Jita Park Speakers Corner

I think the current system is fine, with a single vote for each account. Any problems with large organized blocks gaming the system or null-sec getting too high representation is easily remedied by increasing the amount of voters. In order to do so, the CSM must be more visible for the playerbase as a whole.

Let me quickly tell a bit about my own situation, to show you what I mean. I'm a fairly active player. I have 3 accounts, one which is my main character that I pvp with. The second is my PI account, while the third is a high-sec trader/manufacturer. I read several EVE blogs daily, and I pay attention to our alliance forums and various news sites. I only started playing back in February, so I'm a fairly new player. Still though, I think it's safe to say I'm pay more attention to what happens with EVE than the average player. I'm not the most hardcore by far though.

The whole mess with Trebors thread is honestly the first thing I've seen CSM do since Mittani was thrown out. I can't come up with a single thing I can remember them doing, or a single change they've been responsible for. Why should the average player care about voting, when they don't even know if the CSM is doing anything? Even those who took the time to vote, cannot know if their representative is doing anything. I know there was some minutes released, but very few people are honestly going to read through that. All this creates an extreme voter apathy. I'll likely vote for whoever the goon leadership endorses, just because I have no idea what the CSM has done or who is responsible for what.

I will say that the way the various CSM members handled Trebors thread, has made me even less impressed with the CSM, but at least it gives me an impression about the various members. There's literally not a single other thing I have to form an impression about them, which is quite sad considering how long it's been since the election.

CCP and/or CSM needs to do something to give the CSM exposure, and give us all information on what the current members are doing, if anything. Right now, they might as well do absolutely nothing for all we know. Find a way to do this, and more people will vote, fixing the problems you are concerned about.

I think talking about specific voting systems is getting way too ahead of ourselves. If effort is expended into anything RE: CSM elections, it should be primarily geared towards increasing awareness and trying to (a) make sure people know about the CSM and (b) determining if they want any part in the process.

The first part to this is to really reach out to the playerbase to make sure they even know about this:

- Eve-mails to every character and E-mails to every account annoucing CSM landmark events, i.e. Candidacy period is opened, voting has started, here's the results, CSM summit is happening, CSM minutes are here. That sort of thing. Nothing terribly invasive or frequent, but enough to make sure as many people are in on this as possible.

- Client splash screens. This can be done for all of the above, and when it comes time to vote, perhaps in-client voting options? "I wish to vote now", "I wish to vote later", "I abstain from voting", and "What is this all about?" or something like that. IMO, it's important to make sure this isn't forced, just a convenience option. Forcing people will just result in button mashing to get into the game, which helps nobody at all.

The next step is to create as welcoming an environment for the new participants as possible:

- Ditch the Assembly hall and turn Jita Park Speakers Corner into *the* CSM forum. Assembly Hall is an awful, outmoded idea that not only comes off as a stuffy clone of Features & Ideas, but it paints the wrong image of what the CSM is even for. They're an advocacy group, not a dictaphone for the players' ideas.

- Encourage far, far more CSM participation in this new, single CSM forum. One of the sources of outrage of the debacle known as the Voting Reform thread was due to the CSM's near radio silence on the forums before that, so the impression was "they came out of the woodwork for THIS?". JPSC is a dead zone right now, and I'd be willing to bet a large part of that is due to the basically zero CSM participation in any of the discussions that actually happen. Change this and I'd be willing to bet it'd actually become populated, as opposed to just the "Frying Doom Argument Sanctuary" that it is now.

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Once the above is done, wait an election, see what kind of data you get (abstains vs new voters vs straight-up ignores etc), and then we can have a discussion about voting systems with either (a) the new players or (b) knowing that there won't be many new players. Until that point, talking about it just turns the CSM into even more of a closed system than it already is.

Obviously, none of this is a guarantee of anything. It might be entirely ignored or completely ineffectual. I think the ideas themselves are good representations of the directions we need to go if we actually want more participation in the CSM at all, both from a candidate and player POV.

(Being able to search for CSM forum tags wouldn't hurt)

This is done today. Or, at least email, I don't remember when it comes to evemails, since I get very little interesting evemails so I end up bulk ignoring most of it.


I believe client splash screens are done already, although the suggestion someone else came up with of being able to buy banner space, maybe even with attack banners (all within reason, of course) strikes me as hilarious, and something which could whip up some interest. Titillating news/drama titillates, after all.

If incarna hadn't been such a dud, and the CQ had been more prevalent than it is now, then maybe we could've started having in-game ads which display out and about in various station environments, where candidates could purchase their own blurb or x second animation etc. Maybe we'll have this by CSM20.

As for the in-client voting option, the most obvious thing here would be to fully utilize the ingame browser. Barring that, maybe make the neocom spout a button at the bottom (near the undock button) which opens up the IGB at the voting page. But above all, as you say, the prime focus must be convenience, and not forcing anything.

This is a very sensible approach to begin with. I especially agree that we need to streamline the forum categories, the fact that the Assembly Hall is a graveyard for every obscure idea in the game is a relic of the "old-school" way of running the CSM and needs to be deleted so that players know to post in Features and Ideas instead.

Summarizing the CSM's activities should be our own responsbility - this doesnt have to take place through evemail spam. I actually have a report I've been compiling over the weekend that will be posted on my blog within 24 hours here that will cover our work since the summit, and will release subsequent updates as we continue towards the Winter expansion. I will mirror each of these in Jita Park as well for the forum users.

I would also strongly urge CCP to implement searchable, linked tags for the CSM members much like we do with Dev posts. Players should be able to easily spot threads containing CSM postings, and be able to quickly jump between them as they do for developers. A lot of us are quite active on the forums, but players shouldn't have to click each of our names individually and read through our recent posts to find what they need, more visibility throughout the forums in general would be greatly appreciated, and is boosted by simply coding our tags the way the developer tags work.

We also desperately need a *single* email address, "CSM7" or something like that In-game, where all EVEmail can be sent to the entire CSM. Players could very well be contacting one of the non-contributing, inactive members and have their concerns DOA if the rest of us aren't aware that's going on. A single email point of contact ensures that we can all be held responsible for taking care of player concerns even if several members are slacking hard.

I agree with you that 'wasted' votes is an uncomfortable term - but this is perhaps not the best time to dig deeper into that.

I also agree that increasing the requirements to get on the ballot is needed. The test during the last election showed that it weeded out some candidates (I cannot remember the exact number), so putting it higher with a slight change to the system should be the way to go.
I haven't figured out how the change should be, but I believe most people agree that using forum 'Likes' should be abandoned

1) People should be able to vote for a council, not one member. There should be fewer spots on the council, and fewer candidates. I'd make the council 7 spots, 12 candidates, and after #7, they're alternates. If someone has to resign, dies, goes inactive, whatever, the next person steps up. Each account should vote for the 7 members they'd have on the council. That means organized blocs can "game" the system, but having 3 voices all saying the same thing doesn't actually matter with the council. The bloc is more likely to get 3 people with different strengths, as it serves the overall game, and themselves more that way.

2) www.eveonline.com should have a box for the CSM where the current council is listed, as well as their twitter accounts, blogs, whatever. I'd rather the CSM keeps most of their stuff on the forums, as it's a central place, but most seem to rather do it out of the forums, and just point people there.

3) CSM tags in the forums is a great idea. (Add the GM tags too while you're there)

4) The CSM box from the main webpage should have the platforms of the candidates that won after the election, and before the election should have all the platforms. The platforms should list the 6 other members that those players would select to join them on the council. They could also even slam the candidates they believe have been useless in the past, as it's just another part of their own platform.

5) You should be able to vote from the in game browser. Each candidate should have a link to the main CSM page with their platform. During the voting time, the link for the voting can be in the MOTD.

6) Transparency of the CSM is a big limiting factor currently. When the CSM finishes a discussion in their private forum, the thread should be moved to Jita Park after NDA clears it. It would be nice for the players to know who fought for what, without having to take their word for it.

In general, RL interest in politics is very low and why should mister Joe Average (or his counterpart, Jane Average) want to think about it when they are entertaining themselves in EVE Online? Another point that I think we, as in players that DO vote and CCP, could work on is that while Null sec candidates are prominent, many of them have gone through much of the game content - meaning that they DO know high sec, low sec, manufacturing, running missions, etc. So, while a candidate might represent Null sec, he or she is far from being ignorant of the rest. In fact, I must state that most of the CSM people that have been elected throughout the years have had a good understanding of EVE as a whole. We have to bring this fact into the light.


I understand your argument, but I lean towards not changing my opinion - i.e. the CSM doesn't fit ingame. The CSM sits in the meta-game, channeling stuff into EVE and out from EVE.


The splash ads have already been utilized (three ads for every election IIRC). Having to sign in using the ingame web browser is a technical thing, as signing into the game doesn't sign you into the web section (and vice versa).


1. Already like that
2 & 3. Things to think about
4. I've had the standard of 'if you don't have an EVE criminal record you can run' - excluding someone because he cannot gather 2 bills is, in my mind, a weaker condition rather than having to gather support from, say, 300 people.
5. Annoying people on the login screen might not be the best way to go. People should (I know this might sound naive) vote because they have an opinion, not because I tell them to.
6. Me and the CSM are working on this.
7. Now where is that email for that CSM Secretary?
8. It is currently like that.
9. This is a bit difficult because the CSM is just ONE of the channels they go to for feedback. However, when the CSM has had an impact they are more often than not mentioned in blogs or where ever talks about these matters happen (conferences, media interviews, etc.)
10. If they don't, they have to answer to me

Thank you for the feed back.

Yes they could.

I've also been thinking about the following scenario:
Hold regular elections for CSM8, using current voting mechanics.
Make that dictate the results.
On the side run an experiment on a new voting system and see the results from that using the voting data from CSM8 election.
Investigate and spit-shine and use new voting system for CSM9 if viable.

Just a thought in terms of a possible implementation strategy.