Assembly Hall

Yes if there is one thing that will increase the effectiveness of the CSM, it's ensuring that only those people who have to spend half their term getting used to the way CCP works can be elected. We should definitely toss that experience into the dumper and ensure that only inexperienced CSMs represent us. This is not at all a back-door proposal to get rid of CSMs you don't like even though they got lots of votes because you're afraid that the CSMs you do like won't get as many.

I for one will resist them, because it's impossible to properly implement it. And in any case, very few players stay in one particular niche for their entire EVE careers.

WRT to focusing on one area to the exclusion of others, right now the focus is on fixing basic stuff that broadly affects a lot of people. Getting CCP to implement Dead Horse POS's, for example, is something that helps everyone. Improving industry and mining makes hisec more interesting and nullsec more valuable -- and worth fighting over. And so on, and so on.

People in the CSM might disagree over whether iterating nullsec sov or FW or lowsec is the highest priority, but these are disagreements at the margins. And if a sharp-eyed dev at CCP comes up with (or notices on the forums!) a low-cost way to iterate an existing game feature (like FW, or bounties), we are certainly going to get behind that, even if it doesn't directly affect an area of the game we hold near and dear -- because the bang for the buck will be too good to ignore.

As far as changes for the CSM is concerned, I found myself agreeing with what The Mittani posted in his Chairman's thread:

CSM needs more marketing avenues with the actual game of eve.

like:
Splash screen on Load up
the IN CQ captian Quarters
the In space TV in space near Jump Gates

if it is in game - the CSM will have to work in "Role playing " some of the topics to avoid emerssion breaking

A link to the in game Browser's Wiki of the CSM would be Handi
or a web page pointing to a particular poll

One of the larges concerns I have is the developing of official polls the need to be neutral. Several Polls written by the CSM during the summer of incarnage were written with incredibly bias.
If a poll is written it should be done by that CSM Mediator guy. So that the polls will depict an unbias question and provide a valid answer.

The private Polls that when out during the last Summer (the market research) the CSM should view the results of these, so they can temper of what they see from the forums that can easily suffer from group think vs what people are thinking on an individual by individual basis.
They then can leverage their vocal minority input to position that also addresses the information collected from the surveys.

Here's an idea for getting people to vote: create a new faction frigate and only give it to people who vote. It doesn't have to be Dramiel 2.0, just something worth having.

Or maybe a vanity item. Or a choice, that faction frig, a *GOOD* vanity item, or *insert third good idea here*

I wish nda was information was not talked about or at least was the exception rather than the rule. Here are the problems:

1) Its unclear how alliance leaders that are on the csm don't get an advantage from hearing what changes are being made in advance of the other players. Is there any clear guidlines on how the csm should act. For example Alliance leader csm hears super caps are being nerfed. Another leader in his alliance then tells him "Super caps are the **** we are putting all our resources toward creating huge fleets of them." How is the CSM alliance leader supposed to respond? Is he to say well we discussed the future of supercaps at an nda meeting so I must recuse myself from any alliance decision making relating to supercaps?? Its insider trading.

Ok I agree that with any one thing this may not amount to much - just a slight advantage. But when you add it all together anoms nerfed/buffed dreads nerfed buffed basically csm knows all the changes well in advance of other players.

2) Even if somehow csm can explain how the above does not give them an advantage it seems to me there is still the appearance of an advantage. This appearance will lead more people to want to join the alliances where the leaders are in the know. This also gives the alliances an advantage.

3) Most importantly, the nda and csm has just built a wall between players and ccp. CSM never really discusses much at all with the players on the forums. And the conversations that do happen are often chilled by the csm worrying they will be anked for overstepping the nda.

Basically csm has become the receptionist for ccp. When players want to know something csm says “CCP is unavailable” and when we ask them its always “well we can’t really say what we know because of nda.” Look at the “discussion” about the secret meetings with zulu. Really why csm at all? Zulu knew the players weren’t happy. Couldn’t zulu himself told the players ccp is reworking things and he will let us know. Why did he need csm to tell us that.

With new emphasis on NDA the csm has become pretty silly. If ccp wants CSM to be a focus group to run ideas by then fine but don’t claim csm is representing views of the players when the players aren’t even privy to the issues discussed.

CCP has bought some good will with the players they no longer need csm to be a buffer. CSM should be able to come back from a meeting and tell players about everything they discussed. Sure some ideas will be howlers but that’s not the end of the world.

So for these reasons I think the nda discussions should be scrapped and if ccp isn’t willing to discuss things with the players that should include the players on the csm. Short of that there should be precious little that is bound by the nda. Otherwise csm is really just acting like a receptionist/wall between players and ccp.

BTW: I do not mean to suggest anyone on the csm did anything wrong with any nda information. I don’t pretend to know one way or another. But until I understand what sort of guidelines are followed when it comes to how they deal with nda information its hard to see that their alliances are not reaping benefits.

Make sure that all (or most) aspects/areas of Eve are represented .. the travesty that is the current null council is bad for Eve as whole.

Wield in what way?

In game I think the alliance leaders who are also on csm will do better in general than those who are not on csm.

Outside the game I think we saw people unsubscribing en mass that influenced ccp.

I think we saw csm often explain that they couldn't say much due to nda so players never really knew what was going on.


I'm not sure if you include my post in the collection of "tinfoil" but I'm sure even you could see that the nda was onerous this time around.

Why not make it so the nda is the exception and not the rule? That is make it so csm can discuss with the players they supposedly represent about what they discussed with ccp unless there is clear indication it is nda? Now it seems the other way around. It seems you can't discuss anything with he players unless ccp says you can.

CCP dictate NDAs, not the CSM. Maybe you missed the blogs and posts where all the CSMs have said that they want to reduce the use of the NDA-bat - but they're also unanimous that they need to be able to see information that really does need to be NDA'd in order to function.

Good then csm seems to agree with me. Maybe that will be a topic of conversation.

To say "ccp dictate nda's, not the csm" is irrelevant. CCP dictates *everything* in game but this is a meeting between ccp and csm. So CSM could presumably discuss things that they want changed - liked the extremely overbearing nda cloud that looms over their communication with players.