Jita Park Speakers Corner

from http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2012/10/csm7-transparency.html

One of the favourite lines of CSM7, when they (or CCP) are faced with criticism is: "You don't know what's happening behind the scenes."

That's because there's a serious lack of transparency.

It would seem that, to CSM7, transparency is writing out a 165 page document on a three day meeting. That is the sum total of their transparency. The document is less about what CSM7 cares about, and more about what CCP is planning.

From the outside looking in, CSM7 seems to be nothing more than CCP cheerleaders. Criticise the direction in which CCP seems to be taking the game, rather than CCP explaining their position, defending their development, you have the CSM coming down on anyone daring to criticize their keepers. CSM7 is less a player proxy and more a buffer between CCP and the players. Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure that's not the role the players want their CSM to play.

Devblogs on Retribution are starting to roll out. So, as each feature is announced and explained, the NDA on that feature is effectively dropped. It would be of immense value to the players to now learn where the CSM stands on those features. Where they very much agree with specific feature-sets, where they butted heads with CCP. Where they agreed and disagreed. That's transparency. Information on how CSM7 is actively trying to represent the players to CCP.

Again, from the outside looking in, it appears that CSM7 is more concerned with not pissing off CCP. Because, in their minds to piss off CCP is to anger CCP which might lead to less access to CCP down the road. I'm pretty sure we voted our selected representatives hoping they might have actual opinions, perhaps even strong opinions, on what might be bad and what might be good for this game. What use is having more access, if you're too afraid to speak your mind when presented with this increased access? So, you get to see things you might not otherwise have got to see, but if you have concerns about those things, being afraid to speak up about them, because you might offend someone, because you're afraid of blowback, well, that's not particularly useful at all.

CSM7 may in fact be butting heads with CCP. But, of course, we don't know what's happening behind the scenes. We're not privy and/or entitled. And that's a shame, because a few of these representatives ran on platforms promising to open up and reveal the process to their constituents. While NDAs are in effect, obviously they are hog-tied with respect to how much they can reveal. But the moment the NDAs become moot, we should be seeing lengthy articles on each new feature, the opinions on it from CSM7, where they agreed and where they disagreed.

It's of value to the players to know where their representatives stand. What has made them happy, what has made them sad about an upcoming expansion. Where they think CCP could have done better, where they think CCP has failed.

It can't all be puppy dogs and ice cream between CSM7 and CCP. Yet, from the outside looking in, that's exactly the façade we're all presented with. A big unified front of "everything is working as intended and let's give CCP the benefit of the doubt. Bitching about stuff leads to nowhere good."

Actually, bitching lead to the cancellation of Incarna and a refocus on spaceships. Bitching has been very good for the players. I think we'd like to see where our representatives have spent some time bitching, because it would be disappointing to learn that it's all been lollipops.

And with CCP directly engaging the players, in General Discussion and Features & Ideas and elsewhere, it's not hard to argue that this is an attractive direction for them to be going in, in purely pragmatic terms.

Some of them might have learned that effective public relations is really hard, too.

Since you are talking about me I was very forthright about answering you. The problem is that you couldn't accept that the question you asked was based on agreeing on how to evaluate the result of the barge change. I supported them and still do based on the concept that since I ran to make miners happier and they did I was glad that happened, the fact that you continue to single me out when all the CSM 7 supported the change shows pretty clearly your question was meant as some sort of troll/personal attack. I could have ignored you but I continued to try and get some resolution to your post.

As for what has been announced to date, I am very happy with what we know about crime watch, the new ships, the balancing that has been announced. Feel free to make specific asks on a feature by feature basis and I am happy to discuss within the limits of the NDA what I think about what we can expect.

Some folks have stated that the next expansion seems light. I think part of that is that a lot of what we are going to see is the "same" stuff we have now, but having it behave differently. So not as clear as the "new shiny" many expansions have provided.

So feel free to ask about specifics. You'll get an answer from me, even if you choose to try and frame it as not answering because you were trying trying to get some "specific" answer to "trap" someone into saying something you think you want to use to affect the next election.

CSM 7 is being very transparent, you are just using some bizarre filter to pretend we aren't engaging the community.

Issler

Appearing on a podcast is not necessarily transparency.

Telling some podcast guy that "we spend a lot of time on Skype" is not transparent. What are you talking about? What did you agree with? What did you disagree with? With the NDA for Retribution beginning to fall by the wayside (devblogs should invalidate NDAs, because the info is now out in the open), the CSM should begin detailing their opinions on the new features, the good and the bad, especially where they told CCP there would be problems, etc.

That gives us a fuller picture of how well each CSM member actually understands the game and their area of interest, and how well they are representing the playerbase.

I give CSM7 a fair amount of credit. I am pretty impressed with several of their members.

But I have to say some of this rings true to me, and echoes opinions I've held and even expressed.

I too have a concern that it is easy getting sucked into being buds with the devs. (Which is great to a degree, but tell them when they are walking off a cliff! Yell at them if you have to.)

Which would seem to be why the CSM wasn't so quick to pick up on the issues with the Unified Inventory. (Although also mitigating was there was a lot else going on at that point in time that seemed more likely to be disaster at first glance.)

I do appreciate Hans' more recent posts, but yes I agree: It would be helpful as the NDAs lift if we could here more about what happened behind the scenes.

As much as most of us would love that to happen, it probably won't. CSM doesn't want to criticise CCP openly, because then CCP will cut them off. (Or so they think.) The CSM is neutered with this fear.

Oh sure, they'll tell us they've disagreed with CCP, but without knowing on what they disagreed, it's an empty statement. An easy statement to make, if you don't have to back it up.

We never got this sort of pandering when The Mittani was in charge. CSM8 needs a strong capable leader again.

Sums up my concerns pretty well.

Not sure I am dying to get The Mittani back, there were a lot of negatives to his leadership as well, but I do certainly agree that the current CSM doesn't understand what The Mittani could do with the figurehead position, or perhaps considers it beneath them. Courthouse called it "soft-power". I had a few arguments about this with Hans and a few others dating back to the election even, when they were saying the chair was a meaningless position that had no power.

The standard response to this would be "See you even say its a figurehead position, of course it has no power." It doesn't come with power or influence. It comes with the opportunity to create it.

I see this happening to an extent. The CSM's stakeholder project could lead to something truly remarkable. But if they sacrifice the ability to be critical... the ability to take a stand when something is going horribly wrong... then what good is it? On that point I think we agree, Poetic.

Yeah, in the spirit of transparency , what did the CSM think of the newest dev blog?

Personally I think it is too much for CCP Guard to sneak to close to other CCP devs, even with camoflage. Guard was obviously hacking in that video.

Also which CSM member told CCP to hire more hot women for their company? I think I smell a CSM 8 chairmen already.

Yea, everyone would want an inside knowledge about upcoming changes(and benefit from them ?) before they will be know to the masses

Poe, they come out with verbatim (save NDA material) transcripts from the meetings, they do townhalls, Dev's are communicating more, and CSM are even personally emailing back replies to any and all reasonable emails and questions to them. Case in point, Trebor and Twostep have replied to questions I have asked them about with thorough clarity and full support to discuss if required.

What more do you want from a video game?