CSM Minutes Are A Conceptual Failure

First of all, I'm a big fan of the CSM. I think that they have provided CCP with valuable input in the past and will continue to provide valuable input going forward. I think they are a useful communication link between the playerbase and the developers. And I think the summits are incredibly important for fostering the relationships and improving communications between the representative body and the developers and designers at CCP.

But the minutes themselves that come out of the summits are a failure. Not just in execution, but in their conception.

Over at Jester's Trek (linking him again!) we see in the Week Thirty status update that the minutes are still not released. The summer summit was held in the end of August. Its now the beginning of December. We might actually be closer to the next summit than the last with no minutes in sight, and no promises for imminent delivery. This is an execution failure and could be addressed for future summit with procedural changes.

But as long as the concept of the minutes is to provide a blow-by-blow, line-by-line account of a week's worth of meetings, the minutes will always be a failure. The handful of nuggets of useful information that comes from the released minutes are not worth the massive effort required to produce and review them and could be imparted in many other ways without the same overhead.

Perhaps the easiest solution is for the CSM to pull those nuggets out and present them to the community in a 2-5 page document (with CCP's approval of course). Failing that, just release the damn meeting recordings  although that would require someone editing them to excise the NDA parts, and editing that video would have to fall to CCP in order to decide what's NDA'd and what's not. So I think that's out.

Regardless, as it stands right now, the minutes are a failure both in concept and implementation. Either the CSM and CCP have to commit fully to completing them in their current form wholeheartedly (i.e. make stories with high stack rank in the backlogs) or come up with a new plan.

Fanfest Reflections

So I've been following the fanfest through blogs and twitter and my thoughts have been percolating over the weekend and I have a laundry list of thoughts.

New Jump Effect

Very gorgeous and I approve of the War on Loading Screens. Very much so. Anything to drive a more immersive experience is good in my opinion. My only concern is how well it performs under stress (i.e. trying to jump when a big fight is on the gate and if it slows down jump duration any.

New Directional Scanner "Discovery Scanner"

Finally! The outdated and archaic Directional Scanner UI is a particular bugbear of mine which I have argued needs only a little love to make it significantly better. However, I have some questions and concerns. Number one is if we will still be provided a list of hits for 260 degrees because my viewport is at least less than 180 degrees (and more like 90 degrees). If I have to rotate 360 to see all hits at a glance I will be annoyed beyond belief. Also, will it still have range and angel control for fine tuned scanning?

Probe Formations

If this is all they are doing to probing directly, I approve. Assuming the formations are any good. Super bonus if they let us create our own formations and save them, and even more points if they can be exported and imported.

Ice Mining

Not sure why they are moving all ice belts to anomalies... other than it gives them more ability to reduce the amount of ice available overall but controlling the amount of ice in the spawn and how often it respawns once depleted. This change it going to piss off a lot of casual ice miners, especially when coupled with the shortened cycle timers, an obvious attempt to make ice miners look more active for bot detection I wager.

Resource Rebalance

- Moon Goo: At first I questioned the point of the two new materials but I reread the blogs and I get it now. Before the Ferrofluid and NeoMercurite were used across all four empires, but now they are just for Caldari and Minmatar tech II items respectively while the two new materials are for the Amarr and Gallente. So far this change makes sense to me but I leave it to the moon goo number crunchers to really dig into it (paging Ripard Teg!).

- Asteroids: So a lot (I mean a lot!) more low end minerals in null sec and low sec ores. This is supposed to allow null sec manufacturing to thrive because they won't have to import low end ores but in reality this ends up as a nerf to high sec mining as null sec ores now get the high end ores get the same high end minerals and the low end minerals. Hmmmm. I do like that the reward for min-range ores have been brought back in line though.

The removal of grav sites from normal probing to just being picked up by the "discovery scanner" is interesting, but not sure if it will have any impact.

- Outposts: Wow! Outposts got huge upgrades. More manufacturing and research slots, offices, and bigger upgrades.

Overall: This constitutes a massive massive buff to null sec and significant nerf to high sec. Expect to see a lot more production done in null sec and the price of tritanium and pyerite to drop. The ice mining changes will also be a buff to null sec as high sec will be less able to meet the demands of hungry towers and capitals and I expect these prices to rise accordingly as well.

CSM Election Results

I'm very happy that four of my six endorsements made it on the CSM and extremely pleased that Mike Azariah was one of them. Except for the glaring hole of low sec/ faction war representatives it seems like a good spread of candidates, although I think this is the first time there is no null sec Russian rep if I'm not mistaken.

EDIT: It was pointed out to me that Korvin is a Russian candidate so hopefully he provides the Russian community with the communication channel to the CSM they deserve.

I'm sad that election turnout is down. I think its a combination of no pressing outrages and  a disappointing CCP effort to make the CSM election important (to be fair, after I posted that CCP did make a good dev blog post with developer testimonials and I saw Devs in local promoting the election in trade hubs) along with a frustrating voting experience that forced turnout down. Part of me wonders if fanfest preparation takes too much of CCP's attention from running a good election. We'll see next year I guess.

New Trailer "Origins"

Its very slick, but obviously marketing material and not reflective of actual gameplay footage for a large degree. I would love for some of those damage effects in game.

The CSM Is Important - So Go Vote

Voting is open and its more important than even that everyone votes with all their accounts. In fact, despite the process being annoying as hell, you should vote for a full slate of 14 candidates.

Why? Because the CSM is important.

At the very least, the CSM forces developers and managers and product owners at CCP to check themselves and their thought processes when they have the face to face meetings with the CSM members once or twice a year. This is an invaluable check as it forces them to look at their assumptions and conclusions and make sure they are internally consistent.

Then on top of that, the CSM has a chance to challenge those assumptions. Sure, CCP may not listen; Incarna was proof enough of that. But at least the process has that feedback so when things go wrong (horribly horribly wrong) then CCP has that feedback to look at and say "oh, yeah, we see it now." Without the CSM, they may not have had that moment when the lightbulb went off.

On top of that CSM functions as a valuable sounding board for developers at CCP, giving direct advice on changes long before us the playerbase see them. And more recently the CSM has earned a real seat as a stakeholder. I'm 90% certain that without the CSM the POS changes announced as goals for Odyssey would not have been on the table.

The CSM is important. But its only as effective as the amount of effort we the players make in determining its composition. The more votes the more CCP has to take the CSM members seriously.

So go, vote. Make it matter.

Endorsements

In my post titled "Earning Endorsements" I laid out the qualities and attributes I wanted in my CSM delegates. In this post, I'm going to list the candidates that are at the top of my slate of fourteen, the ones I would vote for regardless of anyone else's slates. I do plan to vote for 14 candidates but the rest I'll pick from other published slates from people I trust.

On to the endorsements...

1) Ripard Teg.

While I don't agree with everything Mr Teg has to say about stuff, I do agree with a lot and I appreciate his thought processes and viewpoints even when different from mine. I feel he argues honestly and is willing to step back when he can be shown wrong, and would bring a seasoned voice of developing compromise and cooperation on the CSM with CCP.

Plus, if he's really busy then he's probably out of the running for the "Most Prolific Eve Blogger - All Time" award.

2) Trebor Daehdoow.

I was going to vote for Trebor anyways due to the hard working and straight thinking he has shown in his previous runs in CSM, but then I moved him up to number two as soon as I saw how much it would piss off Poetic Stanziel.

3) Mike Azariah.

Mike has run before and was always a second or third choice for me and I always felt bad for it because I think he would be a good candidate to represent my actual playstyle! Now that we have STV, I can endorse him and feel good about it.

4) Unforgiven Storm.

I know, I'm surprised as you are that I'm endorsing a Goon candidate but as he's not the "official" Goon running and I like what he had to say on the blog he started up about industrial matters I felt he was worthy of putting high on my ballot.

5) James Arget.

It was hard work going through all the wormhole candidates and trying to figure out the one I thought was good for my endorsement, but eventually James stood above the crowd and while I disagree on a few things he said in some of the podcasts I listened too, I think he's better than the other bunch. Unless I'm confusing him with someone else.

6) Psychotic Monk.

Up until I heard his Crossing Zebras interview I would not have endorsed him, but I was pleasantly surprised by that podcast. I think he brings a valued viewpoint of high sec PvP gameplay to the table and he will lobby for it honestly.

* * * * *

That's it for my personal endorsements. Other people have listed fuller slates and I plan to fill out the rest of my ballot based on them. Good luck!

High Sec Population Dominance Fallacy

Ah CSM election time.

You will here the canard that "most players live in high sec" a lot. Sometimes the number thrown around is like 80%, as in "but 80% of the players live in high sec" so we should take action to make them move/cater to them/nerf high sec/boost high sec/ etc and so forth and so on....

The original facts for these widely held but rarely proven claims come from the old Quarterly Economic Newsletters that provided explicit population breakdowns of the areas of space. Like so from Q4 2009:

But there is a humongous problem with these numbers: they count the number of characters, not the number of players.

Take myself for example. I am one player, but three accounts. On those accounts I have 8 characters total. Two live in wormhole space, two in low sec, and four in high sec. A population breakdown with me as representative would be 50% high sec, 25% low sec, 25% wormhole space, and 0% null sec. I can assure you, I consider myself 90% low sec player with PI in wormholes being the other 10%. My characters in high sec buy and move stuff for my low sec lifestyle.

I don't think my situation is unique. A lot of people have multiple accounts and multiple characters on those accounts, but only their main and one or two others in the area of space they live in most of the time. Most veteran players have logistics alts and trading alts in high sec.

So the next time someone talks about how 80% of the playerbase is in high sec, make sure they understand that number if inflated by alts and the real value is probably much lower.