Jita Park Speakers Corner

You appear to be laboring under the misapprehension that unless you can get elected to CSM, you are without any influence, but anyone who reviews the history of the organization and the EVE community as a whole will quickly come to realize that this is not the case.

While CSM members clearly have their own opinions, some of them strongly held, in my experience the most effective CSM members have been those who pay attention to the opinions of those who bother to get in contact with them, either privately or via the forums.

Furthermore, many CSM members were influential members of the community well before they got elected -- Hans Jagerblitzen (now CPM chairman), Ripard Teg, and Malcanis are obvious recent exemplars. One of the reasons I pushed hard for election reform was to make it easier for such respected members of the general community to get elected, because CSM is a force-multiplier for them -- and thus, for you.

That said, we all have our own ways of doing business. For example, Malcanis, Ripard and I will patiently listen to the opinions of community members (we are, after all, your representatives). However, Malcanis will bluntly tell you that you are a clueless idiot, Ripard will write a 5,000-word blog post about why you are wrong (with footnotes), and I will simply gently imply that you may be misinformed.

@ Trebor & Mike:

My judgement comes as a end user. With or without the CSM, my experience with EVE is that 5 years ago I did X stuff and now that stuff is the same, jsut older and tired. Actually, I would had left the game in 2010 if wasn't for Incarna. Since then, i've tried to make change the game in ways that suit me. I am inteligent enough to not ask for changes that would harm the game (FAI, arcade like PvP), but also i have noticed how different measures, and my own experience speaking with people, show that i am not a part of some tiny minority, but a part of a sizeable population which is too silent, self-centered, and disorganized, to force itself on CCP.

And it's a large population, nonetheless. Sometimes it's the 70% of characters that log in to hisec. Sometimes it's the "more than 50%" of "lurkers". Sometimes it's the 73% of new players who didn't consider PvP a factor in their decission to try the game. And on and on.

So, when i look at the CSM as the fruit of what being vocal, organized and devoted achieves, i wonder wether the CSM serves CCP by being beyond the reach of a large population who, albeit it's not comitted, nor vocal, nor organized, surely pays a lot of those precious monies CCP likes to get.

And in my personal selfish account, with the Hallelujah Plan aimed at non-soloers, non-carebears, non-hiseccers, non-casuals and non-PvErs, I wonder who's wrong, and what would be the case if the CSM usually had more than one person who claimed to defend the above groups... all of them known for being unorganized, silent, and more prone to quit than to speak their issues with the game. Most people I've met in the game no longer play, and this game is a disaster without some acquitances and buddies, even if they are "uncool" players who "do it wrong".

Even the uncool minorities are entitled an opinion... and i am crazy enough to express it rather than shy out after being told many times what a nasty person i am.

As much as i hate this game's foundations, i also like it and have a serious commitment to it. I'm a EVE fan, just not of the appropiate kind (i am even abstemious... ), and when i speak, i do it from the conviction that what i claim as good to me would also be good to the game. i may be wrong, but i am sincere too.

See this is exactly the attitude that infuriates me. "Why should these guys who put all the effort and talent into getting their voices heard be the ones who get their voices heard. Surely people who don't give a **** and can't even explain their ideas should get equal time. What about the idle dullard?"

Well what about him? If someone can't take the 5 minutes (it used to be 1 minute, but now STV) required once per damb year to vote, why should anyone spend more effort than that concerning themselves with their particular requirements?

Be noted that this does not necessarily mean making everything you can do on your own a total piel of garbage (FAI, Odyssey's loot spew).

Also, call me weirdo, but splitting solo rewards is the exact opposite of rewarding you for binging in some friends. 2 mission runners running Lvl4s on their own inject, say, 60 million ISK per hour into the system; but if they run them together, they merely get 30 million ISK.

That's because missions are static canned content and are not really meant to be done by a group of players.

Of course, there's group PvE, aka incursions, but CCP murdered it when they decided that only the best fleet would get any profit -so they essentilaly assured that such content would be farmed by dedicated corporations, hostile to outsiders.

Making player-generated pve content, with a backgrond of non-ship PvP, would make for a win-win solution. It would add more PvP beyond asploding ships and would deliver developer-free content to passive consumers of it.

Of course, people who think that this is good, don't even vote the CSM... but also they won't give CCP money so they develop nullsec 2.0 and call it worth 3 years of development.

Complaining... where?

They just quit, Malcanis. How many threads do you recall about the lack of evolution of this or that "fringe" content? Now, if you were advising CCP as a company, what would you choose?

- actively engage customers before they quit so they have a chance to complain and have their issues adressed, even if they just whine
- f*ck those wannabe whiners and let them quit rather than let them spill their whines, you don't need customers anyway

I think you are lumping two things together incorrectly. There is a service the CSM provides which is separate to the way the CSM is selected. The purpose of the CSM is pretty much always present in game development, in some cases a single member of staff takes the role in meetings and at the opposite extreme you have the 'dream' of the CSM. My point being, as I know you don't like reading, that it the CSM is a highly peculiar thing to encounter and that it is reasonable that people don't 'get it'.

I like a good complain about some things - high sec war mainly - because I can see the number of people that fall into the 'last month' category after one and know that it exceeds the number of people that the war retained. I will quite happily complain with a passion about a system like that as I can clearly see a volume of people that are not sticking about long enough to even be able to vote or moan - that irritates me so I irritate you and maybe you may irritate CCP but at that level its up to you to decide which irritation is most valid from the choices provided by the players.
That is one of the risks of the CSM, that it forces the game into an ever decreasing circle as by its nature it fails to take any account of those that are not prepared to suffer doing battle on these forums.

No, I've long since abandoned that illusion.

Why lend additional legitimacy to this CCP marketing stunt?

Even during the Incarna outrage the CSM happily played along with CCP's attempts at damage control and that really tells us all there is to it - all your power derives from your role in EVE and thus from CCP and at the end of the day that is where your loyalties are.

If this ship goes down you will clinch to it until the last moment, not capable of letting go, telling yourself that with enough words and concessions you will somehow convince the iceberg to move out of the way. You are just a marketing stunt, unreliable in representing player interest because you are wedded too tightly to this game and company.

Someone as heavily invested into EVE as the CSM has almost no leverage against CCP.

And, yes, that is totally what happened.

Even the CSM members themselves realized (by September, I think) just how stupid they had been to play along with CCP's "emergency summit" damage control charade.