It's Crunch Time!

Welcome to the nineteenth installment 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 player's 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?'


For anybody that is in the dark about the reasons for the CSM being the focus of this Blog Banter, let me bring you up to speed with recent events:

- The election results for the 5th Council of Stellar Management were released at the end of May.

- The CSM members were invited to a three day summit meeting with CCP in their Iceland offices, in order to discuss Eve player's recommendations and look at what CCP have planned for the development of the game. This took place at the end of June.

- On the 12th of July CCP published the documented minutes of the summit meetings. These minutes were approved as a correct record by both CCP and the CSM.

- After reading through the minutes the majority of the Eve playerbase couldn't help but notice that many of Eve's issues or areas of Eve that were considered broken are not likely to be fixed by CCP any time soon. In fact there were hardly any issues brought up by the CSM that CCP committed to working on in the current development cycle. The overwhelming view was that CCP were focusing on new Eve features, rather than fixing and refining existing ones.

- The discussion has raged on ever since then, aided by the release of CCP Zulu's Dev Blog and the ongoing comments by Devs in the accompanying thread.

So there we have it. As Eve players we are concerned that CCP is neglecting already existing features of the game in favour of new shinies, and also that they are ignoring the CSM's calls for issues to be fixed. Thus, many people are wondering whether the CSM is really worth it.

Now I've posted before on this blog at length about my enthusiasm for the CSM. Despite current events my views on this remain unchanged. The CSM still remains an excellent opportunity for Eve players to take advantage of and get their opinions heard. In fact, if it wasn't for the hard work and dedication of the CSM, we would be in the dark concerning CCP's plans.

The reality is that this furore is a product of the developing CSM process. It has taken 5 consecutive CSMs to reach a point where the current CSM has the power and leverage to take CCP to task for not acting on issues that have been raised consistently by all of the CSMs.

There is now no excuse for CCP. They have had ample time to react to some of the major player concerns, and enough of the playerbase have bought in to the concept of the CSM to force CCP to take note. Thousands of people voted for the CSM and hundreds of proposals have been raised. What we are seeing is the culmination of 5 CSMs worth of work, both raising support and forwarding proposals.

In short, this is crunch time.

This is the crossroads for the CSM, and it's the reason I can't answer the question as to whether the CSM is worth it or not. Because ultimately that answer lies with CCP. If they listen to the CSM speaking on behalf of the players, and if they show us proof that they are acting upon player's recommendations, then every single CSM will have been worth it. If they don't, then it's been one gigantic waste of time and money.

I'm a realistic person. I'm not expecting a multitude of game changes. I'm not even expecting game changes anytime soon. All I want to see from CCP is that you're acting as a result of listening to the CSM.

I voted for the CSM. I read the Dev Blogs. I read the CSM meeting minutes. I read the summit meeting minutes. I even tried to read most of that Dev Blog threadnaught (44 pages and counting)!

I've bought into this whole CSM thing. CCP, please can you too?