Gategun-Gate aka CSM minutes

CSM - Council of Serious Minutes

Last week the CSM released 165 pages of meetings minutes for their already hilariously outdated meeting with CCP.(Okay okay, it was only a few months in coming) Some things discussed in the meetings were already in game, and naturally there was quite the ruckus when certain parts of the document were read, repeatedly, every what-way possible. There is an excellent summation of the minutes by a fellow blogger, Drackarn, here, he covers a bit of the same thing as I am going to focus on here, but also the rest of the 165 page monstrosity.

I am referring to the gate guns discussed on page 95. Prerequisite would be to watch the fanfest presentation on Crimewatch, specifically from 15:40 to about 25:00. This will explain what they mean for Suspect vs criminal flags. 

Now the intent of the gate guns seems to be to deter warfare on gates in lowsec and added punch against criminals in high sec. The meat of their proposed change was the following two tidbits :

"Sentry guns will now shoot anyone with a criminal flag, suspect or otherwise."

"Sentry guns will also start with smaller amounts of damage, and ramp up with time. Ideal tuning will be to where triage carriers will die at around 4 1/2 minutes."

So if you had watched the Crimewatch presentation you will know that suspect means anyone doing a "misdemeanor" and a criminal is a person comitting a "felony." Without re-covering the entire presentation, let's just suffice it to say that this places flashy red pilots at risk, as well as current yellow pilots who engage in piracy in sight of the gate guns.

Now napkin math aside, let's just think about the level of firepower that the gate guns will have to scale to in order to force or kill a triaged carrier. Then think about the orders of magnitude less that would be required to kill a BS, or volley a BC off the field entirely. It's been pointed out a few times why this is such a bad idea, but let's sum the arguments against this.

At first glance, these new enhanced gate guns will make lowsec pirating on gates, camping gates or otherwise trying to fight on a gate, a pretty useless idea, instead of just limiting frigates from the fight you will start to see bigger classes of ships vollied off the field just by making your tank last a good few minutes.

I won't go too far into the explanation of how bad this is, but that's because several people already took care of that for me. Honestly I think that this response from the community was warranted, but seemed to miss a later summation by the team working on the gate guns. Who said:

"CCP Masterplan explains that this is where everything is at in the design process, that they're looking forward to working more on this as the Inferno stuff dies down"

 With this in mind, I still have hope, but am honestly a little disappointed by the CSM who didn't seem to have much to say at the time about it. Hans Jagerblitzen (Follow him on twitter where he is actually "active" here) was once again on the front lines of this, both as the accused and respondent to this fit of rage against this idea.

To his credit he was able to calm anyone who would listen, as well as some that didn't, and force a better summation into the notes via the forums. The indication there is CCP was/is/will be looking at this and it was indeed just a design idea and not yet a reality. I expect that some change to the gate gun system, made largely useless by the preponderance of swarms of t3 and tank battle cruisers with Logi support in lowsec, will be in place for the December release.

Related Posts : "A look at CCP's suggested gate gun changes" - Low Sec Lifestyle, by Sugar Kyle

Vote Match and CSM7

Well, I've been avoiding typing up this post for at least the past few weeks. Trying to make an informed decision and not just a knee-jerk vote for my corpmate Leboe. A while back I was going to ask some specific questions of the CSM hopefuls and see who responded, and with what. In the end my questions seemed hollow and contrived so I scrapped the idea. I wish had fleshed out the idea and asked those questions, it would have been interesting to see people's responses to small gang combat and NPC 0.0 questions.

Instead I have been listening to all of the excellent podcast coverage of debates, while simultaneously attempting to keep track of who said what, when, and why. Hell, even if I kept notes of who said what I think I would be lost by now. All for the effort of trying to keep up to speed with the upcoming CSM7 elections.

Then I just went back to the same site that has led me through every single other CSM, that is Vote match for CSM9 provided by Dierdra Vaal. Now not only does this site provide useful information, it also gives a chance to see, side by side, views of who best represents your idea's.

To do this, Dierdra has setup a simple statement based system, for example

"The core combat model of EVE lacks complexity and is too simple." And then gives five options to the right, ranging from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree, the middle option being "No opinion" or more accurately, "don't care."

From these statements and your responses it gives you a list of all the candidates and how their responses compare to yours. Even to the level of looking at things you strongly disagree with and see who agree's with them so you know who to root against.

Well my results are below, and it looks like it was a good thing that Leboe decided to fire up his own CSM candidacy otherwise my vote would be wasted by yet another vote for Elise!

I say wasted because I am fairly certain that he has a great chance to make it back in already. Leboe on the other hand is for sure a longshot. I see Hans Jagerblitzen on there as well, and a great candidate, representing lowsec and facwar very well from what I have heard of him. Korvin, was not well known to me, being a "Russian bloc" candidate, but turns out he holds more than one of the same views I do as I read his CSM page, coming in third of my suggested people I should vote for. I've read and reviewed all their campaign posts and I will once again follow Vote-match into the void and select Leboe with my accounts, hoping that a true small gang pilot can make it onto the special 7. I wouldn't mind seeing any of the other three on there as well.

I suppose it helps that Leboe is a Rote Kapelle alliance member, not that my opinion of him is based just on his alliance membership and Corp membership.

Surprise(to me)absentee's from my top five - Prometheus Exenthal (45%), and Alekseyev Karrde (60%). Both self-nominated small gang candidates, but yet so different from my responses. Very eye opening to see them nailed down on some topics that obviously we differ on in significant ways.

Really interesting for me to take a look at some of the "Big names" out there as they pertain to myself. My fifth ranked candidate is another very good one, Meissa Anunthiel (63%), of Rooks and Kings, who has a ton of experience in both the CSM as well as in game. The Mittani (Goonswarm) manages to have 48% of my views, not that he needs my vote. Trebor Daehdoow (51%), honestly thought he would be higher, he's had a vote of mine before. How about Seleene (56%)?

All in all, I will be supporting my alliance mate Leboe! Should you find yourself with some extra time and are still wondering who to vote for, you should go check out vote match and give it a shot for yourself!