Summit Minutes Published, Nothing New Here.

So the minutes are out, and they’re pretty much what everyone expected…

TL;DR:

CSM: “The players do not want new shiny things they would like you to fix some of the core gameplay problems first.”
CCP: “Yes we know about all these things you are telling us, but we’re not going to touch them for another 18 months. Ooh, look at these new shiny things.”

This has raised some ire in the forums, as was to be expected no matter what the results of the summit were, and there are even established bloggers who have had enough. Add to this the current furore about Ankh’s dismissal from the CSM and we have a situation which seems to vindicate the position of a large number of CSM naysayers.

Their claim that the CSM is nothing more than a publicity exercise and can exert no real influence over the direction that EVE is going now has the minutes which they will use to support their claims, and while I remain a staunch supporter of the process and its goals, I can kind of see their point.

The minutes are worth reading in their entirety, and its worth reading between the lines as well. As the Summit progressed the frustration being felt by the CSM with CCP’s apparent intransigence and unwillingness to implement many of the suggestions brought forward by them becomes more and more evident. With later discussions devolving into a reiteration of the “Commit to Excellence” argument.

The only committments on CCP’s part were not related to doing anything to the game itself, and had more to do with producing Dev Blogs (listed below) and procedural stuff for the CSM itself. A few of these related to publicising the issues that the CSM has brought forward and are currently in the backlog and more transparency with regards to their prioritization.

This is all well and good, and will certainly improve the amount of information that the playerbase has with regards to the CSM’s activities. However they are all, still, in the realms of generating publicity for the CSM and CCP, which without concrete examples of fixes being implemented in game (fixes which the player notices, not fixes which shave milliseconds of a certain backend process in the client), simply runs the risk of playing further into the “CSM is a PR stunt” crowd.

CCP needs to prove that they care, they need to recognize that some of the issues that the playerbase has are genuine and need fixing. The CSM doesn’t have to prove anything, the minutes speak for themselves. The CSM have acted in good faith (recent events not-withstanding), taking the player’s concerns and opinions to CCP and being quite forceful in their presentation. CCP, it would seem, have not acted in good faith, dismissing and ignoring the concerns of their customers in favour of the big ideas of their executive.

As has been seen, players are going to start voting with their wallets, this is also counter-productive. I can understand how disheartening it is, I’m disheartened myself, but quitting a game you love is not going to fix anything and ultimately undermines both the CSM’s ability to speak on behalf of the players and CCP’s ability to devote resources to the game.

Anyway, enough of the ranting and on to the minutes themselves, I’ve picked out a few choice titbits which I found interesting but the whole document is really worth reading in its entirety, along with analysis from other bloggers and commentators in the forums.

The most telling quotes come during the ‘Committment to Excellence’ discussion, which was based on the most supported Assembly hall thread in the CSM’s history, and reveal a fundamental disconnection between the executives at CCP and both the actual frontline developers and the playerbase. The grunts who do all the work building this marvellous world in which we live are on our side, the problem is that they don’t make the decisions.

In response to the presentation given Nathan Richardson (CCP Oveur) responded with the following:

“Speaking on behalf of CCP, Nathan disagreed strongly with the claim that CCP isn’t committed to excellence.  He pointed out that CCP probably spends a bigger part of its income on development than most other large, established game companies. He stated that this is a clear sign of this commitment.”

As has been pointed out in the forum thread, evidence of input is not evidence of output and is normally the last resort of a bureaucrat trying to justify his job. Its all very well saying that you spend alot on development, but if we as players are not seeing definable results on our end (which are not the same as the total line in an accountant’s ledger) then we’re going to wonder whether investing our money in your product is worth it.

Theres quite a bit of discussion of this point in the forum thread, well worth a read.

The other quote I think is worth mentioning from that discussion is this one:

“CCP stated that once Incarna and Planetary Interaction/Dust 514 are fully implemented, focus will probably shift far more towards improvement of existing features.”

The emphasis is mine, note that probably is not a definite committment. What I fear is that once Incarna an Dust are out (the next 18 months by all accounts) in the wild another new shiny will come along and suck up all the resources so that nothing will ever get fixed. What CCP needs to do is make a committment to go back and polish after Incarna and Dust land. Don’t give us vauge platitudes with indefinite timeframes, probably and maybe don’t cut it. Make a promise, and then keep it. This will go a long way to addressing the loss of faith that many in the payerbase are feeling after reading those mintues.

It may also be productive to find out where the communications bottleneck/disconnection is between the executive and the rest of those involved or is it simply a blinkered focus on the bottom line?

Other interesting items were the revelation that we would begin to see Incarna rolling out at the end of the year (again, with the caveat ‘probably’) with the introduction of the new avatar creator. There was also mention of a new feature (sigh) in the winter expansion which the CSM took issue with, the lack of resources being put into reworking the mission system (revealed in another discussion at the summit) would suggest that this may be a new PvE feature, but only time will tell.

Dev Blogs we should expect:

• History of NPC goods/Tyrannis Hoarding issue.
• PI Depletion Mechanics.
• PI demographics by high, low and null security.
• Incarna “State of the Situation”.
• Unhappy Customer Project (done).
• EVE Wiki page regarding ban policy.
• Low Sec Demographics and Statistics.
• Network Scaling Issues
• Excellence

So far we’ve seen one of those (about the Unhappy Customer Project, in a kind of round about way), and one about the fixes that were brought in via the mass testing (which was basically the same statistics that were thrown at the CSM during the lag discussion). Personally I’d like to see CCP follow up on all of these as soon as possible. If they don’t it merely adds more grist to the mill of the CSM’s naysayers. I can imagine it now: “The CSM can’t even get CCP to put out Dev Blogs, what a waste of time they are.”

So those were the minutes fo the first of CSM5′s Summits with CCP. As I said at the top of the post, they were pretty much what I expected. All we can do from here in is keep up the pressure and support our representatives as they continue to speak truth to power. The CSM is our voice at CCP, lets get behind them and turn the volume all the way up to 11.

As I’ve said before there is no point in losing faith in the CSM, doing so undermines its influence and means that we have even less of a voice. So spread the word, tell your friends, corpmates, enemies, prospective ransom targets, anyone. The more people get behind the CSM the more pressure they can exert on our behalf and maybe, just maybe, the decision makers at CCP will have no choice but to listen and act.

M out.

Other commentary on the minutes:

• EVE Forums Discussion
• Scrapheap Challenge
• Life in Low Sec (Mynxee, CSM Chair)
• Confessions of a Noob Starship Politician (Trebor Daehdoow, CSM Delegate) (and this one too)
• The Elitist
• Faction Warfare Military Career Center
• Max Torps Starfleet Comms
• Mike Azariah
• Let me know If I’ve missed anyone here or in the comments

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