Jita Park Speakers Corner

from http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2013/09/the-csm-is-useless-not-what-you-think.html

I'm not disrespecting the personalities involved. The eighth CSM (CSM8) has been the most productive and vocal CSM since the inception of the stellar management program. Ripard Teg and Mynnna are definitely the two strongest voices on the council. I've no problems with any of the work that they are doing. I'm even warming to Trebor Daehdoow. And then you have another eight or so folks who are all hard-working and invested in their roles as player representatives.

I'm not disrespecting their intentions. I think they accepted their jobs, and have proceeded to do their jobs, with the very best intentions. The welfare of the game is at the heart of everything they do.

As an organization that is supposed to represent the concerns of the players, I feel the CSM falls entirely flat. Not because our representatives aren't trying their damnedest to represent us, but rather how CCP uses the CSM to further their own designs and agendas.

Most CSM members come into their positions feeling quite strongly about where the game could be improved. Those are generally pre-existing areas of the game with mechanics that could be made better. Nullsec sovereignty mechanics, for instance. Or the POS subsystem. Or corporate role mechanics. The CSM come into their jobs, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, sure that CCP will listen to their concerns, because their concerns are the concerns of the playerbase. And CCP exists only at the whim of the playerbase.

And CCP does listen. Sitting there silently, attentively, nodding at everything the new recruits of the CSM have to say. "Yep. Yep. Sure. Yep."

Then CCP goes away for a time. And then they come back with what they intend to work on for the next expansion. And most of this stuff are new features, which don't have much to do with what the CSM was concerned about. Radial menus. Exploration mini-games. Redesigns of character selection screens. There might be a couple of little things mixed in there, that sort of address a few pixels of the high-def image of concerns that the CSM had.

(Take Yurts. I'd like to think this is the first step towards a modular POS system. I really would like to believe that. I'd like to believe that CCP paid attention to a major, long-standing CSM concern. But there's a good chance that Yurts are anything but that. That all Yurts are is exactly what they're called "personal mobile structures." That there is no grander scheme beyond that. That POSes will continue to be broken for many years to come, and any feature you'd like to see from a POS will have to be served only at the personal level via Yurts.)

What the CSM becomes at this point is a rubber-stamp on these new features. The CSM gets to weigh in with some opinions and concerns, of which CCP does listen, does take some of that feedback into account. Then the CSM comes back to the masses, tells us all how instrumental in the process they've been. Unfortunately, little of what has been rubber-stamped has anything to do with the concerns the CSM brought to CCP initially.

In return for the privilege of this look behind the scenes, the ability to give feedback on features that nobody really asked for, the CSM is supposed to tell us all, before announcements are made, that they're reviewing exciting new features they wish they could tell us about. And if you look at most of the tweets and blog and forum posts from CSM members pre-Rubicon announcement, you'll see a lot of that. A lot of stuff they're excited about and that we're going to love.

The CSM keeps us invested in-between expansions. And if we're not particularly excited about a particular expansion, well the CSM is there to start telling us how incredible the features in the next expansion will be. And so on and so forth.

The problem is that CCP uses the CSM as not much more than a public relations and marketing tool. I think the CSM plays into this unknowingly, most of the time.

In terms of marketing, look to the Summer Summit. There was an entire session devoted to the EVE Online Collector's Edition. It was ostensibly called Session Sixteen: Sales and Marketing, but as Ripard Teg described the session, "Unsurprisingly, a lot of the focus of this session was [on the] EVE Collector's Edition." He then went on to describe the collector's edition as "undeniably awesome" and "in-cred-ible." Ripard even describes the session as a product pitch. The CSM fulfills its purposes, selling EVE to the players they represent. The collector's edition may indeed be awesome, but is that the CSM's role, to upsell CCP products? (I bought my copy of the collector's edition the day it was announced, as my disclosure on the item.)

The current role of the CSM, whether they realize it or not, is to sell the playerbase on this three-year (or five-year) roadmap. They're supposed to keep us invested in what is to come, even though few people have the foggiest idea what is to come. I'd be surprised if the CSM has been given concrete plans, and not simply something slightly less vague than what the players have been fed via Fanfest and Rubicon streams.

in on epic thread

Why the heck do you care about any of this? Weren't you quitting anyway?

Didn't you quit?

Also, your word count is making Jade Constantine blush.

Well you heard the man. We can't make everything perfect every time, therefore nothing we do has any point.

Seriously, there's only one question that he needs to ask, but sadly it's not really dramatic enough for Poe's standards:

Is EVE better with the CSM or without it.

Ultimately these are my feelings on the matter. I agree that CCP occasionally treats the CSM poorly and doesn't utilize it in ways that could really help them (Blink and TOS screwups come to mind). But I also feel that EVE is a far more solid game because of the CSM than it would be without it.

A little from column A, a little from column B

There are other benefits to being on the CSM.

For instance - and here I pick an example that actually happened - let's say $NEW_FEATURE is being discussed. It has been a somewhat contentious issue in the past, and CCP aren't even sure if they should mention it. I as a CSM get to point out a possible benefit from a trivial addition to the feature for a minority demographic for whom the feature is an absolute game-maker, and phrase it such that CCP can (if they wish) include this perspective as a positive reason to do the feature. CCP get to introduce the feature, I get the happy feeling of helping a much disregarded minority, the minority in question get to feel a jillion times better about the game.

Also, being in frequent contact with CCP devs, you do get to, over time, present a perspective on issues that has influence. It's hard to quantify with hard metrics but it's there.

RMT?

That question sounds like, "Are you better one-eyed or totally blind?"

If the Hallelujah Plan is a proof of what the CSM can achieve in terms of CCP "getting it", then the CSM could easily be scrapped and neither us nor CCP would notice.

Rentlord? That's interesting.

Do you have the CSM flag on two characters? Or did you just transfer the flag?