Daily Archives: November 7, 2025

Last Weekend to Vote for CSM20

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Past statements from CCP suggest that if you were going to vote in the CSM20 election, then you have probably done so already.  That people tend to vote in the first 24 hours was the reason they cut down the voting period a few years back.  Then again, they seems to have extended the voting period back out to a full two weeks since then, so were they wrong then or are they wrong now?

And this is why we need a CSM, so CCP can ignore feed back directly rather than having to glean and discard it from the forums and social media.

Council of Stellar Management XX

Anyway, you have just a couple more days to vote as the voting period will close at downtime on Monday, which is 11:00 UTC and zero dark thirty locally for me, so Sunday is effectively the last day to vote.

In order to vote you must meet the following two criteria:

  • You account has an active Omega subscription running
  • Your account is at least 60 days old

That is it. No Alpha accounts can vote and you cannot roll up and subscribe a bunch of Omega accounts today and vote. This is like voting of old in the real world where you had to be a property owner in good standing.

And, of course, if you have multiple Omega accounts, and I currently have three active, you get to vote with each of them.  Money talks.

For a reminder, here are the 55 candidates running for the CSM this year.  The links go to their forum post statement.  Those with an asterisk by their name are incumbents, those with two asterisks have previously served on the CSM.

Candidate Alliance Corp
Angel Maelstorm None Xae Mining Consortium Inc.
Angry Mustache** Goonswarm Federation KarmaFleet
Ankh Lai None The Scholae Academy
Aqustin Agustus Brave Collective Spoopy Newbies
Ariel Rin* The Initiative. Tactically Challenged
Aries Wolfblade Shadow Ultimatum Bureau Inferno
Arrowspeeed Bounty Fraternity. Elysian Technologies Enclave
Benzmann Snuffed Out One Risky Click
Bexey Songweaver The Craftsmen Songweavers
burtus antonioprimus Absolute Will Absolute Order XVIII
CollegeKid Sigma Grindset Yamato Tech Solutions
Coltitus Mando Vyraj. Totality Squad
creatnos NullSechnaya Sholupen You’re dunked
Drake Iddon* Rote Kapelle CastleKickers
Dujek Oneye* Brave Collective Brave Newbies Inc.
ElenHellen Crocodili et mammoths Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors
en guarde Pandemic Horde The Reason is Treason
Fluffy Neko None Forgot to repair
Frippyy Get Off My Lawn R3b3llium
Gideon Zendikar D-sync. D-sync
Gustav Mannfred Remember Mumuit Summer of Mumuit
hyprviper1 Goonswarm Federation KarmaFleet
Itaer IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Neurotoxin Control
Janstina Urthadar Shadow Cartel Immortalis Inc.
Jolange Jogua Fraternity. Arknights.
Kakala Asanari None Caldari Citizen’s Assembly Corporation
Kane Carnifex Brave Collective Duty.
Kaptin Tiberius Kitchen Sinkhole Dark Venture Corporation
Kenneth Feld* Pandemic Legion Habitual Euthanasia
Kshal Aideron The Ancients. F.U.N. Inc.
Limited Liability Organization of Skill Extracting Corporations The New Eden School of trade
Machiavelian Pandemic Horde Blackwater USA Inc.
Mick Fightmaster* No Vacancies. No Vacancies
Mike Azariah** None The Scope
MILINT ARC Trooper None Pator Tech School
NeoShocker Scary Wormhole People The Dark Space Initiative
Nikita Luciano Goonswarm Federation Ascendance
ntrosell2 Death Legion of Capybaras Unstoppable legion
Oncepure Pandemic Horde Our Sanctum
Orion Sa-Solo Minmatar Fleet Alliance Rattini Tribe
piett weyun None Clarion Call Capsuleers
Rose Allari Imahara Goonswarm Federation GoonWaffe
Rots Mijnwerker Out of the Blue. Into the Ether
Sawdeth Ternius None BobVult
Styxx D.A.R.K. Dark Shado
Sven Bauer Pandemic Horde Horde Vanguard.
Teddy Shi None Science and Trade Institute
The Oz* None Pecunia Infinita
Theman JR Goonswarm Federation Tritanium Industries and Technology
ThePuce Moose Watch This Starline Enterprises
Val Auroris The Initiative. Aurora.
Viola Terra Sleeper Protocol Redshift Horizon
Wheezy1442 L A Z E R H A W K S Lazerhawks
yilifaerr Invidia Gloriae Comes Your Ex’s
youngpuke2* Sedition. Jerkasaurus Wrecks Inc.
Zintage Enaka* Goonswarm Federation Echelon Research

As always, my general advice for voting is to go with somebody who has a positive message, who is not trying to promise specific action (CSM members have no such power), and whose plan doesn’t involve screwing over some other play style in the game.

Related links to help you find the information you need:

Friday Bullet Points About More Video Game Endings

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And not the good kind.

It is Friday and there are some news items that have popped up that I want to notice, even if only in passing.

The writing was on the wall for the unloved Tencent MMORPG.  I am pretty sure the MMO news sites spent more time trying to cast some spurious unflattering narrative or another about the game than actually seeing it for what it was… another mediocre entry in a very tired niche market.

Is that the sun setting over the clouds? Is this MMORPG Elysium?

The crime wasn’t cloning or being a throw away title as one columnist kept suggesting.  There was nothing intrinsically wrong with it, even if I did not love the control scheme.  Rather, it was another failure to read the room, to see that the classic DikuMUD inspired, level grinding MMORPG is dead.  Or, if not dead, then stale enough that the odor coming off of the genre suggests death.  I haven’t really looked forward to a new fantasy MMORPG in over a decade.  Maybe I am jaded… or maybe there has really been nothing new under the sun in the genre for a long, long time.

I mean, I have a quote from GDC 2007 that called it almost 20 years ago:

…because of WoW, and all the dumb money and all the publisher pressure, there’ll be lots of games that shouldn’t have been MMOs but would have been great boxed products. Lots of publishers are pushing for that subscription pie, but they’ll fail.

-Rob Pardo,  MMOs Past, Present, and Future Panel at GDC 2007

Some titles are great and thrive as a massive experience.  But most don’t.  We’ve seen it over and over and over and over again.  It isn’t that nobody can beat WoW or that WoW destroyed the genre… it is that replaying the same tropes and mechanics over and over for a couple of decades gets old.  Tarisland was a competent recycling of those tired tropes.  It did all the things expected of it.  In a vacuum where nobody had seen a fantasy MMORPG, it could have been a winner.  But we live in the real world where we have seen this model too many times, and the market for that sort of thing isn’t limitless… and was never as big as some suggested.

The WoW-killer of myth was never going to be a copy of WoW’s model.

Speaking of fantasy MMORPGs and tropes and what not, the Greg Street (formerly Ghostcrawler at Blizzard) and his studio Fantastic Pixel Castle lost its financial support from NetEase and was unable to find any other backers.

My tirade above about the staleness of the MMORPG market and the complete failure of anything new in that specific niche to grab an audience and make a strong name for itself in the last decade or so could feed into this.  We don’t know what plans they had or if their vision might have broken new ground or just attempted to revisit the same old scenes.

Maybe NetEase couldn’t be convinced that there was any “there” there in the studio’s plan.

Or maybe investors are skittish about big projects in general.  The layoffs do not seem to be slowing down in the video games industry.  We just saw Amazon bail out on the idea of any sort of large scale, live service game last week when they found that even their money couldn’t make the genre something it was not.

Anyway, the princess that will save us from this was clearly in another castle this time around.

EA is out there trying to woo the SEC to allow its board of directors to cash out… because not one of them ever cared a whit about making video games.. by selling the company to the Saudis in a deal that is structured in such a way as to blow up whatever EA was so as to end up with a shell of the former structure.  I’ve been over that before in a whole post bidding farewell to EA and whatever it was.

Despite having paid off the president by allowing his son-in-law to “broker” the deal for a huge fee, they are going through the motions and pretending somebody might object or try to block the acquisition.  But nobody will.  The president has put the most grossly incompetent people in charge of every government department to ensure they are only loyal to him and will only do what he says because they are mentally unprepared to do anything else.  So the acquisition theater goes on, which included the FAQ that EA sent out to employees with the following entry:

    • Will private ownership lead to layoffs?
      • There will be no immediate changes to your job, team, or daily work, as a result of this transaction.
      • Our focus is on driving innovation, and expanding our global reach, all of which require world class teams, who are excited to shape the future of entertainment.

That is such a lie that I assume that the lawyer who wrote it was wearing asbestos underwear in order to shield himself from the inevitability of his pants bursting into flames due to the flagrance of the lack of candor being displayed.

I mean sure, that first point is technically true, depending on your definition of immediate.  EA won’t be driving people into the street with clubs the very moment the deal closes.  But the company will be saddled with so much debt that the only reason some people will be kept around is that they probably can’t sell an unstaffed studio to another company.

It will be a bloodbath and I will be mightily surprised if the company employs 20% of its current staff a year after the merger is complete.  It will, in common with all such mergers and acquisitions, lead to job losses, studio closures, price increases, service reductions, and a variety of other lesser bad outcomes for the consumers, all to make a few individuals incrementally more wealthy and to allow the Saudis to have Madden titles featured at their esports complex in an attempt to put a friendly face on their bloodthirsty dictatorship.

When people complain about the problems with late stage capitalism, this is what they are talking about, a situation where billionaires are rewarded for eliminating jobs and screwing over the general public with the full support and assistance of the government they have bought and paid for.

My final entry is pretty small potatoes relative to the above.  Another EVE Online fan site appears to have fallen over and will likely not be revived.  This is a story that will keep repeating itself I am sure.  Such sites do not last forever and the game suffers from time to time because CCP leans so hard on the community to fill in the gaps it cannot, or will not, fill itself.  The company couldn’t even maintain a wiki about the game after all.

In this case it was a simple site that collected the RSS feeds from the now dwindling few bloggers who write about the game and presented them in a few different views as well as a consolidated RSS feed that I run on the side bar of my other blog.

It looks like the inner workings of the site gave up the ghost on October 18, after which it collected no more entries.  The site only maintained a seven day combined feed, so its unified output dried up a week later.  The site was run by Steve Ronouken, or Fuzzy Steve, a long time EVE Online industrialist and a former CSM member.  Judging from his blog he hasn’t been active on the site for a few years.  Something changed in the background or got updated and things broke I guess.

The funny thing is that a dozen years ago there was a fight over who would host the site and claim the name when Marc Scaurus decided to step down from running his iteration of the site.  There was community drama and name calling as two sides struggled to claim the EVE Bloggers name.

Now none of the sites I mentioned in that post are up and running… except for Foo’s EVE Blogroll.  We still have that at least.

The site was never a huge source of traffic here or at my other site, but it was often a quality source, bringing people in already keen on the game.  So it goes.

Addendum: Oh, and a Warhammer MMO was cancelled as well.