Blog Banter #19 – CSM: Player Power or Paper Tiger?

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 players 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?

Oh boy, I’ve written so much about the CSM over the last month I pretty sure you all know where I stand. I was asked to contribute an article to E-ON about it (its in the latest issue), I ran a survey, I was lucky enough to be invited to a few of the meetings at the Summit, and much like everyone else I was disappointed with a lot of the response from CCP which was published in the Summit Minutes. That being said, I fully support the CSM project and believe it is a valuable, if not essential, part of the EVE development process. And here’s why:

First of all a point of clarification, based on what we know from various sources (including those Summit Minutes), being a stakeholder does not give the CSM any more weight in the prioritization of development than any other stakeholder. Ultimately all the stakeholders have to bow to the decisions of the executive. They get a say, and input into the decision making process, but only on an equal footing with everyone else. They have no more authority to influence the direction of EVE than someone who works in the Reykjavik office. They may even have less influence simply because they are not there in person 5 days a week.

So, the CSM have no direct authority to assign CCP resources to specific tasks, they merely have an equal voice in advising the decision makers as to where those resources should be assigned.

The problem here is that this has not been communicated effectively, and has been mixed up in management jargon. All it means, in plain English, is that previous to CSM 5 CCP did not even have to listen to the CSM. That they did so was a courtesy, nothing more. Now, having been granted ‘stakeholder’ status, CCP are only obligated to listen to what the CSM says. They are still under no obligation to actually do anything that the CSM advises them to do. Just as it is with any of the other ‘stakeholder’ groups at CCP.

The CSM becoming a stakeholder has revealed that the executive has no obligation to actually do anything any of their stakeholders advise, even those  within the company itself. The only real obligation they have is to their shareholders. Any obligation to their customers is not really an obligation at all, its completely optional and if CCP feel that they can get more customers elsewhere then they’re not obligated to keep their current one’s on side. It may not be all that clever, or even advisable, to alienate an existing loyal customer base but that decision is ultimately up to them.

CCP is not a monolithic entity, this seems to have been highlighted by the last CSM summit. The minutes and blog posts of delegates gave us more insight into how things work at CCP than we seem to realise. A communications disconnect was revealed within CCP, between the frontline developers, designers and programmers, and the executive.

It used to be that the executive and the developers were the same people. Hilmar, Nathan, and Reynir built EVE as part of a small team of less than 100 people. Working passionately to make the game we know and love today. As EVE and CCP has grown however, they have stepped back from the day to day grunt work of developing the game and have taken a more visionary and executive role. This is perfectly normal in a company which has grown so quickly in such a short space of time, in fact its perfectly normal once any company reaches and exceeds a certain size.

It would seem from the Summit minutes that the CCP executive needs to reconnect with their product and their customers as more than numbers on a graph and the CSM is an essential component of that, as are all our blogs and forums.

Is the CSM worth it? For what it cost us? Yes. For what we as players get from it? Absolutely. For what it costs CCP and what they get from it? I would say yes to both of those as well. The CSM gives us the players a conduit through which to reach directly into the heart of CCP and make our views known. It allows us to tell CCP pretty much directly whether they’re achieving the ‘excellence of experience’ that they are inferring from their various numbers and metrics. The  CSM is not a one way street though, and CCP needs to realise this before they can extract the full value from it.

To CCP the CSM is valuable as a marketing tool, that’s a given, but at the moment they’re doing it wrong; as the furore over the latest Summit (And CCP Zulu’s subsequent Dev Blog) amply demonstrates. There is so much potential for good PR to come from the CSM project that CCP are being foolish in squandering it. There is much more mileage to be gotten from listening to the CSM and paying close attention to its advice in terms of really good PR than there is just from having it there. It certainly does seem at the moment that the CSM is merely there as a distraction and publicity exercise. So yes, the CSM is a marketing tool, but it is more use as such if it is actually listened to and its advice acted upon.

To CCP the value of the CSM lies not only in its potential as a marketing tool but in that it allows a group who are basically ‘third parties’ in to see what they’re doing. External eyes can spot things that internal ones simply don’t see because they’re used to it. An external opinion is always valuable as it can show up the flaws in an internally conceived plan or vision. An outsider to any organisation can also ‘think outside the box’ with greater ease than someone who is more constrained by the limitations within the organization. An external view can be a source of innovation, inspiration and advice unfettered by organizational restrictions.  The CSM is valuable to CCP in more ways than they know, they just need to find that out.

Is the CSM a scam? No. I don’t think so. If it were a scam then the CSM would be flown to Iceland, all expenses paid,  given a free holiday going round all the tourist attractions and being wined and dined by CCP then flown home again. As it is, and I have first hand experience of this, when in Iceland the CSM delegates work incredibly hard on our behalf, discussing the various issues we have with EVE with CCP, and among themselves. Its not a holiday, its 4 days spent sitting in a stuffy meeting room for 9-10 hours a day and arguing their cases to CCP.

So the CSM is a good thing. It may not look like it at the moment, but with the support of the players and a little flexibility from CCP it could be the force that can make EVE the game that we all want it to be, CCP and players alike.

M out

Other Banterers:

1. Growing Pains | CrazyKinux’s Musing
2. CSM: Hoax or Serious Business? « Lost in New Eden
3. CSM-Power to the people or puppets of CCP « A whole lot of Yarrrr!!!
4. Gaming the CSM | A Mule in EvE
5. A Taste Of Democracy | StarFleet Comms
6. CSM: Player Power or Paper Tiger? | I Am Keith Neilson
7. Governance Thrash Redux? « The Ralpha Dogs
8. CCP Doesn’t Care: Blog Banter 19 « OMG! You’re a Chick?!
9. The Cataclysmic Variable: It’s Crunch Time!
10. The 19th EVE Blog Banter is upon us… and about the CSM and CCP | Victoria Aut Mors
11. Your Call Is Very Important To Us, Please Stay On the Line.| A Merry Life and a Short One
12. 19th EVE Online Blog Banter: CSM and CCP | The House Theodoulos
13. When worlds collide… | The Hydrostatic Capsule
14. Blog Banter #19 | Dense Veldspar
15. Blog Banter #19 – Be Careful What You Say Roc | Roc’s Ramblings
16. CSM: Lame Duck from the Beginning? | Confessions of a Closet Carebear
17. Blog Banter #19: Want Cheese With That Whine? | EVEOGANDA
18. Blog Banter 19 – McSpaceships?… You Want Drones With That? | Blastrad Tales
19. Governance Thrash Redux? | The Ralpha Dogs
    
20. More to come…

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