[Jester's Trek] CSM8 Status report: Week thirteen
CSM8 Status report: Week thirteen
CSM8 term, 25% complete!
Vacation time in Iceland continues. As I said last week, our stake-holder meeting for last week was canceled and with the tourney over, I'm idly curious if there's anyone in the office at Reyk at all. The only CCP posts of any significance were this one about the Command Ship re-balancing (and the associated threads about gang-links and local reppers) and this one from CCP Rise and that one opens with Rise saying he isn't even in the office. ;-) So, yeah.
But for both of these, the CSM reaction more or less mirrored the player reaction. We were concerned about the Nighthawk (and said so) but thought the other CS changes were generally pretty good or better (looking forward to a viable arty Sleip, myself). And on the jump clone skill, the CSM reaction was about the same as yours: 25% "good!", 25% "meh", 25% "why does this need a skill at all?" and 25% "yeah, OK, but this skill is not good enough yet!" So that was kind of amusing.
Still and all, these are pretty minor tweaks. The big stuff has to wait until the office starts filling up again.
So the CSM continues with our current player communication initiative, which is the "Reasonable Things" vote which even came with a really nifty Reasonable Things Voting Assistant designed by Trebor. I can't tell you how pleased we are with how this initiative is going. We got 1363(!) submitted suggestions, which the CSM then narrowed down by the process of each CSM member picking 150 to 200 of them. Those were then whittled down to the list that all of you saw and could vote on, which was 99 items.
And vote you guys did... 161 pages of votes and still climbing! WOW!
Again, I want to thank all of you out there that took and are taking the time to participate in this initiative. We know it isn't perfect -- for instance, we know some of the items got duplicated in the final list of 99 -- but now we have a really good operational process that gets players, CCP, and CSM involved and has public accountability at each step. Even better, CCP has already picked an item out of the list that they're definitely going to implement some version of (see that CCP Rise post again), and two others have devs that are excited champions of the ideas. It's been great to see CCP really get engaged in this process, those CCPers that are around, anyway.
Part of the reason for the duplication is my fault: I was really busy with tourney stuff this week and got my votes in later than Trebor Daehdoow asked for them. The guy's a freakin' task-master, I'm telling you! You player types, he gives ten days to work on your lists. Us, he gave five days and all five days right in the very midst of tourney finals week practice. He's a mean man! But I got my votes in under the wire.
You might ask how I picked my list, and it's a fair question. I went through the list of all 1363 items (yes, it took a long time, thank you for asking), and then I went through it again. I tried to pick things that I thought were reasonable and quick -- that CCP could implement in a single sprint with one team, or at most two sprints. That meant things like "comprehensive drone UI revamp" wasn't on my list... even though... ummmm... this. But since it wasn't small, it didn't get my vote. Whereas things like "don't make me restart the client to log in an alt" and "let me board a ship in an SMA from anywhere in the POS shields" definitely made my list. It was a really nifty thought experiment, and I look forward to seeing a lot of these ideas implemented!
Best part of all: all of these ideas came from players. I love that.
I'm kinda hopeful that we'll do one more of these initiatives before our term is up and come up with another 100 items for CCP to look at for spring. That'll give us another opportunity to really refine and perfect the process.
Those of us attending the Summer Summit have our travel plans in hand and we're getting ready for that in three weeks time. However, before that, I'd like to announce that the date for the second CSM Town Hall has been set:
17 August 2013, 1900 EVE timeWe're going to use the same format that we did for the first CSM Town Hall. The play-back will be on EVE Radio, and we'll be using EVE University Mumble. However, the structure is going to be a little different this time. While I'm still going to ask for questions to be submitted in advance, this time, I'd like to give priority to questions submitted live. That'll give a nice bonus to those of you that show up to badger us in real time. ;-)
Focus on this CSM Town Hall is obviously going to be the upcoming Summit. Hopefully by the time of the Town Hall, we'll have a good idea of the exact sessions that CCP wants to talk about and we'll have a chance to submit a few requests of our own for topics. That however is almost certainly going to have to wait until CCP vacation season is over...
Source: CSM8 Status report: Week thirteen