who happen to undock. I doubt this happens every day, but it’s something that I’d like to see fixed, and that should be fairly easy to do if nothing else.

– Some more icons for corps to choose from in their logos would be nice, especially some more obviously industrial, mining, research, and trade related ones. There are some, true, but . . . we could do with more. I can’t imagine this would be terribly difficult to do, either.

– On that same topic, given the recent changes to alliance logo submission, give alliances that don’t qualify for custom logos the ability to choose predefined ones like corps can. Also, expand what alliances are eligible for custom logos.

– Moving on to the topic of roleplay and immersion: it has been rightly said that most of the content in Eve is player created. The entire ‘0.0 endgame,’ for example (as an aside – I personally believe the endgame is what each player makes of it, and that 0.0 does not, and should not, hold exclusive claim to be Eve’s endgame). When it comes to immersion and Eve’s storyline, things are no different – most of the content and story is driven by the players. I’d like to see CCP get involved and acknowledge the player-driven storyline more. Capsuleers are the most powerful beings in Eve. The things we do should have an effect on Eve, and I’d like to see more acknowledgment of that from CCP, see player driven storyline impact the ‘official’ storyline more, and see CCP controlled NPCs interact with players much more. Opening things up again for players to submit stories to be made official chronicles would also be great.

– At the same time, there’s nothing wrong with CCP created content. Let’s have more of it. Maybe some more frequent chrons, perhaps ones in a different style than Abraxas – I dearly love his work, but don’t want to overwork him, and variety is good – as well as more events. Especially events not related to Factional Warfare, some dealing with industry and trade would be nice. And some just pure freeform roleplay. Of course, it could be that we have more than I think we do now, in which case what’s needed is a bit more publicity.

– Nothing wrong with combining player driven content and events, though. Giving players tools to better create events would be pure win and awesome.

– Back to official content here, I recall that at one point there was an effort to harmonize the Prime Fiction of Eve, to find the various things that don’t agree with each other and ninja-edit that all out. To the best of my knowledge, though, nothing ever came of this. I’m sure there would be players willing to volunteer to find most of the discrepancies, all CCP would have to do is decide what the official line for each of them is and make the edits.


Well, I suppose that should do for today. A few bigger changes, mostly littlish things, all of them would (I feel) be improvements in Eve. I’ll try to blog about a few other improvements in the next couple days, either lowsec, industry, or both. I’d like to improve them together, after all.

Hmm, that could make a good slogan – “Lowsec and Industry, together at last.”