Why I'm running for the CSM - by Trebor Daehdoow, Sane Industries, Inc.

In my view, EVE faces two major problems that must be overcome for it to grow, one short-term, and one long-term.

The short-term problem is (no surprise) lag, and the long-term problem is that the EVE user interface is broken. Without a significant commitment from CCP and from the user community, these problems cannot be fixed.

I am running for CSM because I believe these issues must be solved in order to ensure the healthy future of the game, and that the CSM can play an important role in facilitating that process.

The EVE-forums thread regarding my candidacy can be found here.

A little about Me

My RL name is Robert Woodhead. I am 51 years old, and live in North Carolina with my wife and two children. I am the author of the first 4 games in the Wizardry series of RPG games, as well as one of the first anti-virus programs, Virex. As a player in one of the early text-based multiplayer RPG games, Gemstone IV on GEnie, I created what may be the first "bot" character using modem-program scripting, RoboCleric, which would roam around the game, rescuing other players, dispensing advice via an Eliza module, and doing a little killing and looting (but oh, so politely). The Gemstone staff responded to this in a totally despicable way: they made me a GM, and I ended up creating a secret-society subgame, the Council of Light. In other words, I'm an old-school hacker (in the original, good sense of the word) -- in fact, I was the Hacking Consultant for the film "Real Genius".

I am also a founder and CEO of AnimEigo, the oldest surviving Anime company in the US.

In my spare time, in addition to playing EVE, I also build and fight combat robots, write the occasional bit of free software, and I'm probably one of the few EVE pilots who actually knows what Zero-G feels like.

I have been playing EVE for a little over 2 years now, and in that time have written several private API tools to help me trade and manage production pipelines, as well as the EViE browser-based skill training monitor (for iPhone and all major desktop browsers).

The Plague that is Lag

Currently, lag is making large scale battles in 0.0 either impossible, or frustratingly unfair ("dead before the grid loaded"). The recently announced nerfing of deep safes is, IMHO, a band-aid aimed at taming lag by making it pretty much impossible to even entertain the idea of bridging a large fleet into a blobbed system unless the FC is both intoxicated and mentally unhinged. Unfortunately for CCP, drunken insanity is the default state for Alliance FCs -- it's clearly not a job for the sane or sober.

However, without knowing more about the internals of EVE, it's impossible for anyone to do more than make educated guesses about what can be done about lag. As a guy who used to have to get complex code to run on 1mhz 8-bit processors with 48k of RAM, I know the sweet pain of bashing your forehead repeatedly into resource limitations (if you scroll back up and look at my picture, you can see the dents). While there are clearly many cute hacks that can (and will) reduce lag, the blunt fact of the matter is that such fixes are at best temporary fixes, because as soon as you defeat the lag-monster for N-player battles, the current design of the game encourages bringing extra people to the fight -- which means you have N+500-player battles, and lag returns. In other words, "Fleets expand to fill the lag available". As the EVE population grows, the problem will only get worse.

The only long-term solution to lag is going to be game design changes that both preserve the ability to have large-scale fleet battles while at the same time rewarding tactics within those battles that allow the devs to cleverly eliminate, or hide, the lag. Getting this right is enormously challenging, but I think it is possible, and I think the CSM has great value not just as a way to make proposals to the devs, but also as a sounding-board for the devs to bounce ideas off.

A Modest Proposal to fix Lag

I want to preface this by saying that since I don't have any knowledge of the internals of EVE, this is based on guesswork. I do not claim this is the way to deal with lag, only that I think it's an interesting starting point for discussion about the kinds of changes that might tame lag -- see, I'm waffling just like a real politician!

I would make one (conceptually) simple gameplay alteration:

Warp cores interfere with sensors

In other words, the more ships that are near you, the less you can see. There are many ways this could be implemented, but the simplest one would probably be:

You can only see the closest N ships (where N might be 50-100) both in overview, brackets and local.

Consider the effects of such a change:

• Small-gang PVP is not in any way affected.
  
  
• Blobs now become much harder to use effectively. In a large blob, most of the ships will see mostly friendly ships, and only a few of the enemy. An opposing fleet that splits itself up and maneuvers well can put itself into positions where it can gain advantage.
  
  
• Combat stops being FCs saying "Dirtbag is Primary" over and over again, and becomes much more tactical, with more decision-making at the wing and squad level. There's more maneuver, more confusion, more chaos, more fog-of-war, more fun. A well-lead small force may be able to defeat-in-detail a larger, clumsy blob.
  
  
• From the standpoint of the devs, such changes (while not trivial) should make life a lot easier. If a player can't see all the ships on grid, then the server doesn't need to send all that information to the client, greatly reducing the amount of I/O.
  
  Furthermore, with certain exception (like bombs), if a player can't see another player, he can't interact with them, which should reduce the compute requirements.

Take a minute and think about how such a simple change would affect large fleet compositions and tactics. It would throw current doctrine for a loop -- which IMHO is a good thing.

Next up, some candy -- eye candy, actually.

What's Wrong With The EVE UI

Even at a glance, the EVE UI is dated. Furthermore, with each new feature release, it becomes denser and more difficult to use effectively. Users of the Mac client (including myself) have an even harder time of it; for example, when the current EVE client is running, other Mac applications often slow to an unusable crawl.

Ask any EVE player, and you'll get a laundry-list of problems with the UI; bizarre overview issues, baroque manufacturing systems, interface inconsistencies, ambiguous fonts, what have you. A cursory glance at the forums proves that just about everyone agrees there are serious problems -- and just about everyone disagrees on what they are!

This is, actually, entirely predictable. The EVE UI attempts to be all things to all people, and fails, because this is simply impossible. The perfect interface for one activity can be entirely distinct from that for a very similar activity (consider your dream interface for flying a RR BS vs. a Sniper BS; they will probably be quite different, and the interface for a tackler would be even more distinct), and even two players performing the same role can have very different concepts of the most efficient interface -- and they may both be right.

So what happens is that everyone bitches about the things they hate the most about the interface, and CCP looks at the big pile of different, often mutually inconsistent complaints, and says "We can spend all our time for the next two years fixing all of this, if indeed it can be fixed, which will be so mind-numbing that half our devs will drunkenly wander out into the tundra and throw themselves into active volcanic vents, and the other half will spend their days pining for the fjords. Or we can forget this stuff and implement something cool like wormholes."

Guess which one they end up doing.

How The UI Can Be Fixed

The key to fixing the EVE UI is to understand that no standard interface can be optimal for all players. In order for the UI to meet the needs of the players, it needs to be extendable by the players.

In other words, CCP needs to implement addons. In my personal opinion as a game designer, addons are one of the crucial elements of the success of "the game that must not be named", cough cough, World of Warcraft, cough cough. Many of you have played that accursed game before you saw the light that is EVE. Did any of you last more than a week or so before you started extending its UI with addons? I certainly didn't -- in fact, I wrote one myself (RoboCleric -- what can I say, I recycle) that enhanced the situational awareness of healers.

For the benefit of anyone who hasn't used addons, what they let you do is add new UI functions to the game, enhance existing ones, or replace them entirely. Some examples of what EVE addons might be used for include:

• Enhancing the overview so that it allows more types of sorting and hilighting, or even permits multiple overviews at the same time. Wouldn't it be nice, for example, to have an extra overview panel that just showed you all the ships and drones that were targeting you?
  
  
• Improving the local display, so you could see at a glance how many blues, reds and neutrals there were in the system -- and sorting it so the reds appear first.
  
  
• Creating new display formats for fleet messages so they are harder to miss in the heat of battle, improving situational awareness.
  
  
• Reformatting the module activation buttons and shields/armor/hull readouts to a position and style that suits you individually.
  
  
• Making possible the development of tools that leverage the existing API, but run in-game. Traders will particular love this.

Permitting addons has many advantages for both players and CCP. Here are a few, just off the top of my head:

• Engages the creativity of the players, many of whom are excellent programmers, in a new way.
  
  
• Offloads much of the pressure for UI tweaks from devs to players, allowing them to spend more time on feature creation and bugfixing.
  
  
• The best innovations can be made part of the standard interface. In fact, the standard interface is actually a core set of CCP-authored addons. If CCP made the source for these available, players could use them as the basis for their own versions, and useful innovations would be easier to fold back into the core versions.
  
  
• Makes the game more attractive to new players.
  
  
• Provides a good reason for a serious refactoring of the client codebase, which will permit not only the elimination of Cider emulation on the Mac, but also make the client much more easily portable to new platforms -- such as, for example, the iPad. Devices like the iPad are going to become major gaming platforms over the next few years, and EVE needs to be available on them.

There are also some issues that addons will raise that need to be addressed, such as:

• Excessive automation. I think this can mostly be handled in the same way that it is in the game that must not be named -- each user action (keypress, click on a button, etc) can generate only one command to the host. As a bonus, dev-produced addons would not be so restricted, which would mean they could use addons to create quite sophisticated bots, and that, plus a non-graphic microclient and some VMs, would let them do more controlled mass-testing.
  
  
• Secret "I Win" Buttons. There will be concern that the major alliances will come up with addons that somehow give them an unfair advantage. My proposed solution is that in order for addons to work on Tranquility, they have to be downloaded from a CCP-controlled public depository, which adds a digital signature. Any addon that turns out to be abusive will quickly be reported by other players and revoked. Addon developers would test them on Singularity.
  
  
• Addon conflicts. These are going to happen from time to time, but these are player-to-player dev issues, not support issues for CCP. If you use an addon and it crashes your client and you lose your Titan, tough noogies.

What Else Will I Advocate If Elected?

While I am a member of a 0.0 alliance (Initiative Mercenaries), I intend to represent the entire EVE community on the CSM, with a focus on issues that affect everyone. As both a published game designer and a professional programmer with 35 years of experience, I believe I am capable of appreciating both the needs of the community and the practical realities of software development.

Of couse, lag and the UI are far from the only problems that EVE faces. Some specific issues that personally concern me are:

• The POS Dead Horse. Having had the job of managing POS's, I am all in favor of this one. If the full Dead Horse redesign turns out to be impractical, then I would lobby for relaxing some of the POS module access distance constraints and/or remote moving of materials between modules.
  
  
• Manufacturing Interface. Having personally run a 3-Orca production pipeline for almost a year, there are some rough edges in this interface that need filing down -- with an industrial grinder. In fact, if addons do get implemented, this is probably something I'll personally tackle.
  
  
• Corporation Interface. While I have not had to use it a lot, much of my knowledge of Danish profanity is a direct result of my CEO having to struggle with it.

In addition, I will of course carefully consider issues that are brought to me by members of the EVE community. My goal is to help make EVE better, and if someone comes up with a good idea, I will accept and champion it, without any ego (well, without much ego...)

In conclusion, it is my firm belief that killing lag and reinventing the EVE UI are crucial factors in the game's long term success, and I will work hard to stimulate discussion of, and find solutions to, these and other problems of concern to the EVE community, and act as a forceful advocate of their concerns.

If you agree with me, then let CCP know by giving me your vote.

I look forward to your comments and suggestions, both on the EVE forums and directly via email. Thank you for your time and attention.

PS: to answer the inevitable question, "Are you doing this just to get a free trip to Iceland?", the answer is "I'm 51 and have a bad back. Flying to Iceland isn't a reward -- it's a punishment!"