Market Discussions

Hi everyone.

Every election since the CSM4 elections I've ran CSM Vote Match, a website where you can match your views and opinions about Eve with the views and opinions of the CSM candidates. Since the Vote Match website looks like it is from 1997 I'm currently building version 2.0 from scratch which will offer much greater functionality and more nuanced matching! You can preview the new website here, but keep in mind it's currently still filled with placeholder and mockup content.

But I need your help!

I need statements to present to the candidates (and the voters), and I like them to be as diverse and useful as possible. It's not easy coming up with 40 statements by myself so that is why I am asking you.

I am specifically looking for statements that:

• Are unambiguous and clear in their meaning
• Can be answered with "Strongly disagree", "Disagree", "No opinion", "Agree", "Strongly agree"
• Do not require a full paragraph of text to explain themselves

So an example of a good statement would be:

This statement is clear in it's meaning, can be answered as needed and is fairly succinct.

Additionally, I am also including open questions in Vote Match this year. The open questions will not be used in the matching process but will be visible on each candidate's profile page. So I also need suggestions questions you would like all candidates to answer.

Please help, because the questionnaire will only be as good as the statements we can come up with!

TL;DR
I need you to give me statements that can answered with "Strongly disagree", "Disagree", "No opinion", "Agree", "Strongly agree" for use in CSM Vote Match. Also I am looking for open questions to ask the candidates.

I think good questions would not be pure feature requests but would be questions that allow us to learn something about the candidates' attitude and mentality.

There is simply no reason for any CSM candidate to say no to a question such as "Markets charts should have an option to enable candle stick bars or at least HLC bars", so everyone will just answer "Strongly agree" and move on. The question is also at a level of detail that the CSM does not deal with.
"CCP should improve the visualization of market history data" would be a more suitable statement but is still an instant "strongly agree" as long as it is not connected to some sort of trade-off.
(e.g. "CCP should make overhauling the market interface one of their top priorities for an upcoming expansion" would make it more obvious that voting "Agree" includes a statement about the prioritization of this issue relative to everything else).

"An EvE markets quasi real time data feed should be made available through something like the EvE API." is a good question as there is no "right" or "wrong" answer.
Some might agree with all the benefits such a change would bring (more efficient markets, easier options for analysis with 3rd party tools, official solution to a problem that players have tried solving with limited success for a long time [eve-central, eve-marketdata], ...) while others would probably be completely set against such a feature (efficient markets are not in the traders' best interest, market information coming at a substantial cost [necessity to use price check alts etc] or being incomplete/outdated enables many styles of inter-regional trading, further blow to the contract market, ...).

Some ideas:

• Markets & Industry as the focus of an entire expansion (in the near-ish future).
• Level of interaction between CREST and the EVE market (OOG manipulation of orders?)
• Introduction of game mechanics that would enable secure (player-run) banking
• InterBus NPC courier service
• Restrictions on market orders (increasing or reducing the waiting time before orders can be adjusted; increasing fees for manipulating market orders; killing undercutting by 0.01 ISK; ....)
• Should the broker system be scrapped entirely? (would allow players to select which order they sell to or buy from)
• Automated order adjustments (see Ebay's automatic bidding for inspiration)

I think the answers to questions along these lines would tell us a lot more about the CSM candidates' view of the market-related aspects of EVE than variations on "Don't you agree that we all should get a daily free lunch?"
This is not about writing a wishlist to CCP and the CSM, the point of vote match is to find out which candidate is the best fit to your idea of how EVE should look like and that requires making the candidates answer controversial questions.

(disclaimer: the only statement in my list of ideas for questions that I would actually agree with is increasing the fee for the manipulation of market orders, everything else would get a strong "disagree" from me - but that's not the point.)

As for the open-ended questions, I suspect that the most obvious one would be something like "of the many facets of gameplay in need of improvement (insert list), which of these should the CSM lobby for priority and why?"

I've a question about the vote match tool. Will the question text be allowed to be lengthy? I think Vera's point about detailing the advantages/disadvantages/implications of the proposal (in the question) is a good one. It makes it possible to easily see why one might be in favor or opposed. Absent the details, I think the questions might receive too many knee-jerk answers.

MDD

Strongly agree on all counts. These suggestions all fall into "useful", "harmless", or "potentially and hilariously exploitable."


Note: This should not be taken as an announcement of a run for CSM8.