Candidate: Cross Atu

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Campaign statement

Playerbase, it's the life- blood of an online based game, its growth and stability are vital to the overall health of the game and communication between development and players is central to the role of a CPM, and to my focus as a CPM1 candidate.

The ability to find and communicate pertinent information to CCP regarding the game and the players is foundational to the work of a CPM. The inverse is also true, even with the NDA present it is important for a CPM to make best efforts to fill in the gaps between Dev posts and keep the community as informed as possible to maintain a high level of useful feedback from the players.

Emergent Game-play - The fundamental draw of a persistent sandbox game, regardless of type, is emergent game-play. Stated simply, it is the ability of players to make their own choices and define their own play experience.

A pillar of emergent game-play is player driven content, which requires robust tools to truly flourish.
I intend to continue to push for more data, more social management tools, and additional flexibility and customization both in and out of match so that players can get the most out of their time both in Dust and moving into Legion on PC & PS4.

Which brings me to platform integration. I play on both console and PC, I've enjoyed both experience and firmly believe in the idea of Legion coming to both PC and PS4. While I acknowledge that this is a long term goal as Legion is not even in beta state yet, I do not believe it is too early to keep a dual platform approach in mind even as CCPs choice of PC focused development moves forward.
In short, I hope to foster development choices that are not only good for the game, but support an expanded community on both the PS4 and PC in the coming days of Legion.

I welcome questions from the community regarding my candidacy, my general profile is included below for reference.

Cheers,
Cross Atu

For links with more detail and to listen to my podcast appearances check out my Campaign Thread :)

Experience in Dust

DUST based Experience:
* Closed beta veteran.
* Dabbled in most roles Dust has to offer.
* Long time support logistics - part of the "I'll rep you for 0 WP" club.
* Leadership positions within Dust corps and alliances since closed beta
* Participation in FW, PC, and tournament play.
* Extensive testing across specialized alts, including a 0 SP alt for direct testing of the NPE and raw stats/effect of base gear.
* Active recruitment and training of players new to Dust.

Real life experience

Prior community liaison/rep experience for MMORPG (Hellgate: London), including interacting with the community, gathering ideas and information and creation of executive summaries

Gamer since 1987 across multiple genres including; RTS, FPS, RPG, MMO, roguelike and console titles (starting with Frogger on the Atari) too numerous to list.

Questions

What are the top three issues currently facing Dust 514 and why?

Player retention - Because without a player community there functionally is no game.
Core Gameplay - Because without a working game, all content and interaction in the game becomes choked and smothered.
Emergent Gameplay - Because without diverse in game content, and the mechanics to support persistent and meaningful player choice in the use there of, game play becomes repetitive and stale.

Why will you be an effective CPM member?

I'll keep this short and sweet, focusing on each area of interaction a CPM will have to tackle

Community - This is the primary focus and will require proactive information gathering, exchange of ideas, and a specific push to not just read, but let the community know that I've read, input on various subjects and am tagging it for transmission to CCP

CPM - Diplomacy without pandering. Being able to be constructive without avoidance of raising concerns is key. If the CPM is to be effective we do not have to (indeed it can often be better if we don't) always agree with each other. We do however into to interact in a diplomatic enough manner that we're professional and productive both as individual CPM members and as a whole elected body.

CCP - Funneling feedback and community information to them in as effective and actionable (plus links) way as possible so that developer time can be spent on tackling development, in other words spent using the community feedback rather than spent gathering it.

In what way do you think the CPM can be improved?

The CPM would vastly benefit from the ability, even if it was constrained to after the fact, to post specifically about subjects/issues where their recommendations to CCP where not adopted (where they were as well, but that's somewhat less vital, although both would be ideal) so that the community can know how the CPM is representing them even when/if those represented voices are ultimately overruled (which is bound to happen at times, for many reasons not the least of which is that the community rarely holds one single view on anything, since it is a diverse group of players with differing experiences and motives).

If a player wants to get in touch with you, the best way to contact you is:

Skype: Cross Atu
Chat Channel: CPM1 Candidate
Email: CrossAtu69[at]gmail[dot]com
EVE character: Cross Lui Greine
In-game mail: Cross Atu

What is your opinion on Project Legion?

The positive aspects of Project Legion; If done well it will provide the universe of Dust 514 persistence beyond simply the New Eden name, once the PS3 hardware is no longer supported by Sony. Meaningful assets such as SP value, AUR purchases, etc. will be transferred, as well as character names and histories. It will allow a more diverse and robust game as the hardware will be more powerful thus offering expanded development and deployment options.
It'll also need a strong community/player base to provide feedback and a will from CCP to consider, and communicate with regards to that feedback.

The two areas that currently concern me the most with regards to Legion are;
1. Dust-Legion persistence. Maintaining strong and clear value transfer of characters currently active in Dust as they move to Legion. The community has put a lot of time, energy, and in many cases money, into Dust and I consider it imperative that those investments be meaningfully carried over into Legion. A simple transfer of cosmetic elements such as name and employment history alone will not suffice and the more resoundingly CCP unequivocally states that transfers will contain the tangible value of things like SP and assets which we've all worked so hard for the better.
2. Respecs - While I would readily support a one time only, non-bankable respec for characters coming out of the academy I am adamantly opposed to limitless respecs within Dust or indeed any New Eden game. A detailed analysis would create a huge wall of text but I'll give the summation here;
If CCP is providing the robust NPE, transparent communication, and continuing balance that they should be respecs past the academy will not be needed. Further limitless respecs will damage the economy, emergent game play, long term player retention and create artificial barriers between Legion and other New Eden games. Limitless respecs also disadvantage newer players.