EVE General Discussion

In my opinion the CSM is suppose to be a sounding board that not only provides feedback to CCP about their current and or future projects but also provides feedback to CCP about player ideas and issues pertaining to the game.

The problem I see is that CSM members are only doing the first part and are basically ignoring the second part.

There's a couple of sub-forums where the CSM should be very active but they, as well as CCP, rarely ever visit them. I'm talking about the sub-forums 'Assembly Hall' and 'Player Features And Ideas Discussion'. Maybe they're just stealth browsing the threads in those sub-forums so they don't give the impression of showing favoritism towards specific threads.

Now that sounds reasonable and I can understand why they would do that but personally I'd much prefer it if they actually participated in the thread discussion. They don't have to agree or disagree with the thread topic, just show some interest by asking a few questions. I think that would definitely let the player base know the CSM is at least doing something other than getting free trips to Iceland.

As for this thread and it's question - CSM: A Publicity Stunt Or Actually Useful? Currently it seems to me the correct answer is both.



DMC

CCP won't comment on player ideas unless they seem real potential on them and want to encourage discussion. The CSM won't comment on them because PFAID is a cesspit and 99% of what's posted there is a terrible idea that doesn't need any encouragement.

None of that means people at CCP, or the CSM for that matter, aren't browsing them.

I'd also point out that it's not the player's or the CSM's job to try to be game designers, which is a lot of what those threads are trying to do. It's not "this is a problem, CCP can you please look at a solution" it's "Here is my one line/three page idea, please implement this ASAP thx".

If you want to see the CSM being active look for either:

• The few threads with well written legitimate complaints along the lines of "hey X thing is clearly broken" or "this is bad gameplay and here's why"
• The meeting minutes and the things the CSM brings up that have been brought to them by players.

IMO if you want CCP and the CSM more active on the forums make them less of a Piranha tank environment, but that would probably involve filtering them and locking them down pretty hard, and I don't think anyone actually wants that.

I know they've been more active in the past, but that was more down to individual devs not some general policy by CCP, and quite a bit of it was done on the dev's own time, not as part of their normal work schedule. General CCP engagement on the forums has also fluctuated up and down over the years with how busy they are, devs joining or leaving, and other things. A lot of the very forum-active devs have either left or been promoted into positions with more work to do, which means less time on the forums.

As to 'encouraging' threads, asking a question is encouragement. "Oh, CCP's looking, lets badger them with questions/comments/ect"... Plus have you read half the stuff on PFAID and Assembly Hall? Some of it's good, most of the good stuff doesn't require questions or feedback, but most of it's kinda crap. Either ideas that are actively bad or requests for massive feature reworks to suit someone's vision of the game, not an addition to the game as it is now. What does participating in the few good threads get? Probably a flood of people either coming in to yell about how bad the idea is or ask why this got attention but their idea didn't. Yeah that's a bit of a cynical view but if you look in the few blue tagged posts around there that a good chunk of what you get, same for a vocal minority in the Upcoming Changes threads. "Why are you changing this, clearly X is more important than this!"

As for the CSM, that's entirely down to their individual discretion. If you want CSMs who will be more active on the forums then vote the ones who are back in and vote in CSMs with a history of forum participation and who say they will be active here. Steve's constant participation both on Reddit and here on the forums is a big reason he got the top spot on my ballot.

The forums are what the players, collectively, have made them. There's no way for CCP to stop all the trolling and BS and bad debate without basically clamping down hard on it. The only thing that Reddit has over the forums right now is a slightly better reputation, more traffic, and slightly different content.

There's also no expectation that someone from CCP is going to read everything that gets put on Reddit. Possible, sure, but with the forums there's something of an implicit guarantee that if you post in FAID someone at CCP at least skims your thread and rolls their eyes at it.

Also, arguably, less chance of anything CCP says there being taken as gospel, though that's debatable.

deleted ... learn to read Nic.

I thought I bent dongs

Maybe you should study more than "basic political science". The issue of voting has been studied for a very long time, like 200 years or so. One of the first to look at voting in a rigorous manner was the Marquis de Condorcet. He came up with the Condorcet Paradox which notes that voting can lead to cycles even when individual preferences are not cyclic. Ever since then people have been trying to come up with better methods of voting and have pretty much failed. And along the way there have been a number of results suggesting that voting will always have problems. Such results as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, the Nakamura Number and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.

The probelm is that voting systems are susceptible to what is called the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). This condition has to do with transitivity of preferences. In an individual if a person said I like apples to oranges and oranges to pears, but prefer pears to apples we'd consider that strange. That is the preference ordering apples P oranges P pears should imply, apples P pears. But voting is an aggregation of preferences so it is entirely possible that you get some violations of this. That is suppose we are voting on {apples,oranges} and the voting has apples P oranges, that is apples wins. Then we introduce pears then we get, oranges P apples simple due to the inclusion of pears.

In other words, the out comes of voting systems is not independent of the voting system. The outcomes will be decided, at least in part, by the voting mechanism itself. Further, voting should be thought of as cooperative games and with game theory, the resulting equilibrium need not be "optimal" or "desirable".

In short, what you want is not possible. Voting is always problematic as a way of making collective decisions.

It's not that I think there's no problem, I agree that it would be nice if CCP and the CSM were more active on the forums, I just don't see a good or even particularly feasible solution that doesn't just cause more problems than it solves.

The CSM we have some control over, but getting people to vote simply based on forum participation isn't realistic, especially with how many people never touch the forums and therefore don't care about CSM participation there. Beyond that it's just not feasible for the CSM to chime in on every thread, there's a literal army's worth of posters here and, what, 10 CSMs now?

As for CCP, I just don't think anything productive would come out of forcing them to engage on the forums. I can tell you from experience in PFAID that there are absolutely people who will take it personally if CCP comments on their idea and not someone else's. That much isn't cynicism, it's just experience. There are also people who will come into every thread with a blue tag to comment about how their pet issue isn't getting attention. Both of these reduce incentive for CSMs and CCP people to come in and comment. The *rare* exception is some general idea threads on a general topic or problem, not a "here's my brilliant idea" thread.

Beyond that CCP people have jobs beyond posting on the forums. You can tell the few people whose job description does include posting here because they're more active, but even they need to be careful what they post or comment on. This is just a fact of game dev, it's the same at every moderately successful game company to one degree or another, but especially for MMO devs.

I don't see anything good coming from locking down the forums either. The player base would probably riot if CCP implemented rules that would actually make the forums livable for regular and frequent dev-posting. You just need to look at the average Upcoming Changes thread to see why. They're 90% vitriol by volume.

I hope that's a bit more heavy on explanation and a bit less on cynicism, though I'm not going to pretend the latter is gone.