CSM 8, You Have Failed This Blogger

I hold all Councils of Stellar Management to the same high bar for measuring their success and I'm sad to report that CSM 8, like CSMs 1-7, have failed.

Why?

Very simple.

The Crucified changed from this:

To this:

The Tristan which didn't need an update is changing from this:

This this:

But the Moa? THE MOA?!?! Still looks like this:

CSM 8, you have failed this blogger.

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P.S. While we're at it, you are also failing for this long running crusade:

What the heck do we pay you guys for anyways!?!?

CSM 7 Final Report Card

I debated writing this post at all. I'm only a casual Council of Stellar Management observer and I wondered if trying to write an evaluation of CSM 7 from that perspective was fair. But then I thought that I'm part of an audience that needs to let current and future CSM members know where they are weak and need work, and where they need to continue doing what they are doing. So here we are.

I'm going to evaluate the CSM both as a whole and members individually in this post, and at the end wrap it up with a grade.

Member Participation

As far as I can remember, this has been one of the most polarized CSMs in terms of member participation. It felt like 90% of the work was done by 1/3 of the CSM, the other 10% by another 1/3, and the last third did nothing or actively worked against the rest. Alekseyeve Karrde, Hans Jagerblitzen, Two Step, and Trebor Daehdoow were visibly active the most for the whole year, while Seelene and Elise Randolph and Kelduum Revaan popped up here and there. I didn't even remember UAxDeath was on CSM 7 until I looked up the list to make sure I spelled names correctly, and Darius III I knew was on there but he can be considered a rogue agent for all intents and purposes.

I acknowledge that some members may have been more active in other non-english communities thus not as visible, but my impression is that is not the case here.

I'm going to say that I think making Seelene the chair of CSM 7 was a mistake. I understand that they had their reasons for voting the way they did but Seelene's participation in CSM 6 was not good enough to justify the chair and as CSM 7 went on we saw the same problem with him going off the radar. Yes, the CSM should not be allowed to replace real life as a second job but there is a many levels between fully engaged and fully disengaged and yet Seelene seems not able to find them. I think some of the problems with member participation could have been addressed by a stronger-willed, more diplomatic and more consistently present chair.

Activity

So what did the CSM 7 do for the year? To be fair to them they entered office at a weird time. CCP was getting over the mad panic rush to right the ship with Crucible and Inferno and did not pay enough attention to the CSM for the first half of their term. The CSM called CCP on the lack of proper interaction and steps were made to rectify that and the second half of their term was a lot more productive.

The minutes produced from the summits were extremely detailed (perhaps overdetailed?) and provided some much needed accountability by identifying who said what. I approve. But again we run up into the situation where the lion's share of the work is seemingly being done by the minority of the members. I disapprove.

I was very happy with the CSM when they produced the strategy document which laid out a clear vision of strategic planning recommendations for CCP. I think it was brilliant and should be held up of an example of good CSM-CPP communication and influence.

I believe that CSM 7's greatest contribution to the institution will be the improved stakeholder status and getting the CSM more involved with one team on a constant basis. I hope CSM 8 continues that trend going forward.

Communication

While I'm not as critical of CSM 7's communication as others like Ripard Teg have been, I do think it could have been better. CSM members that ran blogs went horribly silent for the most part, in particular two important members, Seelene and Trebor.

Here's Seelene's posts over his term:

And Trebor's:

Yes, it is better than nothing, but it leaves a lot of dead air in between those seasonal status updates where a lot of casual people can forget the CSM even exists. I don't think any of the other members have blogs.

There were a fair number of podcast appearances and I will give credit to CSM 7 for being active in the podcast circuit. Well, some of them, the usual ones. And Alekseyev runs his own excellent podcast called Declarations of War in which he had a frequent CSM section, but for the casual eve player these avenues are ineffective and a very different audience from the forum and blog readers.

Also, I was disturbed by how much air time on these podcast appearance were taken up by responding to criticism, real or imagined. Ripard Teg's posts in particular seemed to drive the CSM batty, especially Seelene and Alekseyev who at times displayed incredibly thin skin for public figures and went very aggressively after Ripard on podcasts until the whole thing jumped the shark when Aleks allowed co-host Ninja Turtle to deliver what I can only hope was a tirade fueled by accidently mixing alcohol and medications, since it was so over the top and outright demonstratively false. To their credit, Ninja Turtle and Aleks publicly apologized on the podcast when called on it and gave Ripard a chance to come on and speak for himself.

Overall

In the end, I give half the CSM 7 a passing grade and the other half a failing one. For the chair Seelene, I thought he would have been better suited to just being a member and not being the chair. I think they did OK on communicating with the playerbase but could have done better, but there communication with CCP was good to excellent and their work on planning and summits and the minutes were outstanding.

I think that the fault for the lower CSM 8 election turnout has to fall equally on CSM 7 and CCP's shoulders., and I'm hoping that CSM 8 takes improving community outreach as one of their common goals this year.

CSM 8 Election - CCP Should Have Done More

We heard on various podcasts and media outlets that CCP was going to launch a publicity offensive to make players not plugged into the external metagame of the election and  encourage them to vote.

Media watchers like me observed and waited and wondered what CCP would do to drive voters to the polls that traditionally have stayed away. And what did we get?

- The usual splash screen banner that no one clicks.

- The usual news link in the character selection screen.

Both of these are terrible in that a player logging into the game must be taken out of the game when they click on those links. I know that when I'm logging in the first thing I don't want to do is not actually log into the game. At best the player thinks about doing it later and at worst they say "meh, why bother?"

- A horribly unimaginative and uninformative 38 second video. Words do not suffice for describing my disappointment. I love CCP Xhagen but the guy put me to sleep with his one line. This video should have been accompanied or replaced by a larger more vibrant video describing a) what the CSM is, b) how they are important and plug directly into Eve's development process, and c) what great things they have done in the past. And done it with energy like the Crimewatch video.

- A mass mailing that one character of mine got. One. Out of eight.

Now maybe they have some metric for deciding characters that are active and yet still need a prod to go vote, but considering all my accounts had voted by this point and this character was no more active other ones, I don't know what metric they would be using.

To add to these failings I have to say the voting itself was painful. At least it was drag and drop but required my full screen and even then it was hard to get my voting boxes on with all the candidates. A side by side design would have been much better and easier to use.

I expected more. A lot more.

For something as important as the CSM and getting the vote out for a more representative CSM makeup, CCP's effort has been underwhelming. Here are my suggestions for next time:

1) Longer and better video that, as I said above, has more life and describes not only what the CSM does but things it has accomplished already. Explain why people should want to vote.

2) Integrate voting into the client. No more having to go out of game to vote because that extra step is going to turn off a lot of people who want to play Eve, not internet spaceship politics.

3) More adverts in game like on billboards or automated notices in local chat with links to the in game voting tool. Make it easy for people playing the game to play politics and you will get your involved voters.

4) Bigger mass mailing campaign to get the word out. One out of eight characters is not enough CCP Dolan.

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I predict as it stands right now that voting turnout will be below 16% of the active playerbase.

Earning Endorsements

Choosing who to vote for in the upcoming CSM elections is harder than ever.

For one thing, the Single Transferable Vote means that you need to identify 14 people to vote for instead of just one. Sure, you can only fill out your ballot with a smaller number but if you do that you effectively give more power to people with the patience (or vindictiveness) to fill out all 14 slots. And if your vote gets transferred below your list of desire candidates than it effectively gets wasted. Don't waste your vote.

For another, the role of the CSM has evolved far beyond anything it was when it started years ago. It has moved from a player sounding board only halfheartedly used by CCP to a full stakeholder in development. CSM 7 has had unprecedented access and input into the process and CSM 8 should be continuing in that vein, thus choosing representatives for that elected body is more important to the future of Eve than ever. No jerks nor assholes need apply.

So we, the voters, need to put more effort than ever in finding the right people to assign our votes to. What follows is my criteria list of what I want in a good member for CSM 8.

1) Shares my Eve values.

What I mean by this is that at the end of the day we agree on a large majority of the big issues and questions facing Eve in the future, or at least our visions on "the way things should be" are compatible in the board strokes even if they differ in the fine details.

Respects different types of game play? Wants greater variety in types of space? Believes super cap jump range is an issue? Concerned about lack of sub cap options to deal with super caps? Wants local in null sec to be delayed? Wonders if greater protection for newbs would be a good thing? Wants the directional scanner revamped? Thinks moon mining is a abomination? Wants to move alliance income into "bottom up" model? Wants to give corporations more power and alliances less? Etc etc etc.

Now I'm not looking for a complete match, that would be near impossible. As long as their reasons and logic for why they think things should be different from what I think seems based in reality and strong rational thinking, I'm willing to give them the consideration of my vote. However, if they agree with me but got there but a completely ludicrous and illogical set of steps, I'd consider voting for someone else.

Which leads to...

2) Is Intelligent and thinks logically.

For the most part, Eve players are pretty damn smart. But you need to be a cut above the average pilot in order to be considered for CSM in my opinion. You need to be able to look at CCP's plans and ideas and pick them apart point by point in a short order of time, because you can bet for sure if you don't some of the players will when it hits a dev blog near you. Find the loopholes, mechanic blunders, and possible outcomes simply based off a slide show in a meeting. Its a challenge and you need to be able to do it to serve the CSM adequately.

3) Can communicate well.

Being smart and sounding smart are two different things. You want someone who can be both: smart enough to swim in the deep end of the mechanics and social outcomes pool and capable of explaining your opinions on these issues to people in the CSM, the developers at CCP, and ultimately the player base.

And communicating does not always mean with friendly parties. You need to know how to communicate in hostile situations, how to drive home points when the opportunity strikes and how to back off when the channel is obviously closed. Somehow the CSM member needs to be able to build bridges and not burn any down despite the best efforts of people around them.

At the same time, as part and parcel of point (2), they need to be able to listen well and be willing to revise their opinions based on new information or information shown to be incorrect that they believed was true. Its hard to change your mind when being aggressively attacked; our pride can make us defend a point long past rationality, but a good CSM member will be able to do so.

That's very useful for...

4) Making Compromises.

A good negotiator knows that to get something you sometimes need to give something up. The CSM is made up of 14 of the biggest egos in the game at any one time and a person looking for my vote needs to be able to work with them (or at least the active ones) in order to reach consensus without abandoning all principles. That means knowing it may be necessary to give ground on one topic and digging your heels in on another. You don't to always give way or else you are nothing but a nodding head; you don't always want to demand your way or you are impossible to work with. Finding that balance is the hallmark of a great team member.

On top of all that, once you as CSM have reached a consensus with the other members, you then need to be able to take that and reach compromises with CCP. And then turn around and sell those compromises and agreements to a playerbase totally removed from the process.

You know what? Add this to the list...

5) Willing to take a lot of abuse.

CSM is a thankless job. Some people at CCP see you as a bunch of entitled yahoos with no realistic knowledge of game design or how "things were meant to be before the players ruined it". Some players see you as useless windbags and propaganda machines of CCP's marketing department.1 Its a safe bet based on previous CSMs that half the members will be dead weight at best. All for no appreciable advantage in game and a questionable "free trip" to Iceland that costs you vacation time and time away from family.

On top of all that, you are expected to put in 10-20 hours a week on average (according to current active CSM members) to discuss all the items and processes which leaves less time to actually play the game.

Um, tell me again why you want to do this? Why anyone would want to do this? In the real world people get paid for this type of work.

6) Joy of the game.

Ultimately, one thing I want in a CSM member is someone who really truly loves the game and wants it to be better. Passion is hard to quantify but I know it when I see it. I also can tell when someone is running for the attention instead, and let me tell you, it burns me when they get elected and end up doing nothing. I want to find the people who voted for them and give them a shake.

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The worst part of all of this is I have to make a determination on all of these points based on what I know of someone in Eve. At best you have a couple years of posting on forums and blogs to make a judgement call. At worst you never have heard of them before they announced they were running. In real politics you can see what they have done in the past based on public record and investigative reporting. With Eve, everything is suspect and part of a possible giant troll or plain old lie.

What this means is that you need to give the people running for CSM some benefit of the doubt and assume, unless shown evidence to the contrary, that they are being sincere in the fora and blogs and podcasts you observe them in.

So now that I've outlined my guidelines for what I am looking for in a candidate to vote for, I am going to compile my list and when the voting is about to begin I will give my endorsements.


1 - Its also useful if you have a thick skin and don't get riled easily. Some people on CSM 7 really need to take a chill pill. ;)