Surprise! I'm answering them now.
Why should I vote for you, and what do you plan to actually do?
You should vote for me if you think I would do a good job representing you in the council. I could sit here all day and talk about how
unbelievably handsome I am, how STRONK at combat I am, or that I'm simply better than the other council members. However, who I am matters relatively little. What you should be looking at is how well I can communicate the ideas of others, and how well I work with others. It's one thing to be able to promote your own thoughts effectively; that's awesome if you can, but that's not what this job is about. This is a job to represent and communicate. What leadership exists will probably be derived from the charisma of being elected to the council in the first place.
My plan of action if elected is probably going to be inline with the council roles laid down by duke, namely the following:
- Seek opinions from the community on ideas and suggestions, issues and concerns, and present them to the dev team for consideration.
- Hold public and private forum discussions on key ideas and issues in order to deliberate and decide what the community thinks to be the best course of action.
I really think that defenses need a bit of tweaking. Shields are close, armor is on the horizon, but radar jam and cloak still need a lot of work. I intend to work with the community and see what they want from a revamp to those systems. Although hull has been discussed repeatedly (and so has shields) I think that there's still some discussion to be had about how these defensive effects can interact better with the myriad combinations of weapons we have, especially when I see so many interesting suggestions on the forum. I hope to collate and gather these suggestions into one topic that can hash out how we really want these to work and interact with the universe.
My other topic is in regards to resource acquisition. We've reached a point where mining is worthwhile, however it's still difficult to find certain materials within asteroids. This leads players to exploit planets to feed their economic juggernauts. Unfortunately, this KILLS the server. I've seen some suggestions that would still allow mining planets as a lazy, easy option for reasources, while still making controlling planets worthwhile. Right now, all planets are good for is target practice, strip-mining, and creative building. 99% of the time, you are better off making your home on a station. I hope to promote and facilitate further discussion about how planets can be useful beyond that.
Who is your daddy? And what does he do?
He's an advertising executive who also produces a
home improvement radio show.
My real question is what have you done in starmade?
Oh, crap. Now I feel silly. :p
I'll answer this with my proudest achievements; I think they are the best representations of what I've accomplished in my time as a part of this community. If I don't answer satisfactorily, please, elaborate on your question.
1) The original Arstotzkan Confederacy. Those guys were some of the best I've ever played with. During the time it existed ( 3-4 months ) we grew to be the largest faction on NASS, and collected some of the more inspired players I've ever met. After we went inactive the few of us that stuck around managed to do some ridiculous stuff. Best examples of this when four of us in ~7k mass frigates with drone fighters managed to break through the DFN defense line during the
"final battle" and kill
FlyingDebris himself (no hard feelings). Many of the core members of the Confederacy are actually still part of the group today.
The reason the faction came to exist in the first place was as an entry for players from
Blockland to learn how to play StarMade with friends. It's branched out to also include /vg/ since then, plus the necrotic nature of BLF has kind of resulted in a very obvious demographic shift.
2) I was part of the tester staff for a little while (3-4 months). The reason this is one of my proudest achievements is because I was able to contribute to testing the forums we use now, and remained a tester during the transition/introduction of AndyP (meaning I was at least actually testing the game). I wish I could be more precise, but I'm having trouble finding the exact date that I was "hired" and when I "quit". I ended up quitting that for a couple of reasons. The big one was that I was dealing with an 18 hour semester, two jobs, and I had just started a position as a Resident Assistant at my university. These factors resulted in me not being able to get much done. I didn't feel that it would be fair to keep the title without doing any of the legwork, so I quit.
3) The one achievement I am most proud of was running the NASS hardcore server. It was run by
BDLS and myself, with gameplay somewhat similar to what we have today. Rewind about a year and this was revolutionary. Fixed recipes, buy with blocks, zero friction, complete inventory drop on death, and disabling shop spawning ENTIRELY made for a radically different and much more difficult player experience. It was popular for a short time but it became increasingly difficult to maintain (every update required re-writing the blockconfig.txt) and dwindling server population caused BDLS and I to kill the project. However, the people who did play enjoyed the server immensely. The big turn off for players was when they got killed by a pirate and dropped all their salvage, haha.
what is your favourite type of cake?
This is a hard one. It's probably going to be bundt-style cakes.
I'm also impartial to Pink Velvet cake from ruggles green. It's like red velvet, but instead of chocolate it's strawberry.
If you were to be elected, and you would be able to freely choose the remaining council from the applicants, who would you choose with which priority?(as the amount of seats in the council isn't determined yet)
And why would you choose them?
Oh god, I'm going to be judged eternally for these answers, aren't I?
I'm going to go with a theoretical 8 players on the council. That's 1/6 (roughly) of the players who applied, and I think that's a good number of councillors. Minus myself, the seven I would choose would be the following:
MrFURB - He does his job, and manages to stay a likable human being as he does it. Plus, he's good with people. If he isn't elected I'll be legitimately shocked.
Also he's from Texas so I gotta watch out for my Texan brothers.
Pi-Rex - I really appreciated his initiative with the combat guide he's been curating. This demonstrates a marked interest in helping new players defeat the INCREDIBLY daunting learning curve this game has with combat.
therimmer96 -
If you're in trouble he will save the day... He's one of the Admins on Elwyn, and he's active on the forums. I mention the adminship on Elwyn because it's currently the top-ranked server and one of the most populous. I swear, I'm not shilling for EE, but I think he'd be a good representative of such a large concentration of players.
Dalmont - He's one of the artistic ship builders who can take criticism worth a damn. I'm not going to go into my shpiel here, but when you're dealing with the public, being able to stand up to criticism, and be able to learn from it, is a invaluable skill.
Crusade - He's one of my top choices as council member anyways. His music is generally pretty good, and he gets along with most of the community.
Vanhelzing - Active on the forums and helpful with new players. Accurate EVE ships are a huge plus.
Sven_the_slayer - Also active on forums, he's done a fair bit of (awesome) work with logic, and helped teach others how to use it.
EDIT: I would've answered you but you asked the question so you were disqualified :P sorry. Although in all honesty, it would be awesome to have someone on the council who understood the game's code
I like to think that this would give a decent cross-section of the community here. The most important thing I was looking for here is experience interacting with the community, and I mean actual interaction beyond simply providing content.
6 - Planetary resource acquisition and factional economy
1 - Large object and logic (+ update distance) optimization
3 - Integration of RP/interior/crew into meaningful game mechanics
4 - Additional astronaut mode content, including equipment
7 - Graphical weapons update: better scaling of visual FX, explosions, smoke, particles, "battle flair"
2 - Mechanical weapons and systems update: Improvement and/or niche-finding for underused weapon/system combinations
5 - Single player content for both servers and actual localhost (mobs, NPCs, missions, trade)
8 - Fleet control (of varying depth; at least some basic commands like follow, protect and similar)
I've numbered the topics in the quote in order of importance, with 1 being critical, and 8 being most minor. I'll note that three and four can be interchangeable, as they both relate to one another. I feel bad about putting Fleet control last (I can think of MANY times in the past month that such AI/player commands would have been useful) but everything else is more important. I'll also note that I put singleplayer content in the bottom half, but I'm biased towards multiplayer anyways. In a creative game, I find the most enjoyment comes from sharing creations with others.
