A Taste Of Democracy
Welcome to the nineteenth instalment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
This months topic comes to us from @evepress, and he asks: The CSM: CCP's Meta Game? - The CSM, an eve players voice to CCP. Right? In the grand scheme of things yes, the players bring up issues and the CSM presents them to CCP. But in its current iteration the CSM was supposed to be given small authority to assign CCP assets to projects that the CSM thought needed work on. As it has not come out this was not the case. So fellow bloggers, is the CSM worth it, has the CSM improved the game in any way, or is it just a well thought out scam by CCP to give us players a false sense of input in the game? What's your take?
It's quite clear that this Blog Banter is quite different from others, it almost presumes that there is an ulterior motive by CCP in producing the CSM and that it is a toothless, ineffective tool for players. For the record, the CSM have documented proof that they have performed well and have had meaningful input into the game, equally CCP have delivered although one could argue minimally given how long the CSM has been running.
@Mynxee has stated though that tracking of issues raised by CSM is difficult to say the least:
“The "Resolved Issues" are the ones known to be implemented. There may have been others. The problem is that:
a) delegates do not consistently update the issues' status there (esp. former CSMs)
b) CCP does not communicate which of our issues they've worked on, mainly because they are not identified as CSM items in the backlog so how would they even be expected to know?
The process of tracking and updating the status of CSM issues is such a laborious process, and the communications so lacking from CCP that I'm afraid we simply do not have clear information about what is what.”
Let's look at what the CSM is supposed to be: “The Scope of the CSM”
The purpose of the CSM is to represent society interests to CCP. This requires active engagement with the player community to master EVE issue awareness, understanding, and evaluation in the context of the “greatest good for the greater player base”. The scope of issues is restricted only to EVE, its ongoing development, and limited meta (out-of-game) issues which have direct relevance to the EVE universe. It is important to keep in mind that the CSM will not have formal powers within CCP, they will have a voice inside CCP.
You could break that down into it's component parts and conclude that what we have now is what the stated aims are, however we have reached a stage where the CSM have presented a case on behalf of the players to CCP and that has been unequivocally refused development time, so where does the CSM go from here?
If the CSM is truly a stakeholder, then they should have the same opportunity for meetings as the other stakeholders and be totally included at every opportunity with equal clout. This will need to be driven by CCP who need to increase the level of engagement with the CSM if that is what they truly want. A stifled voice of the players invited to meet infrequently with CCP is not doing anyone any good.
In other words, if CCP still want a CSM that works they need to enable it. Currently, we have a CSM with a role that has effectively been blocked by Nathan Richardssons' schedule for 2010/11, that has limited communication with CCP (not even audio conferencing on a regular basis or an IRC channel despite many requests!) and has no actual weight in any decision making process despite being a so called stakeholder.
Even the minutes barely make it outside the CSM management circle within CCP as evidenced recently.
This pretty much renders the incumbent CSM fairly pointless from a work-flow perspective and if CCP do that to this CSM, then there is nothing to stop them doing that to any CSM. You then have to ask the question, “What is the point of having a CSM?” and sadly the reason for this blog banter becomes that much clearer.
What the CSM and player base need is true visibility of the backlog with items being revisited and re-prioritised. It's all very well having a list on a wiki of raised and accepted items, what is really required is visibility of where that list is within the overall CCP workflow. The most important thing above all is that action needs to be seen to be taken no matter how small. Right now, many believe we are at a critical juncture for both the CSM and CCP.
The recent Dev Blog by CCP Zulu to clarify issues surrounding the 18 month suspension of fixes had only caused more confusion and obfuscation with numbers being flung around however it all boiled down to the same result. So don't be confused, it means nothing pipelined for fixing at the level of Faction Warfare for 18 months. Some devs will look at lag though and maybe tweak things a bit. Later, CCP Hellmar himself joined the party and said some non-specific stuff will probably get fixed. The lack of clarity is simply not good enough, especially after we had been told previously that nothing will be fixed.
That said, everyone has a choice.
Players can either:
Accept the situation and wait for Incarna/Dust 514 and then hopefully see some vague fixes to something.
Communicate further with CCP via the CSM
Quit
As the CSM has been so far denied any real tools to do the job they could take this opportunity to further organise themselves into a campaigning party acting on behalf of the players countering the data presented by elements within CCP with data we players produce instead.
To help the CSM with this, the players could (should?) be volunteering services and expertise to help make this a reality as CCP aren't helping. I'm talking web site hosting, functional voting and forum applications utilising Eve API, twitter and other social media publishing and monitoring tools all localised into world languages to bring the non-English speakers on board too.
The aim of this is to create an independent CSM portal that would be inherited by future CSM with an information base monitoring success or failure of items proposed, a better voting platform on issues and ultimately a distinct way to get more than 10% of the player base involved. The Evelopedia is okay but isn't a complete enough solution being limited in its scope.
As a player movement, faltering first steps of bloggers organising have already been taken here and more are welcome. If the bloggers there produce output working with the CSM and the CSM work with them, then we have the beginnings of a truly effective media platform to gain player more input into the CSM with the aim of involving the entire player base at an interactive level. All of this should key through the CSM, random community members doing their own thing lacks the punch of an organised group.
This CSM could then have a new lease of life. A life of motivating and bringing together the players of Eve like never before, a real chance at punching through the noise and making a valuable contribution to the gaming media society and the Eve community. Whether successful or not, the CSM still have a chance to leave behind a fantastic legacy of organisation, involvement and tools for the next term.
However, if during this term a substantial gesture has not been made by CCP in recognition of the already sustained and organised player opinion and the many, many related threads, then we as players could well question the purpose of the CSM after all.
Players need to decide if they feel passionate about all of this to give the CSM their support.
CCP need to decide what they want the CSM to do and enable them to do this without further prevarication. Even with their remit now they lack sufficient involvement with CCP for the task at hand. Proper commercial commitment needs to come from CCP.
CCP need to state clearly what they are going to fix, if anything. CCP need to clearly tell the CSM what is on their technical backlog, how it compares to the accepted CSM items, discuss and re-prioritise if necessary then publish the immediate schedule highlights for the backlog via the CSM.
They will have used the CSM as a communication channel and their customers will know what is being worked on and what is likely to be fixed soon.
