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CSM8 status update: Week four

CSM8 has now been in office for a full month! The time is really going by fast.

With Odyssey's scheduled release only a few days away and with all of the interesting problems over the last week culminating in a very eventful Sunday in Iceland, the CSM hasn't had a whole lot to do. Our stake-holder meetings are now officially wrapped up for this release, though as a group we continue to be extremely active in giving CCP our feedback about the final few tweaks in all of Odyssey's new features. I want to give a great big shout out to Ali Aras, who without question has been the CSM8 MVP this week. She and mynnna have done an outstanding job staying on top of the changes to exploration and the new hacking mini-game and its rewards. But Ali's the true genius at this stuff. She's teaching the rest of us about it. Without treading on NDA territory here, I think it's very fair to say that their input is being taken very seriously and that again as a group, the CSM is hearing and communicating your concerns about this feature.

That said, I also think it's clear enough that CCP wants the new hacking mini-game and its associated rewards to emphasize group cooperation. At the end of the day, this is an MMO... I'm also completely convinced that you min-maxers out there -- you know who you are -- will find ways to optimize the rewards you get out of these sites. You wouldn't be EVE players if you didn't do that.

I had three official duties this week. First, I officially announced the date and process for CSM8 Town Hall #1, which will be two weeks from today, June 16 at 1900 EVE time. Once the EVE Online servers come back up, you can find all the details in this thread on the EVE-O forums. Needless to say, I expect this will be a pretty busy town hall and I hope to chat with a lot of you there!

Second, we had our first official "meet and greet" with CCP Seagull, the Senior Producer of EVE Online Development. She was good enough to share with us her thoughts and goals for the next few months and a bit of information about where she wants to go with the game in the next couple of years. Though of course the specifics are under NDA, we've asked permission to share with players the process Seagull hopes to follow in defining the theme for the two expansions that will fall under CSM8's purview as stake-holders.

(Incidentally, I'm still waiting on word of whether the NDA itself is under NDA. Don't worry, that ball will not get dropped.)

Overall though, this was a terrific meeting and a lot of good high-level information was shared with us and we were able to share with Seagull both our backgrounds within the game and our goals for this term of the CSM. It's clear that she values the participation of the CSM in the process and that isn't going to change with all the new faces. So definitely some good news there. We'll be meeting with her again, obviously. And I didn't call her Sunset once.(1) ;-)

Finally as I've already mentioned, I had a great interview/fireside chat with Neville Smit, EVE University's Teaching Manager. This is a really great guy who sought me out at Fanfest even before the CSM election results were announced and asked if I'd be willing to come to E-UNI and be interviewed in this manner, covering my work as an EVE-related blogger if nothing else. I was happy to agree and he gave me his card and a very nice EVE University lapel pin, both of which made the trip back from Iceland with me safely. (I was wearing the pin all day Fanfest Saturday, in fact, including at the Party at the Top of the World.) As I've already said, I'm really pleased with how this interview went and Neville is a superb interviewer. If you're interested in CSM-related topics or blog-related topics, I encourage you to go give it a listen. There are also a large number of other interviews as well in case you're looking for something EVE-related to do...

The other CSM members continue to be busy with their own CSM-related projects and goals. Ali's had four?... five? Space Hangouts so far, and I might have another fun CSM-related project being run by two other CSM members to announce in next week's update. Trebor Daehdoow, our intrepid CSM chair, has also been quite busy working on back-end CSM documentation including a clever way for us to keep in contact and define our goals for the term. Hopefully before too long, I'll also be able to announce the date of the first CCP/CSM8 Summit. Usually, they're the last week in May or the first week in June. I think I can safely say without breaking NDA that's not the case this year.

Finally, the CSM-CCP private forums continue to be quite active with last minute suggestions and begging for Odyssey, as do the CSM-CCP Skype channels. I also hope to announce the date for the first "Features and Ideas" CSM meeting this week as well as kick off the T2 Manufacturing Round Table. I also need to follow up on my promise to get CSM8 member blogs listed off to the right of this one. I intended to do one of those this week, but a nasty flu bug intervened. What can I say except we're all human!


(1) Though I did during the EVE University interview, just for fun, then quickly made it clear I was joking...

CSM8 status report: Week six

Things are picking back up for CSM8!

For me personally, the biggest piece of work was today's CSM8 Town Hall, which I'm pleased to report went off without any major hitches. My sincere thanks again to Neville Smit of EVE University and DJ Wiggles of EVE Radio for their tremendous and valuable assistance! I was pretty busy throughout the Town Hall. In particular, I was extremely pleased at the number of questions! There were so many questions for this first one, in fact, that we ended up not doing any live questions at all, but instead took all our questions from ones sent to me in advance and ones from the in-game channel "CSM Townhall". That will be something we'll have to work on for future town halls.

You can find the more or less full list of questions that were asked and we tried to answer here. We got to almost all of them. Of course, if there are any questions that you didn't get to ask, please feel free to send them along to myself, in the EVE Online forum thread above, or to the CSM member of your choice and we'll do our best to get you some answers for them. Present other than myself were CSM8 members Trebor Daehdoow, Ali Aras, Chitsa Jason, James Arget, Kovin, Mangala Solaris, Mike Azariah, mynnna, and Sala Cameron.

For those not able to attend today, DJ Wiggles has said that he'll be putting up a file that you'll be able to download and listen to very shortly. I would expect it to appear in the recordings section for previous CSM Town Halls on the EVE Radio website. Thanks again, Wiggles! I'd also like to thank CCP Dolan, who was good enough to advertise the town hall in both the EVE website Announcements and in in-game news. It was nice to see the event prominently advertised.

I expect the next town hall will be in the late August time frame or so, but keep an eye out here for the exact date.

A couple of questions in particularly intrigued me. pmchem asked if there has been any progress on the "brain in the box" project. I had completely forgotten about this, but the intent was to completely revamp the way in which session changes are handled in the game. Right now, it's a pretty laborious process involving essentially recreating your entire skill profile every time you hop into a new ship, which apparently applies every time you jump into a new system as well. The idea behind "brain in a box" was to create a new server whose job it was to keep track of your skills profile and prevent this sort of time-consuming recreation. The question was, had anything been done on this as part of the underlying mechanics of the new jump animation? The answer is: I have no idea. But it's such an interesting question that I'll ask when I get the opportunity.

The second question was essentially "should CSM members be stealing from EVE players or scamming them?" brought up in this thread on the EVE Online forums. The funny thing about this question is that CSM members are in fact EVE players... all kinds of EVE players. The Mittani's "super-cap escrow service" was fairly legendary, and became quite profitable for him when he was CSM6 chair. As I've said before, it's not a play style that interests me personally but I don't particularly object to others doing it. As with all things in EVE, let the buyer beware and if an offer sounds too good to be true, et cetera, et cetera.

Or of course I might say that if I intended to start a super-cap escrow service of my own. ;-)

Lots of people have been good enough this week to send me their ideas for a new set of "little things." The first thing I nearly always ask is "Where is your post on this in Features and Ideas?" There are ideas that I'm going to champion, of course, but the fastest way to get the CSM's attention if you have a big idea is to put it up on the forums and let other EVE players take swings at it and find the holes. Now that the work for the town hall is behind us, you're going to be hearing more about CSM8's plan for mining some of these ideas from you...

A lot of CSM8 members continue to be very busy with blogging, forum posts, and pod-casting. Ali Aras is the new co-host for Alekeseyev Karrde's Declarations of War, and Mike Azariah and I will be appearing as guests on that pod-cast tomorrow night.

Our work with CCP is starting to ramp back up again as well. We have our first post-Odyssey stake-holder meeting this week... early in the morning for me, of course. Oh well. We also continue to have really productive chats with CCP on Skype, and we're starting to hear about and be asked our opinions for various summer projects that devs are spinning up for. Nothing that I can talk about yet, sadly. I have been told that I can say that CCP is even now in the decision-making process for the features for the next expansion. The vision from the December CSM Summit continues to be the road map for this. We'll be learning more about it at the summer CSM Summit which is coming up soon(tm).

And finally, Rixx Javix at Evoganda came up with this little artwork:
http://jestertrek.com/eve/blog/2013/csm8-evoganda.jpg

Sadly, Ripard looks like he has face cancer. ;-) That's all for this week!

CSM8 Status update: Week seven

Kind of a mixed week for me on CSM8 this week. While the rest of the CSM was extremely busy, I myself had a mid-week business trip that kept me away from a couple of CSM-related duties.

After the Town Hall of last Sunday, Mike Azariah and myself appeared on Alekseyev Karrde's Declarations of War pod-cast, and had a really interesting discussion! As you can imagine, the topics ranged all over the place from CSM election mechanics to communications to the release of Odyssey to our initial impressions of the job. Ali Aras will be joining Alek as his co-host on the pod-cast going forward, and this was both her first opportunity in that role and of course as a member of CSM8 herself, she was very much involved in the discussion!

Alek also tried to get me to reveal what might be coming in a theoretical Odyssey point release. I guess he had this week in the "when will Ripard break the NDA?" pool. ;-) I resisted. All in all, an interesting couple of hours!

Tuesday started my business trip, which was unfortunate because there was a follow-up meeting with CCP Seagull scheduled for that morning which I missed (I was driving to the airport). Still, big kudos to Ali, Mangala Solaris, Chitsa Jason, and Mike who took excellent notes from which I could catch up. I really want to emphasize how virtually every CSM member is heavily involved some aspect of the CSM's work so far! This isn't always visible; though communications is my thing, it isn't for everyone. But it's great to have the CSM's work-load spread out among so many people. There's no dead weight; everyone's involved in something. It also means that there's a lot going on!

In particular, CSM8 has two big projects that will be made public very soon. Trebor Daehdoow is leading one (with a lot of input and participation from Mike and myself, plus several others), and James Arget is leading another (with a lot of input from just about everyone). As soon those projects are made public and I can point you to them, I will do so. But working on them took a good bit of our time this week and that was before CCP dropped a bit of a bomb on us on Thursday.

That was the day our stake-holder meetings started up again! Unfortunately due to a miscommunication, very few people were actually present at the meeting. It was implied to us after the release of Odyssey that we'd be notified when the stake-holder meetings would start up again, and I'm not sure it happened. Again, I missed this meeting even though I was back home from my trip by then. I don't feel bad; as I said, almost everyone else missed it, too. Still -- and again -- the people who could make the meeting (notably Trebor and Sala Cameron) took really detailed notes for the rest of us. That was good because the topic of the meeting was really broad in scope and is going to be a big job for this CSM. Let's just say that Seagull has her own ideas about how involved the CSM should be and leave it at that for now. I think she surprised even Trebor. I'm hoping that we can go more public with this change of direction as the term goes on.

And all of this happened during a week when a good bit of CCP was on vacation either due to the summer vacation season starting any day now, or the Icelandic Independence Day I mentioned earlier in the week. There was a lot going on despite that. The next stake-holder meeting is scheduled for week nine and you can bet that we're not going to be surprised by it again!

During this one, Trebor was good enough to follow up on my "is the NDA under NDA?" question since I couldn't be there to do so, so that topic still isn't being dropped. And of course as I already mentioned I've been very deeply involved in the T1 industrial re-balancing thread this past week. This coming week, in addition to putting a lot of time into the projects I mentioned above, I'm going to see if I can kick-off the T2 invention/manufacturing round-table that I've been promising for the last couple of weeks. I wanted to get the Town Hall out of the way before I got that rolling.

So, despite my business trip, I still managed to stay pretty busy this week, and so did the rest of CSM8. Again, I'm so pleased how active all of this CSM's members are. It makes sharing the load a hell of a lot easier! More next Sunday.

Lots of links this week. You can find all of them at:
http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2013/07/csm8-status-report-week-nine.html

---snip---

CSM8 Status report: Week nine

So, CCP holiday time has started in earnest, and it didn't help of course that there was a U.S. holiday this week as well. As a result, there wasn't a whole lot happening this week. For my own part, I had a work-related project mid-week that limited my EVE Online activities. So I myself missed the stake-holder meeting that happened on July 4. Fortunately, those that could attend filled in those of us who couldn't make it (thanks in particular to Ali Aras and Mike Azariah on that score!).

This week, we also got the go-ahead to announce the dates of the CSM/CCP Summer Summit. It will take place during the last week of August, the 28th through the 30th. As of right now, the decisions are being made about who is going to go, and the CSM is being asked for our input on that score, of course. Your humble narrator will be in attendance thanks to the efforts of all of you who voted for me. ;-)

Xander Phoena continues his quest to interview two CSM8 members per month. This past week, it was progodlegend and Ali Aras, and it was quite an interesting discussion! Go give it a listen if you're interested in CSM topics. And Ali of course is continuing her Space Hangouts every Saturday. And she made a specific list of things that the CSM has been asked for our feedback so far on our term so far and that have gone public in some venue. Ali is CSM MVP of the week this week. :-)

Watch the skies on Thursday! There will be a CSM dev-blog detailing our next bit of player communications. :-) Big thanks to Trebor Daehdoow for lining up a lot of different CSM proposals (including mine) into one big proposal that has CCP backing and should make players smile too. I'll have lots more to say about that one next week.

We're getting a few requests for our feedback on items despite holiday season starting up, including a fairly big one that I can't wait to talk about once it gets rolling in earnest. As soon as I can talk about that one, I will. And we're also waiting for the results of our homework assignment. As a matter of fact, I think I'll write up the homework assignment itself and send it to CCP Dolan and see if I can get some version of it past the NDA.

Finally, I want to point to this and this, a CCP "live event" of sorts that I don't think is getting nearly enough publicity. When the CSM was briefed on this and were asked if we thought it was a good idea, I posted that the idea immediately made me start laughing when I realized what the gist was and in my opinion that immediately made it a winner. Thumbs up from me! More of you should participate in this, and... ummm... more of you should try to prevent these photos being taken! ;-)

And after going over my notes for this week, that's really all the major things I could find that happened this week. Like I said, it was pretty quiet! But the holiday for us ends on Thursday...

I have a secret for you.

Those summer doldrums when CCP always seems to disappear on vacation?


They disappear on vacation.

Guessing nothing happened in the last 6 or 7 weeks worth reporting about?