EVE Online: "The War on the Impossible", Part 2: Democracy

Yesterday, we introduced the coming week of articles based on what we saw at EVE Online Fanfest and today we focus in on our first issue: The Council of Stellar Management. This is CCP's attempt to bring "deliberative democracy" to EVE and in true CCP-fashion, they not only presented their design, but invited a couple people to disagree with them and gave them microphones.

In this article, we describe the system, relate the presentations of Jessica Mulligan and Dr. Richard Bartle, the debate that followed the CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson and then finally our own take on the idea. Enjoy.

CCP then said the Council of Stellar Management exists within the "physics of the world", not to influence it. This statement though is a direct contradiction to the design presented earlier in the day, where the councilors were to serve as people, not players and to consider whatever the players want, which theoretically could and should include questions of game balance and design.

At this point, Mulligan brought up a theoretical example where the Goon Swarm convinces the council to vote that all ships be replaced with pink ponies. It's patently ridiculous, but not really inconceivable. What would CCP do, she asked. They admitted they would not make such a change, as they would need a good reason why and none could be given. However, they argued this would never happen.

Read more after the jump.

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a great idea. even with the best community manager it is still hard for the devs to keep up with how the player base feels and what they want, so with a council like this it would make communicating ideas between devs and players that much easier. i am concerned about the "corruption" that they are allowing for this council, though. letting people buy their way in, as well as vote per account rather than individual.
if this council affected something only in game, then that would be all fine and fit right in with the ways of the game, where corruption prevails, but since this council will be able to directly influence the whole development of the game (granted the devs still have the final word), i am worried where a council full of corrupt top-elite corporation members will be able to swing the development of the game to. we don't want another BoB scandal do we?

Is this also the council that is supposed to somehow "audit" how CCP interacts etc as announced during the mentioned scandal?

I think that CCP really wants to be a truly responsive company. I think that they carry their metaphors too far though. This largely came about as a response to accusations of rampant corruption, and should remain clean.

However, it may be simply bowing to the inevitable: I don't believe that CCP keeps things like billing details. They have always disavowed taking any action based on out of game evidence or things that they do not themselves have direct control over or ready access to. They know that webmasters for various alliances can track and compare logins from one forum board to another and have done so in the past. With all the vaunted anonymity with alts and multiple accounts, sufficiently clever and resource-rich players can still do a lot of out of game manipulation. There is no way to keep in game politics out of it. I might argue against a policy of encouraging that outlook, but I think they simply feel they are bowing to the inevitable.

I definitely agree that putting game development into the hands of the players, however well-intentioned, would be sacrificing the spirit of the game. Eve is a sandbox, but CCP has been firm in the past that this is THIER sandbox, they just allow us to move sand around. They can add and remove sand as they want. I definitely would expect the devs to retain right of refusal of any recommendation by any player council or committee. In fact, I would probably leave if they agreed to abide by any resolution. Because I KNOW that we would otherwise end up with pink ponies. Probably trailing blood from their flesh-rending shark-like jaws, but pink ponies nonetheless.