Council of Stellar Management Voting Active

[Calantus]

With tears of joy.

Schild has valiantly defended our nest from the invader and we are safe once more from the walls of text and soapbox posturing.

[Merusk]

Good God!

There are only 2 reasons why someone would go back through an eight page thread (of which he was the majority poster) and meticulously erase every single post after the avatars of his forum identity were altered by a moderator.

Possibility 1: He threw the internet equivalent of a kindergarden hissy-fit because he couldn't stand on being the butt end of a joke.

Possibility 2: He thought that by erasing his posts he was denying everyone the golden nuggets of wisdom contained therein, since anyone that makes fun of him obviously does not deserve them.


Possibility 1 just makes him look like a self-absorbed dick with a catastrophically inflated ego and no sense of humor.

Possibility 2 proves that he is a self-absorbed dick with a catastrophically inflated ego and no sense of humor.

Edit: Spelling

You missed #3, which is far simpler and more likely.

He's bug-fucking nuts.

[Amarr HM]

Well it looks like the CSM is a total flop and CCP are rueing the day. It seems that less than 10% of active the player base voted on it, Jita park gets about 4 posts a day and is fast becoming as retarded as the feautures and ideas discussion.

I now rename it the "Council of Fail" or COF.

[bhodi]

OK I am taking back this thread now.

The first meeting chatlogs are out (here) but they are really fucking boring and 36 pages long. There's nothing in there... except jade being all serious business and darius being funny.

It's clear now that it's high school all over again in there:

Notables for fun!


Hardin > we are all equals here
Jade Constantine > I’ve got no problem with that
Darius JOHNSON > Wait I AM AN IMPORTANT SPACE CEO

Jade Constantine > now then we've got a slight issue
Darius JOHNSON > Type fast frauline
Jade Constantine > only applicants for v sec are already in roles
Ankhesentapemkah > Will do, Darius.
Darius JOHNSON > Ankh bane thinks you're a qtpie btw

[ 2008.05.24 18:55:48 ] Inanna Zuni > ((Darius ... Goons have a reputation which I do not know if it is true or not from personal experience, but you were elected to serve here so please do so,. Thank you))

LaVista Vista > While I do see why everything being public is good, I do find that there is some people on the forums, who don't respect CSM, and try to make our lives hard with no reason.

Jade Constantine > and Darius, you said you had nothing more to add could you please respect the process of the meeting
Darius JOHNSON > farts

[ 2008.05.24 18:19:02 ] Ankhesentapemkah > You can trust me, Darius.

[whether jade should have the power to sign off papers before being sent to CCP]
[ 2008.05.24 18:50:02 ] Darius JOHNSON > We all sign or there's no signing
[ 2008.05.24 18:50:06 ] Darius JOHNSON > period

[ 2008.05.24 17:37:16 ] Darius JOHNSON > I also agree with Jade's call for brevity

[ 2008.05.24 18:52:14 ] Darius JOHNSON > Don't tell me when to and when not to speak
[ 2008.05.24 18:52:17 ] Dierdra Vaal > that too yes
[ 2008.05.24 18:52:20 ] Jade Constantine > Sorry Darius , but yes .... shush please

[ 2008.05.24 18:48:45 ] Darius JOHNSON > What the fuck am I voting on?

[ 2008.05.24 18:36:04 ] Bane Glorious > Sunday would be nice considering that Saturday is the Sabbath and all

[ 2008.05.24 17:37:24 ] Inanna Zuni > Xhagen, if I might ask you to step away from your wall a moment (!) .. as you/CCP started this great idea how do you see the mechanics of making it happen effectively?
[ 2008.05.24 17:37:59 ] Darius JOHNSON > I think it's important for us to have blue text as well
[ 2008.05.24 17:38:10 ] Leandro Salazar > /emote wonders what he is missing as he sees no Xhagen in the channel
[ 2008.05.24 17:38:19 ] Inanna Zuni > not blue - we aren't devs and don't have any power - but something to signify on forums especially
[ 2008.05.24 17:38:25 ] Hardin > yep
[ 2008.05.24 17:38:26 ] Jade Constantine > Inanna please
[ 2008.05.24 17:38:33 ] CCP Xhagen > I do not have anything to put on the agenda
[ 2008.05.24 17:38:36 ] Inanna Zuni > Leandro - whilst devs appear on SiSi not here
[ 2008.05.24 17:38:37 ] Jade Constantine > we're trying to finalize the agenda so that Ank can take notes
[ 2008.05.24 17:38:38 ] Darius JOHNSON > You're totally banned when I get ban power

Forty minutes later:

[ 2008.05.24 18:17:34 ] Darius JOHNSON > Xhagen when do I get blue text? This is important

[BobFromMarketing]

I made this account yesterday to respond to his insanity but for some reason the website stopped responding.  Here i am now.   
I really hope CCP sees the powergrap and spoiled attitude of Jade.  I know they won't let him ruin our game, but it's annoying to watch him try.

That being said.  Hi, i'm arrogant and kind of a prick.

[Reg]

You'll fit right in then.

[Endie]

I was actually going to post a link to this thread's Jaderush in the "CSM RESULTS ARE OUT" thread on gf, but I thought that it was going really well as it was, and we really didn't need HCLChicken and Nuvanito practising their awesome burns in here and making Jade look good.

[Grand Design]

[ 2008.05.24 17:37:16 ] Darius JOHNSON > I also agree with Jade's call for brevity

 

[ajax34i]

Jita park gets about 4 posts a day and is fast becoming as retarded as the feautures and ideas discussion.

Jita Park isn't getting any more posts because everyone has switched to Assembly Hall, where you can vote to support whatever thread you're replying to.  Assembly Hall, however, only has people re-iterating the issues they brought up in Jita Park previously, and most of the issues have less than 50 votes.

Also, the issues posted are, in my opinion, too narrow...  I mean, "Fix 1400mm artillery guns please" as an issue?  Nobody seems to be going for the broader stuff, like "review / rebalance the different weapon types" or stuff like that.

EDIT:  I think CCP was expecting the CSM members to, sort of, moderate Assembly Hall, or at least bang a gavel and yell 'Order!  Order!" and post some issues and have discussions, but they don't seem to be doing that.  I see a Lavista Vista one, and that's about it.

[Megrim]

Right, so i know this was asked on the first page, but could anyone actually explain wtf these elected people are supposed to do? To help Bhodi get this thread back on track, could someone also make some kind of bullet-point list of what they think could be changed, and is in the realm of the possible?

I suspect some good points were brought up earlier, but the WALLOFTEXT monster killed my brain at some stage.

[Phildo]

Fortunate for those fans of pure, non-revisionist history, most of Jade's posts were quoted by other posters.  Unless he somehow managed to find a way to edit OTHER people's posts too.

[ajax34i]

They are supposed to gather the issues we feel are most important, discuss them with us, and then present them to CCP in some bulleted form.  CCP will then respond to each issue in a formal way.  CCP's posted a dev blog about it, with a long PDF and a short PDF.

[bhodi]

They are supposed to gather the issues we feel are most important, discuss them with us, and then present them to CCP in some bulleted form.  CCP will then respond to each issue in a formal way.  CCP's posted a dev blog about it, with a long PDF and a short PDF.

Instead, here's what happened:

1. Semi-polite introductions
2. Election of positions within council
3. Mode of communication between council members, coming to agreement that it should be hosted by CCP
4. Disclosure/transparency discussion in which council members differed in opinion as to how much should be divulged publicly
5. Discussion about how to decide what issues were important - this went nowhere slow
6. Pissing match about Jade signing minutes of meeting prior to sending to CCP, followed by persistent protest by Darius that the Chair is equal to the rest of the council and should not have exclusive document signing rights

Admittedly, it's only the first, but still.

[Megrim]

So they didn't even GET to the issues? They only got as far as deciding (or trying to decide) "how to decide which issues are important"? Jeeeeesus..

I would've though that point (5) is what they should have bloody well started with.

[ajax34i]

Right, well, my interpretation of the various CCP blogs I've read is that "what issues are important" is supposed to be decided via voting in the Assembly Hall, and that hasn't taken off (yet?).  CCP's idea behind the CSM members was that they'd be free to "champion" whatever issues they have, and thus those with issues on their agendas will likely forward those issues without prompting from us. 

But, the playerbase was supposed to also have a vote and be able to forward issues, by voting on them.  However, CCP wants 11,000 votes per issue before it can be pushed through, and that ain't happening.  Like I've been saying, 50 votes seems to be the average.

Thus, it's a failure until CCP decides to reduce that 11,000 number to something more realistic.  And, until then, the only issues on the table are personal agenda ones, and the problem with that is that a few CSM's have agendas, but the majority of them don't.  They're waiting for the players / someone else to vote and thus build an agenda for them.

[Jayce]

It may be an absurd oversimplification, but I think the results of this indicate why "inmates running the asylum" is regarded as a bad thing.

[Phildo]

I really hope CCP sees the powergrap and spoiled attitude of Jade.  I know they won't let him ruin our game, but it's annoying to watch him try.

Does anyone really think that CCP cares about our opinions anyway?  They're likely to ignore all but the most easily-implemented, practical issues.  Everything else will get "we're looking into this" or some similarly vague response.  I'm pretty sure someone else already mentioned it, but the whole CSM thing strikes me as a way of diverting our displeasure away from CCP and onto our elected officials.  Next time there's a dev scandal, we get to go running to Winger Dickgirl instead of directly to the company.

[Nevermore]

You ever have a close brush with something truly horrible but didn't realize it at the time?  After reading this thread I now realize how close I came to the abyss.  See, back when I played Eve I almost joined Star Fraction.  Unfortunately, real life interrupted which ended up being the beginning of the end of my time in Eve so I never did join.  I can only assume that there is indeed a Benevolent God, for in retrospect I see what really happened was Him kindly steering me away from the mountain of fucktardery that is Jade Constantine.

[Fordel]

He does work in mysterious ways 

[MahrinSkel]

Yeah, I wound up back where I started, the CSM is going to be a clusterfuck of truly monumental proportions.  Unless CCP realizes what a mess they've made, and has the courage to take the PR hit for simply ignoring them and disbanding it after this cycle.

--Dave

[Morat20]

Yeah, I wound up back where I started, the CSM is going to be a clusterfuck of truly monumental proportions.  Unless CCP realizes what a mess they've made, and has the courage to take the PR hit for simply ignoring them and disbanding it after this cycle.

--Dave

They should have just gone down the forums, picked two or three regular forum posters with a solid understanding of that aspect of the game (modules, trading, invention, corp, PvP, PvE, whatever) and the respect of the mouth-breathers in that sub-forum and told them "Hey, would you keep a running list of what you guys think is causing the most grief? And if anyone has any good suggestions in terms of gameplay mechanics, we'd love to hear them. Here, you can be a mod and make stickies. We'll check back quarterly".

[Thrawn]

They should have just gone down the forums, picked two or three regular forum posters with a solid understanding of that aspect of the game (modules, trading, invention, corp, PvP, PvE, whatever) and the respect of the mouth-breathers in that sub-forum and told them "Hey, would you keep a running list of what you guys think is causing the most grief? And if anyone has any good suggestions in terms of gameplay mechanics, we'd love to hear them. Here, you can be a mod and make stickies. We'll check back quarterly".

Actually, thats a pretty solid idea that would probably accomplish more then this whole CSM mess.

[ajax34i]

Reading through that chatlog, there's a subtle point that CCP Xhagen makes that the CSM's are supposed to pick up issues and forward them, with the 11,000 votes only being neccessary if they all vote NO to an issue and we still want to push it through despite that.  I.E. we don't need 11,000 votes after all, all we have to do is post issues for them to look at.  I wonder if they've picked up on that.

[IainC]

Yeah, I wound up back where I started, the CSM is going to be a clusterfuck of truly monumental proportions.  Unless CCP realizes what a mess they've made, and has the courage to take the PR hit for simply ignoring them and disbanding it after this cycle.

--Dave

They should have just gone down the forums, picked two or three regular forum posters with a solid understanding of that aspect of the game (modules, trading, invention, corp, PvP, PvE, whatever) and the respect of the mouth-breathers in that sub-forum and told them "Hey, would you keep a running list of what you guys think is causing the most grief? And if anyone has any good suggestions in terms of gameplay mechanics, we'd love to hear them. Here, you can be a mod and make stickies. We'll check back quarterly".

To be honest that doesn't really work either in this particular instance. Remember that this is CCP who are fighting a fairly major credibility issue over their impartiality. The CSM program isn't just to empower players it's so that CCP can point at the changes they make and say 'See! We did this because the guys you picked asked us to.' Unfortunately what they have is neither fish nor fowl. It falls short of being a player empowerment program because the noise to signal ratio is off the scale (as it always will be with this type of program) and it isn't an oversight committee either because the CSMs have no oversight on anything.

The way I'd have done it would be to pull the SiSi logs and figure out who spends a lot of time testing shit out there. Anyone with time on their hands and an agenda to push can manage a crazy postcount but the guys who are heavy duty theorycrafters on test are the guys who really care about the game. Do some background checks to make sure that they aren't someone too crazy and to make sure you have a reasonable mix of racial pilots, industry types, traders, guys with political experience etc and then send them a nice email. Tell them that you're trying to work more closely with the players and if they want to they can come and discuss their theorycrafting on a subforum of your internal boards. Assign a CM and a producer to keep an eye on them and to throw them the occasional bone while they happily do ivory tower building or stat crunching for you. Be pretty harsh on kicking people out of the garden if they start being jerks and be reasonably flexible about inviting new people in if theres a good chance they'll be productive. No-one has unrealistic expectations, it costs you nothing and anything that comes out of it is gold-plated PR. Unfortunately that approach won't work for CCP because a lot of their players don't trust them.

[Sparky]

They should have just gone down the forums, picked two or three regular forum posters with a solid understanding of that aspect of the game (modules, trading, invention, corp, PvP, PvE, whatever) and the respect of the mouth-breathers in that sub-forum and told them "Hey, would you keep a running list of what you guys think is causing the most grief? And if anyone has any good suggestions in terms of gameplay mechanics, we'd love to hear them. Here, you can be a mod and make stickies. We'll check back quarterly".

Actually, thats a pretty solid idea that would probably accomplish more then this whole CSM mess.

I'm sure CCP are more interested in getting a few "CCP breaks new ground again with the first player elected council blah blah blah" write-ups than anything else.

[ajax34i]

The way I'd have done it would be to pull the SiSi logs and figure out who spends a lot of time testing shit out there. [...] the guys who are heavy duty theorycrafters on test are the guys who really care about the game. [etc]

That's a good idea and might have worked, not sure.  Honestly I don't know how many people they get on SiSi nowadays; I know that when I want to do "theorycrafting" about ships I run to EFT or similar tools, and if it's industry or POSes or traderun profitability calculations, there are tools or Excel is good enough for my purposes.  So, I don't see myself using SiSi for theorycrafting; it's there if I want to specifically help them test bugs or for a preview of upcoming attractions, and not much else.

[MahrinSkel]

They should have just gone down the forums, picked two or three regular forum posters with a solid understanding of that aspect of the game (modules, trading, invention, corp, PvP, PvE, whatever) and the respect of the mouth-breathers in that sub-forum and told them "Hey, would you keep a running list of what you guys think is causing the most grief? And if anyone has any good suggestions in terms of gameplay mechanics, we'd love to hear them. Here, you can be a mod and make stickies. We'll check back quarterly".

You just basically described the Team Lead program I started at Mythic.  Most of them were for classes, but we had some "at large" TL's for things like Crafting and Frontiers issues.  It was basically a parliamentary cabinet sort of deal, when it was time to replace a TL, the existing TL's (and the outgoing one, if they weren't getting booted) put forward candidates that seemed to understand that area (and voiced any objections to others candidates), and the Mythic employee that interfaced with them (me at first, when it was completely informal) picked the one that seemed the best fit.  And they submitted reports on a private forum, which then got distilled down to a "hot list" of bullet items and mixed with similar lists coming from Sanya and customer service.  I regularly pinged developers in charge of various systems to come read or particpate in discussions of their area of responsibility.

Thing was, I wasn't trying to create a system of player governance, just close some feedback loops.  You put so much emphasis on it, and make it democratic, you get too many of *exactly* the kind of people I tried to keep out of it, political animals with an agenda that went way beyond just providing information about what was wrong in the game, and why.  Or drama queens who were just trying to stir shit up, God save me from those.

--Dave

[lac]

I'm sure CCP are more interested in getting a few "CCP breaks new ground again with the first player elected council blah blah blah" write-ups than anything else.

This. They got some decent PR & exposure out of it with the added bonus that as long as they entertain this CSM thingy they can both use it to funnel discontent among the users and proclaim it as an accolade of user/corporate interaction without having to invest much into it.
It's a pretty good idea even if it leads to nothing constructive in the end.

[Jayce]

the added bonus that as long as they entertain this CSM thingy they can both use it to funnel discontent among the users and proclaim it as an accolade of user/corporate interaction without having to invest much into it.

I don't know, with these personality types they seem likely to have to invest more time and energy than they bargained for.

You put so much emphasis on it, and make it democratic, you get too many of *exactly* the kind of people I tried to keep out of it, political animals with an agenda that went way beyond just providing information about what was wrong in the game, and why.

Agreed - the problem with democracy is that you then need politicians.  And lawyers.  Yeesh..

[Simond]

Plus we got an entertaining thread out of it, and also get to mock the people who posted "Jade is sure to be better for EVE than the ebil Goonies!!!11" 

[Sparky]

Plus we got an entertaining thread out of it, and also get to mock the people who posted "Jade is sure to be better for EVE than the ebil Goonies!!!11" 

Would just like to point out that I totally called it on page 1.

[TripleDES]

I know that Jade Constantine (go go Google Alerts) will never be able to help himself from reading this thread again. As such, I just want everyone to know that a 39 year old man in Merry Olde England just replaced all of his posts with Wall of Text and probably felt he won the day.

Wait, what the fuck? I thought you were just being a dick by running an UPDATE query on all of his shit. I guess that proves that the space whore is really a fucking faggot.

[schild]

Nah, we didn't fuck with it. If you'll see, they all have the edit sig by him and a timestamp that's different.

[TripleDES]

Instead, here's what happened:

6. Pissing match about Jade signing minutes of meeting prior to sending to CCP, followed by persistent protest by Darius that the Chair is equal to the rest of the council and should not have exclusive document signing rights

An CAOD-active EVE player that managed to rank first in the votes produced an overinflated ego. Who would've thought.

This whole CSM stuff will degenerate due to shit like this. I'll predict the transgendered dicksucker shitting up all these meetings until either he gets kicked out by CCP or the others call it quits.

[Hoax]

Plus we got an entertaining thread out of it, and also get to mock the people who posted "Jade is sure to be better for EVE than the ebil Goonies!!!11" 

Feel free to try but just because he's a raging ego maniac fucked in the head RP'er doesn't mean that he's worse for EVE then the GS candidates who can barely even pretend that they aren't trolling the entire process.  Goons are still terrible for CSM I stick by that.  Fuck GS if they aren't making funny videos/songs.  I stick by that also.  If nothing else Jade will try to take the whole thing seriously (too seriously most likely) and try to make it work.  The GS guys are probably looking to just fuck it up completely for laughs, if not that they are looking to help GS, if not that they are just morons who got elected because their alliance is big.  Woohoo I'm making friends today! 

Btw, anyone else notice that the War thread is quiet as fuck now adays?  Funny that...   

I'll say it for the 10th time, I have nothing against any single member of any single organization be it SF or GS (Endie and Bhodi can we still be buddies??  ) but as a whole GS has always annoyed the fuck out of me, I've always been rooting for BoB and I'm glad GS and their righteous coalition is falling apart.  I look forward to when BoB forms their own little NAPtrain and wtfsmashes GS.  Then again right now they can't even seem to handle the idiots in the north who couldn't even outnumber and own IRC/ED according to the shit I've read on CAOD (see that forum is good for something lol).