EVE’s Council of Stellar Management: Bringing Democracy to an MMO Near You

By Steven Crews | May 7, 2009 | | Filed under: Events, Features, Interviews | Tags: CCP, Council of Stellar Management, EVE

Ned Coker: Didn’t they have pre-elections for that?

The MMO Gamer: They had a primary to decide who they were going to put up for the main elections?

Petur Oskarsson: Yeah. So we’re seeing real political moves, tricks and movements between the various player strata.

Valerie Massey: One of the concerns that people had in the very beginning when we were first talking about doing this was, they said, you take one of these big alliances, like the Goons, or whatever, and they would be able to sway the election because if they all agreed to vote for this one person, that would be a shoo-in.

But it really is it’s almost mathematically impossible for them to be able to do that considering the size of the player community, and even if it is a large corporation or a large alliance, it’s still kind of a drop in the bucket when you compare that to the overall population

Petur Oskarsson: As a prime example the Goon Squad brought in two representatives for the first council, and they were going for two representatives for the second council, but only one made it in.

So, I mean, the concern was that it was going to be monopolized by these large structures, but in practice it wasn’t.

The MMO Gamer: What were the demands of the Goon Squad? More Caturday references?

Petur Oskarsson: No. Their concerns were mostly based on zero-zero combat and how to claim sources, and stuff like that. A lot of the concerns and topics they brought up are quite relevant and well thought out, and there are plans to address some of them in the very near future.

Valerie Massey: I don’t think it’s ever been a case of somebody came in with a set agenda for themselves or for their specific alliance. It’s been fairly consistent that everybody considers the greater good.

Now it may favor a certain play style, because you’ve always got the Carebears versus the PKs and that kind of stuff, so we will always see that.

But as far as, like, little, certain factions or real specific alliances, I haven’t seen any evidence that they’ve…

Petur Oskarsson: And really they can’t, because they do realize that if you implement the change that they need that it’s going to affect everyone not just their group.

Valerie Massey: Why don’t you give some examples of changes that the CSM was able to make.

Petur Oskarsson: Sure. For one, there was the weapon grouping. They asked for a feature that would allow them to change ammunition in all guns simultaneously. So, but, previously they had to change ammunition in every single gun. And having 8 guns, it’s 8 clips.

What we did was to take the idea and, first off, an experiment we already had going, it was old and laid aside, but that experiment was taken up again and out came weapon groupings. Where we could essentially group multiple guns into one gun. So, you press only one button and you fire all 8 guns.

Another example was that they were asking for mid-sized cargo hauler. We only had a relatively small size, and a then a huge one. They were asking for something in the middle. And out came mining logistics ships that fills that role, among other things, that ship is sort of a mobile operating ship for miners, and they’ve been happy about that.

They ask for a feature, and we usually try to take a step back and look at the big picture and see how we can incorporate that feature into something that either we’ve been thinking about, or into something that’s more, taking a step further.

Valerie Massey: The skill queue?

Petur Oskarsson: Yea, the skill queue, the CSM is largely responsible for the skill queue, and it appearing in this version or the next one, or whenever.

Ned Coker: I was thinking of the weapon grouping thing, that also had unforeseen consequences in terms of actually getting rid of lag.

Because instead of having eight server calls for the eight different weapons, in a fourteen hundred player fleet battle, now you just have one. That really helps in these large fleet battles, or if you’re doing combat in the major missions hubs.

That feature, which was borne from the CSM, now is helping for server lag as well. It’s a pretty interesting consequence.

Petur Oskarsson: Yea, another thing that you forgot to mention was, in the wormhole base, the environment changes the abilities and the features of your ship.

You might jump into a system and all of a sudden your ship goes way faster, but it has less agility. Or you jump into a system and all of your shields are gone.

And that idea actually came up in January, and I think, I’m not 100% sure, but I think that we actually took that up directly and incorporated that, because dynamic environments are part of space.

Valerie Massey: So the good thing for us is, we have message boards just like everybody else does, and you can read the boards, and you can get ideas from it, and the community team regularly will compile the feedback for an expansion or a patch and send that to the developers so they don’t have to spend all day long trying to read the boards.

That lets them focus on their job of actually working on the game. So, they see that a large percentage of players are in favor of this, they’re against that, and the CSM just helps us distill that down a little bit more to where we get a really good cross section of opinions, because they’re such a diverse group themselves.

They get the feedback from the players, they bring it to us. It just kind of helps to cut back on the signal to noise ratio so we can react faster. We knew people wanted a skill queue, we just didn’t know how important it was to them. And so the CSM really help put us to put that into perspective for us, and to see what a high priority that was for the players. I think that that is one of the beneficial things about it.

Petur Oskarsson: I think one of the main features of the CSM as well is they provide uncensored feedback. I mean, if I sent down and read the forums, I’m only going to read the channels I’m interested in, and I’m not going to click on a topic that say “Hey, CCP, you’re royally [blank]!”

But they do. And they bring those topics up, that we would naturally and maybe uncomfortably filter out. That’s what the CSM brings up as well.

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