Jita Park Speakers Corner

look at it this way:

The CSM gives good advice and gets the credit for whipping CCP into shape.
The CSM gives bad advice and CCP employees lose their jobs.

Power without corresponding accountability requires very good justification.

The CSM is asking for power comparable to that of internal stakeholders but while those internal stakeholders put their job, their life, their family, their mortgage, their future career, ... at stake with every decision they make, all the CSM stands to lose is their position as internet spaceship politicians. Even in the absolutely worst case scenario the CSM only would have to choose one of a dozen other MMOs to spend their spare time with (the horror...).

This discussion would probably have been a lot easier before the summer of rage, before Monoclegate and before last year's lay-offs but now you have to expect CCP employees to be acutely aware of just how much skin they have in the game (and that the CSM is quite willing to throw CCP under the bus "for the greater good" while walking away unscathed).
Just like EVE players will never forget the t20 incident CCP is not going to forget the events of 2010/2011 and that is a burden CCP senior management and the CSM have to cope with.

The onus on the CSM in this situation is not just to provide a convincing argument regarding how well they could help CCP if given more opportunities for input but also to illustrate just how important EVE is to them (and to the playerbase at large) to justify the additional power they ask for emotionally.

"Give us more power and Monoclegate will never happen again" alone is not enough as it leaves "And what if you are wrong? What if monoclegate does happen again because you misjudged the community's reaction? What happens then?" unanswered.

The players don't have a great track record when it comes to giving input on game design - one day they spam the forums with "Free CCP Abathur" until CCP finally caves in and the next day they heap absurd amount of hate & vitriol on CCP for breaking the game by making supercapitals overpowered.
A credible argument for giving the CSM more influence cannot rely on the CSM always being right.

I just thought of more. There is actually one example I know of of players designing well. Just one I think. Out of all the failure.

With modding. Usually players do well with creating modding ideas. Fallout even went so far to add player mods to their later games I believe. Or dota being a mod, then LoL coming from that. Also WoW hired someone from the Evequest legacy to help with doing dungeons, ( Which in my opinion are pretty creative coming from table top design and almost work as a sandbox feature by Blizzard, so I include him a player helping out in that sense)

CCP does like the sandbox idea with their game, so the CSM or players with modding might work or make sense. But as you like to point out or most players do, that with monocle gate. CCP is very much a company and prefers to have business and make money for their efforts.

So for the minimum the CSM might be argued to only help out with modding concerns or sandbox issues and ideas for them and stuff.

The other will be hard to argue perhaps with CCP being a real company and preferring that status, to have players involved or CSM. ( I think only 80s movies show that to be a good idea :that normal folk or everyday folk being the CEO or king is a good idea:. And with icelandic people already being viking like, I highly doubt many of them were exposed to 80s film as a form as medicine most of us take them as.)

So with business structure plus game ideas that are mostly company promoted and mostly for ~profits~ , that will be harder to argue that the CSM involvement is a good idea, or would be unpredictable to how it would work out.

( I have sadly played X3 and was a short time fan of it, so it is fun to think about ~profits~ with EVE)

I think the topic of this thread is shows some of what is wrong with the CSM. The CSM isn't a stakeholder and shouldn't be. The players are stakeholders, sadly they lack an effective representation.