Eveconomics

The CSM concept was revived about 14 months ago by now. It has been a bumpy ride, but does it deliver? And if not, how does one fix that? Here’s my take on it:

When CSM1 took first took office, it was dropped into the position with very little help from CCP: We had to make up all our procedures on our own and we had a fair fight, trying to justify our existence and requests for resources from CCP departments(A private forum, email system, a wiki). One might call it a social experiment. And I think it’s quite fair to call it that.

The CSM was tasked to structure itself beyond a simple distribution of roles given by CCP. This has the inherent feature of creating an organic organization. However given the lack of challenges it faces, it’s not going to get "pushed" into a stronger state. It’s like survival of the fittest, without any sort of threats to specie’s existence: The specie will survive but not evolve into the ideal shape.

So before I draw any conclusions based on this, I want to put the CSM into the larger scheme of things when it comes to communication inside a community?

If we look back at my earlier blog posts, I have discussed how a successful way of keeping customers happy is all about communication. Some people did note that I maybe was a bit "harsh". And I think that’s fair to say. However I think that it’s more the case of the ideas and conclusions being put forward were very idealistic and slightly over-drawn in order to make a point.

Once again, I’m going to take basis in the idea that communication("Feedback") is a desirable thing to have. How might one apply this to the CSM?

The CSM is a democratically elected body of players. Already there, there’s the idea of an election where people vote, and players are elected. There’s a feedback loop which is "solid". People can go and check who got the most votes and see some sort of progress based on their interaction. However after that, the CSM sort of becomes a black-box operation.

It’s not that it’s impossible to find out what the CSM is up to. However the time and effort required getting a sense of progress being made by the CSM is extremely high. This means that people are going to lose faith in the CSM very quickly. It means that there’s no incentive to go and take active part in the community around the CSM. It means that the CSM is going to become irrelevant to the masses.

How could the CSM be made relevant? It’s all about having a feedback loop that gives people a sense of control and influence. This creates a sense of communication, which is critical.

Right now, the CSM is stuck to a patched part of the eve-online forum where people can give an issue-thread a thumbs up. And this is hardly desirable due to

1. The fact that only a small part of the community takes part in the forum
2. It’s prone to alt-spamming
3. There’s no way of getting a feedback loop going.

The problem isn’t directly technological, as much as it’s about managing the lifetime of a CSM issue. That means that all the way from when it’s first raised by a member of the community, till it’s taken care of by CCP, it needs to be transparent what the issue is about, what has been done and what is being done about the issue.

Right now, the issue starts out at the forum, is taken into a wiki format and then passed onto CCP. From that, minutes are created and placed on the wiki, separate from the issue.

This is a major problem. And quite frankly, it’s a technological problem more than anything else.

How to fix it:

In essence, things need to be well-integrated. The wiki-system isn’t really a bad system; however it’s currently a half-assed solution that doesn’t do much more than simply providing a way of storing and tracking changes to a document.

Here’s I suggest is done:

A system is created that allows for submission of issues that adheres to standardized templates. It could be a wiki-like system that contains:

1. Voting(Up and down)
2. Discussion
3. Public editing is allowed until the issue is marked as being under discussion by the CSM(Done when the issue is voted on by the CSM). The CSM members could have to accept changes. (Optional)
4. Progress tracking
5. Prioritization by both the CSM and the public on a 2-month basis.

This raises the barrier to entry a bit. However this could be fixed by creating a staged system where an Assembly-hall-like forum is kept in place. This ought to be the place where rough issues are raised and the community is encouraged to create issues in accordance to the template, and then submitted it to the system.

The result of a system like this would be that a portal is created that allows for easy access to all relevant information about the CSM and allows for easy feedback.

Voting

Right now, the public voting aspect is rather much of a farce. As pointed out earlier, it’s kind of a slapped-on thing.

Allowing for voting by both the public and the CSM on a per-account basis creates a metric that can be used in the overall scheme of things when it comes to raising the issue to CCP. I’ll talk about that again.

Discussion

We already have a system that sort-of allows for discussion. However it’s currently not very useful due to the fact you are required to post in the thread to throw a thumbs-up. While having to post could be argued as a barrier to entry for voting for an issue, but there’s not any other requirement for the post, allowing for empty posts making it impossible to discuss anything.

Progress tracking

One of the major things I hear from people when I discuss the CSM with them, is that once the issue has been posted to the forum, it’s hard to find out what happened to it. First of all you have to figure out what meeting it might have been raised in, find the minutes and then find the CSM-CCP meeting minutes.

A very simple system could be put in place to allow for keeping records of all aspects of the lifetime of an issue. That includes the raw meeting logs from the CSM meeting, the voting result and finally the meeting minutes from the CCP-CSM meeting.

All this information ought to be contained inside the issue page itself. One might even suggest that if there are relevant patch-notes, these could be tagged despite CCP’s previous stance on attributing patch-notes with a CSM tag. But if they don’t want to do it, I guess the CSM will have to do it.

Prioritization

One of the crucial aspects of the CSM issue-raising is the prioritization of the issues. Thus far, it has been done by each CSM member at the end of a 2-month cycle, give each issue a value between 1 and N(N being the amount of issues).

One of the main purposes of the CSM, as far as I’m aware, is to get CCP a sense of what is most important to the community. Hence, we ought to extend the prioritization job to also include the public.

Going by the same rules, 1 to N for each issue, players should be able to give their opinion of which of the raised CSM issues are the most important to them.

This gives a better sample of what the community wants. And it’s virtually free in terms of time, as it’s a voluntary thing which people can do.

How does this all fit together?

So now that I have explained what kind of tools ought to be available for the CSM, you are probably wondering how it fits into the grand scheme of things?

As established in earlier posts, communication is extremely important. Right now the CSM’s largest problem is that there’s no sort of feedback loop. It’s a black box where people put up issues and give a thumbs-up, and if they are lucky, the might even know if an issue was raised. After that, the communication stops and issues do not evolve beyond being a document in a wiki system.

By allowing for more “consistent” voting on issues as well as public prioritization, you give people a sense of having influence and control. They can see that their action makes a difference, and that’s crucial.

However as times goes by, having once put in a vote doesn’t make much of a difference. That’s where progress tracking comes into the picture. By making progress information easily accessible, you get another feedback loop(Assuming that there’s actual progress).

This way, the CSM becomes another viable mean of communication between the player-base and CCP.

Conclusion

The CSM suffers from not being pushed to becoming more than it is, and is seemingly not given the much-needed development time in order to give it the tools it needs. In order to the CSM to evolve and not stagnate, progress has to be made and tools have to be provided for pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with a player-elected democracy.

Heh, once again, I manage to write something completely different than I promised. I have written quite a bit more about CCP’s communication channels. However, last night during my last round of reading the eve-online forums, I found a new thread-naught by current CSM member Vuk Lau(Chairman during CSM2).

The thread was about the customer service department. And to be quite honest, I kind of saw this coming. The CSM has had a fair bit of interaction with the game-master team, and I think the thread is the product of latent anger with the GM team.

Before I go onto the topic at hand, I’m just going to put up a bit of a disclaimer:

1. Vuk Lau is a good guy, so if I disagree with the execution of this issue, it’s purely from an academic point of view
2. I think that the customer-support team has been doing a fair job. However it’s obvious that there’s room for change. The sheer volume of people who have had a bad experience with customer support is a clear sign of that.

And I got to hand it to Vuk Lau. He has at the point of writing this, managed to get some 200 of his friends (and alts) to support the thread.

However, in my mind it raises some questions about the approach and role which the CSM ought to be taking. Reading the thread, I must admit that I found it to be non-professional, slightly unconstructive (Whiny) and void of suggestions for how to change. The post also makes a whole bunch of assumptions about CCP Internal Affairs, which I think is at best speculation.

As far as I’m aware, this is not a desirable thing to have taking place. The CSM ought to be professional enough to conduct a conversation without repeatedly biting the hand which feeds. And I’m afraid that if these sorts of issues are raised to just discuss how much the GM department sucks, that CCP’s trust in the CSM will disappear extremely quickly.

Another problem I’m finding is a lack of continuity. Well, rather the lack of respect for the fact that there has been previous CSMs. A couple of weeks ago CSM3 raised an issue which was dealt with by CSM2. The conclusion on the issue was that it was extremely hard from a programming perspective and that from a game-design perspective, there wasn’t consensus.

Fast forward 6 months, this rejected issue is now being raised again, using the exact same suggestion, despite them being aware that it was already rejected. As far as I’m aware, this is going to be a waste of time during a meeting which is already way too short. And it honestly doesn’t make the CSM seems professional.

I think that the conclusion here is that the CSM needs to consider its steps more carefully. Over the last year, people have put their heart and soul into this thing. By taking a piss on that and acting selfishly and unprofessionally is an insult to the community at large, which relies on the CSM to be a voice of reason between them and CCP.

And that leads me to what I’ll be writing about very soon. I’m currently finishing up a small post which will reflect on CCP’s means of communication, which will lead onto discussing how I see the future of the CSM. So stay tuned for that.