it's csm season, let's get stupid
etc etc, just click the link. candidacies have been accepted formally and now we get to watch the dog and pony show
since i'm fairly secure in my position i've chosen to take a gigantic public dump on the whole process because it's full of bullshit, liars and fools, which will hopefully make a lot of pubbies very angry.
edit: apparently it's too hard for riverini to click the above link so here's the blurb
They’re lying to you.
All the promises from the CSM candidates, all the ‘issues’ and ‘features’ they’re going to address - it’s all a pack of lies. For years now we have witnessed the same ritual take place in every CSM election. The candidates line up and tell you what they would do if they were given the power to be a game designer. During the first CSM summit CCP made it clear that they aren’t looking for amateur game developers, and on this fact they have never wavered. Yet the candidates have woven the same tapestry of lies for each successive election. They’d remove local, they’d make it harder to suicide gank, they’d protect the interests of the common player (whatever the hell that means), they’d bring ‘real reform’ to CCP.
It’s time we stopped being suckers.
The truth is that being on the CSM has nothing to do with being a game designer, or implementing your favorite features, or fixing railguns, or removing local. Here’s what actually happens:
The CSM is a sounding board. CCP comes to the CSM and lays out their ideas about whatever they’re thinking up, and it’s up to the the CSM to provide feedback while gagged under a nondisclosure agreement. That NDA means that the voting public doesn’t hear about the feedback the CSM provides until the minutes are released months later and diluted by CCPs professional staff. Then at the next election time, everyone goes through the same old dog and pony show, beating their chests and promising to fix blasters or put a Tengu in every hangar.“People have an unrealistic idea of what the CSM actually does. It's how dribbling retards got elected because they had platforms like 'I will fix low-sec' or 'I will make CCP fix the lag'. The CSM doesn't generally present solutions to CCP because that historically isn't very effective so proposals like 'Improve the tracking of blasters' are dead in the water. They get raised anyway and then CCP buries them because they are more interested in having the problems highlighted rather than solutions put forwards.
Most of what goes on in public with the CSM is total bullshit. The important stuff is what happens at the summits and in the internal forums. That's when CCP present their solutions and ask for the CSM to feedback on them and that's when the theorycrafting and superior knowledge of this horrible game come into play. In the year and a half since I've been a CSM alternate, 95% of my work has been shooting down other people's utterly dreadful ideas rather than actually raising new ones. Nobody cares about your ideas, least of all CCP, the best you can do is to try and slow the tide of slack-jawed idiocy coming from both sides of the table.” - Helen Highwater, CSM5
You, the voters, get used - A vicious cycle that pits your wishes for a better EVE Online against 9 people looking for an all-expenses-paid Icelandic vacation.
I know this because my directors have been on the CSM since its inception, and we’ve watched with growing frustration as the CSM showed promise, then failed to accomplish anything relevant. Skill queues are great, but putting that one feature up against the collective ideas of the thousands of players that have submitted proposals or run for a seat is appalling. Not to mention the scandals, and resignations, and outright cheating by CSM members. I’m sick of it.
So I’m announcing my candidacy to become the Chairman of the CSM.
Why all the truth-telling, when I’m making a run myself? Why aren’t I promising you a Tengu or a special Hulk that fires disco lasers while it mines, when it’s worked so well for the other CSM representatives? I’m the leader of Goonswarm. I don’t have to blow smoke up your ass just to get a trip to Iceland. I can get on the CSM, but merely getting there isn't going to be enough. I want to deliver a mandate to expose the hypocrisy of the whole process. I want to unite the CSM into an effective body for advocacy. To do this I need more than the goon votes, or NC support.
I need you.
Your vote can help me end the lies and change the CSM into something useful, something that matters. For that, I need the Chairman’s spot - I need your help to get there.
What is to be done?
The CSM does not implement features. It’s a sounding board for CCP. Ignore everything the other candidates say about their ‘positions’ on certain features because features are irrelevant at this stage in the game. Pay attention to the general attitudes of the candidates instead, as you will never find out what they said to CCP due to their nondisclosure agreements. If I promised you a new feature or a specific game change, I would be lying to you.
Let's not waste time with bullshit. If you’re the obsessive type who wants to know about how I feel on every aspect of EVE, you can read my TenTonHammer columns. I’m not going to write a 3000-word paper about how I feel about any particular issue for the purposes of this election, as I cannot make any promises about anything except my general attitude towards the CSM.
I believe that it is time to transform the CSM by electing a hardline player representative that will forge the CSM into a strong, united body that can fight for the playerbase and shield it from idiocy. With your help and the Chairman’s position, I can do my best to make that a reality.
What I Can Offer You:
The raw, ugly truth. No pretty illusions. No false promises.
Every candidate is going to tell you that they want to bring your ideas to CCP. I want to bring CCP to our ideas.
We play their game, we pay their upkeep, we use their features and we suffer from their shortsightedness. For this they give us one resource, the CSM, and they treat it like a mere focus group, not a stakeholder to be respected. On the CSM, I’ll do what I can to make it better, but I’m not going to promise you the moon and the stars, because I can’t deliver on that.
What I can deliver is me being a ruthless, manipulative bastard. And you need that, if you want to see the CSM become a real advocate for the playerbase, one that cannot be dismissed by CCP. Thus far, the CSM has never been united. It has been a cacophony of individuals, mostly deluded by the false notion that their election has given them a designer’s position, bleating out their personal ‘fixes’ and being surprised when the devs ignore them. A divided CSM isn’t an effective advocate for the playerbase.
If the CSM doesn’t band together to oppose CCP when they suggest retarded things, the interests of the playerbase get steamrolled. Obvious, preventable imbalances get implemented. You need someone who knows how to build a coalition, how to make people want to work together, how to make members feel like their voice and their opinion makes the collective union stronger. I have brought together a coalition of people who normally can't agree on the color of an orange and directed them in a war that most players can only dream of. If I can bring these people together, I can do the same for the CSM as its chair.
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Originally Posted by Phey Onat
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