f13.net forums - CSM Elections Have Begun

Quote from: Pezzle on July 07, 2010, 07:49:55 AM

Which is nonsense of course. Back when they were still talking about walking in stations CCP claimed an entirely different team was working on it. That development should not impact the fixing of bugs, answering of petitions and whatever else. There is a substantial backlog of fixes and features that get ignored. Every time I think of running for CSM that catalog comes to mind. Among other things.

That Chatlog Pezzle

Quote from: Gets on July 07, 2010, 10:12:28 AM

She posted some CSM meetings on her blog and forum. Oh, the humanity.

I guess it would be instructive to read the horror of the offensive post in full

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Take Care - Party for EVE CSM
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Written by Ankhesentapemkah
We have delivered !

The first CSM Summit has taken place in Reyjavik, Iceland. Nine player-elected representatives did an outstanding job taking your views and issues to CCP.

Disclaimer: This is a summary of the events that took place, and is written from the perspective and memory of only a single council member. For a detailled and official report of the CSM summit, please read the meeting minutes once these become available.

Day One

- The Morning -

This year, there are some notable differences in procedure compared to previous CSM. CCP has decided to grant the Council of Stellar Management a stakeholder role in the company. The first task of the CSM was to ensure that it will receive all the information it needs to undertake actions. While previous CSM had the right to raise player issues to CCP, most of these unfortunately disappeared into CCPs backlog, meaning that CCP wants to develop them at some point, but does not assign a development slot for them. The CSM had no insight into the backlog, and could never see which issues were being worked on, or how CCP prioritized them.

In CSM5, this will change. The CSM urged CCP to provide insight into the backlog, and means to track our issues. Pétur Óskarsson, from the Research and Statistics department, will act as our ambassador within CCP. He will also use the CSM's stakeholder position to take part in internal discussions and make sure that the CSM issues are fully represented face-to-face, while the CSM is not in Iceland. From now on, the CSM will be able to see the status of an issue, and interfere if required. This way, the CSM does not have to raise the same issue again, and has more insight in what past CSM have been doing. This is important, as it provides a degree of accountability, and means to keep CCP to their promises.

The CSM can also call on statistics now, and use this data to better prepare new issues, or provide meaningful discussion when working on plans for EVE's future. Better issues = higher priority!

- The Afternoon -

During the afternoon, we discussed what we thought of as our most important issue: The quality level of the expansions that CCP has been churning out lately. The CSM believes that CCP's recent expansions do not meet their very own "Excellence" standards, favoring working on a next expansion before finishing the previous one, as well as ignoring old content that is bugged and broken for years. Unfortunately, Nathan, CCPs producer, became very defensive and attempted to justify CCPs development process. He also said that CCP cannot commit to big issues right now, as a lot of their developers are tied down building Incarna and Dust. The CSM posed an united front, and said that the players are not happy with the current state of affairs and many are losing faith in CCP if nothing changes. Fortunately, things got a bit brighter later in the meeting, with Nathan assuring us that Planetary Interaction will get several iterations over the coming month and won't be abandoned in its current state. Most importantly, I think the message of the players did finally come across: We don't want more shiny stuff while most of the previous shinies are not finished and buggy.

Later that day, the CSM had a live video conference with the Content team in Atlanta. This department is mostly responsible for the PVE side of EVE. The CSM discussed several mission-related issues with them, such as the placement of agents and the factions left out in the cold.

Day Two

- The Morning -

The first big issue the CSM had on the agenda was Planetary Interaction. CCP immediately told us that they are not satisfied with the state PI is in right now, and will work hard on making improvements. Planned improvements include adding more depth and unpredictability to the current game mechanics (possibly through features such as population management and pollution), improving overall usability and drastically reducing the amount of clicks required to perform mundane tasks, adding social interaction so players can cooperate or compete with eachother on the surface.

- The Afternoon -

First, CCP consulted the CSM regarding the reimbursement for players due to the extended downtime. An option was to credit players their lost playtime, but in actual value that would just amount to < $1, thus an alternative was proposed. All players affected would be credited in skillpoints instead. Find out more here.

CCP's technical team gave the CSM a presentation about lag. CCP considers lag a serious issue, as it affects mostl players to some degree sooner or later. The presentation focussed on the sources of lag and the architecture that can be employed to deal with it, and its limitations. CCP explained that current lag in 0.0 is often caused by a node that is already under strain being pushed over their capacity due to a sudden fight breaking out. This is because nodes are designed for handling many solarsystems at once, so even if your system has only a few people in there, the node might actually be busy with things happening in other systems. CCP is planning to address the most serious lag problems by letting nodes transfer troublesome solarsystems to other nodes which do have capacity left over to deal with a sudden fight.

At first, this will cause all players to suffer a disconnect, but CCP is designing a system which allows this process to happen dynamically. Now THAT would really put the lagmonster back in its cage! Another thing CCP is working on to reduce the ill-effects of lag is moving the stargate jump sequence to the origin system, not the destination system. This prevents players from getting stuck upon loading the new system and shot up while they are defenseless, and will likely introduce a mechanic that allows players to cancel their jump.

The tech team also learned about several lag-related issues from the CSM which they were not aware of, making the session productive for both sides of the table. If you experience issues in-game, be sure to always report a bug !

The most important thing discussed on the second day was the state of 0.0. The CSM generally was not satisfied with the state left behind by Dominion. While boring POS warfare was done away with, the current combat centered around Territorial Claim Units has little depth and favors blobbing. While each CSM had their own vision of how 0.0 should be, the general consensus was that there should be more opportunities for small gang warfare, and more ways to obtaining system ownership. CCP said that the current 0.0 situation is monoculture where all sov-holding alliances right now are basically the same in structure and approach. CCP does not like this situation. Unfortunately, I think it will be a long time before CCP has the time to look at fixing the current situation.

As last issue, CCP's Customer Support department gave the CSM a presentation about their procedures, and how the support has improved over time. Overall, the CSM was impressed, and suggested that CCP should publish more information about the things going on behind the scenes. CCP agreed publishing several devblogs, of which the first one can be read here. The CSM encourages you to make use of the new survey should you have any open petitions, and provide CCP with your view of the Customer Support procedure.

Day Three

- The Morning -

The day started with our big Low Sec discussion. This is a pet issue for several members of the CSM, and CCP agreed that the current state of Low Sec leaves a lot to be desired. The CSM would like to see more opportunity for criminals or other shady persons that would like to stay on the bad side of the law. Not only does this apply to pirates, but also entrepreneurs and industrials which deal in contraband products. CCP said that the downside of Low Sec is that besides putting up POSes it is very hard to actually lay claim to Low Sec space, and that they would like to see "homestead" mechanics which allows players to band together. When CCP could give no actual commitment to fixing Low Sec, the CSM urged strongly to look at the issues related to Low Sec. The CSM asked CCP to make small improvements to this area of EVE over time instead, so at least something is done to provide incentives for the players that like to venture to this area.

What came next is my own pet issue, Factional Warfare. The CSM said they still had a lot of open issues in the backlog regarding this area of the game, and were wondering if CCP has any plans to address these problems. When confronted with the many problems, CCP took notes and basically agreed with all of them as issues. Unfortunately, Nathan previously stated that he did not want to commit to fixing Factional Warfare as a whole, despite his own developers thinking of many of these issues as serious. The CSM asked for a compromise, to focus on address the so-called "Low-hanging Fruit" issues which are relatively easy to address and will significantly improve gameplay, such as fixing the way FW complexes spawn.

- The Afternoon -

The CSM met with the team responsible for the User Interface during this afternoon. The CSM stated that the UI is the first impression players get of EVE, and that many players are overwhelmed by it, or annoyed by the poor usability. Overhauling the UI would help retaining a lot of the new players, so the CSM claimed. Disappointingly enough, CCP does not want to commit to a UI overhaul. The CSM proceeded to list smaller problems in the current UI, which were noted by the dev team.

The end of the last day was filled with many smaller issues. Unfortunately, the CSM heard time and again that CCP simply does not have any resources to commit to anything. This frustrated the CSM, which said that some of the issues have been brought up by every CSM to date (Corp Roles review, Alliances in FW), and were not closer to being addressed than they were two years ago. CCP developers said that many of their own issues have not made it in-game either and called the CSM to be realistic. The CSM openly questioned their purpose at this point, as they said there was little point in raising player issues if they were never going to get addressed, no matter how small they were or how highly they prioritized them, as CCP would just run off doing its own thing.

While the end of the summit left most of the CSM with a bit of a bitter taste in their mouth, we generally agreed that the CSM as a player-elected body has been making progress and is gradually earning respect and influence within CCP. Of course, most CSM would like this process to go faster. Nevertheless, the new stakeholder position and access to statistics is a major step forward. I personally believe that our CSM summit has been a wake-up call for CCPs executives, and warned them not to get out of touch with the expectations of the actual players, and perhaps not to get out of touch with the lowly developers actually producing EVE Online.

In my opinion, the current CSM is the best and most productive so far, and I look forward to working with the other council members the coming year!