Jita Park Speakers Corner

If a CSM guy requires a trip to Iceland to be frank with CCP, then he should never have been elected in the first place.

Per Trebor's comment on his Crossing Zebras interview (IIRC) then being on the CSM is a very inefficient way of going to iceland. If you value the "free" trip at £1000, then that works out to an effective rate of about £0.60-£1.00 an hour for the 1000-1500 hours a hard-working CSM puts in. It would be far easier to get a job at MacDonalds or stacking shelves at Tescos for a couple of months and use the money to pay for a holiday that doesn't involve 3 days of meetings in a converted fish factory in Reykjavik in November.

I disagree. The trip to Iceland is hardly a reward; it's time I could be spending earning money at my job for my family.

I'm running for the CSM because I want to make an honest contribution to the game. A trip to Iceland, and whether or not I get chosen for that, doesn't even enter my equation.

Because there is honest work done at it. It's a disadvantage for me, but not going means I get to contribute even less over the course of a year.

They get the reward of making EVE better, which is why they're running in the first place.

If I wanted "rewards" other than that, I wouldn't be competing for a 'job' that pays a quid an hour. I'd just sign up to do a few weekends and bank holidays at work, and enjoy my extra money and time in lieu. It'd only take me a few weeks to get a far better 'reward'.

You seem to be stuck on this idea that the iceland conferences are a jolly, a treat, a reward. But all the CSM reps that have been to them are unanimous in saying that they're actually very hard work. Do you think they're all lying?

But trebor has perfectly well stated that the trip is unimportant these days.

So it is a reward for working hard or as it is now a reward for becoming a CCP mouth piece.

Wow. He didn't say that at all.

Well, when you're convinced there's a conspiracy, it doesn't matter what anyone else says. Best of luck to you in your crusade.

Glad to see you are so sure about your facts, that you attack people on the strength of them.




Yeah well with fact checking like yours you will make a great CSM member.

But then of course you are doing it for the sake of the game and although it may be a hardship for you, I am sure your lack of fact checking was just for the sake of the game. You sound like Trebor Mark II, would you like the Vice Chairman's seat so someone can get to be secretary

I agree completely, Frying.

The only way the CSM will have any relevance at all is if CCP has no say or oversight over it. Otherwise CCP will always be able to corrupt the process. It's obvious that we can't allow CCP to pick and choose who gets to go to iceland and who doesn't.

That's only a start on what's needed to fix the broken CSM, though. Even if we just sent whoever has the most votes, guess who controls the votes? CCP. CCP will just pick brown nosing yes men and say they won. Only CCP counts the votes, so how would we know? Voting needs to be handled by an impartial third party. This way we can insure the validity and credibility of the votes. As long as CCP is involved, we can't be sure CCP isn't rigging the election.

The next step, once we have insured CCP can't stop us from getting the people we really want in office is protecting those people from reprisal. If a player decides to speak up and challenge CCP they can easily be silenced by CCP threatening to ban their account. The logical way to prevent this is to make it so CSM members are immune from any disciplinary action from CCP, but that's obviously open to abuse. Open to abuse by CCP threatening the friends, family and corpmates of the CSM delegates. The only way to be sure is to make CCP relinquish the ability to police accounts all accounts to an independent entity. Perhaps the same one that handles the voting. Once CCP can't take action against any accounts, CSM members will be free to say what they really think. Mostly.

Of course, this doesn't completely solve the problem. They can still effect players through game design. For example if a CSM member from a big Null sec alliance tries to speak out, they could change their space to be really crappy, or just nerf null sec isk into the ground. Therefore, CCP needs to relinquish the ability to make game changes to an independent third party, who will then develop the game on CCP's behalf.

There is still the issue that CCP has hired this company to do handle voting and policing and game design for them and thus can fire them if they don't do what CCP says. So instead CCP should just sell EvE to another company. This way CCP has no undue influence over the CSM.

Once CCP has no control over the game, we'll finally be able to have a fair and impartial CSM that is willing to speak it's mind and challenge CCP on what it could theoretically do in the game if they still had tha ability to do things. As long as EvE is CCP's game, CCP will have a say in what happens in it. Obviously, we can't allow that.

So we put you in the basket of not caring that the power of your votes is diminished, understood. Also so nice to see someone so trusting of CCP and having faith in them not to lie, oh and I have a lovely bridge I would like to sell you.