[Jester's Trek] CSM8 status report: Week three
CSM8 status report: Week three
This is going to be a busy one. Let's start with the EVE launcher.
CSM8 is catching a bit of hell from some quarters for our (relative lack of) response to the EVE launcher situation this past week. I'm going to start by essentially doubling down on my response last week: I'm not sure what CSM8 was supposed to do here. CCP knew about the issues, and they were communicating those issues to the players. This is not really a situation where the CSM can help... honestly, all we can do is make the situation worse, either by:
- sharing out of date information with players (by definition, any information the CSM has is going to be out of date); or,
- lambasting CCP for a situation they realize is broken.
More to the point, though, it's hard to get too excited about a situation that was so minor. Yes, minor. There was a fairly brilliant meme going around this week about how having to fight with the launcher isn't exactly on the same level as boot.ini. ;-) This isn't SimCity or Diablo III. Except for some edge cases (which several members of the CSM are working with CCP), the issue here lasted several hours, not several days, and all of us got 50000 additional skill points out of it. By that scale, CCP can trip over the launcher for a few hours every week or so I'd still be happy. ;-)
In short, I'm fine with how CCP handled this one and in my opinion, it's not worth getting worked up over. If you want to yell at me for having that opinion, yell away. But I'm not alone in this boat. I thought Ali Aras's response on the forums was quite well thought-out and well written. Go read it, because I echo it. Again, onward.
Something that I'm definitely discovering about this whole CSM thing is that it's impossible to keep up with everything. There is literally enough going on with CSM8 and EVE right now that if a CSM member wanted, they could literally spend every waking moment every day trying to stay caught up with all of the communications mediums. It's impossible. Anyone who tries is going to burn out and burn out fast. There's no possible way one CSM member can keep track of (long breath) Skype and Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and EVE-O public forms and FHC and kugu and EVE-O CSM private forums and EVE mail and in-game conversations and in-game channels and e-mail and pod-casts and blogs and EVE news sites.
It's too much. So a number of CSM8 members talked this issue out this week trying to decide who was going to do what. For myself, I'm never going to be much of an EVE-O forum guy. Fortunately, Malcanis is and he's more than happy to be our primary EVE-O forums guy. He and other people on CSM8 that are good at the EVE-O forums are pointing the rest of us at particularly good threads and posts. So if you don't see me replying to a lot of EVE-O forum threads, I'm sorry. I'll be doing my best, particularly in Jita Park and in Features and Ideas. But even for robo-blogger there are limits. Expect the other CSM members to operate the same way. Hopefully between the 14 of us, we'll cover all the mediums. The important thing to me is that all the members be involved.
That brings me to the next thing that I'm really thrilled to be seeing this week: we're approaching 100% of CSM8 members being active on one or more of the communications mediums. All CSM8 members are now NDAed, and all but two are quite active. Of the last two, one got on board with a lot of activities this week and the other needs two more weeks to wrap up an overseas job he's in the middle of. At our Team Five-Oh stake-holder meeting this week, 11 of 14 CSM members were in attendance: more than Skype video-conferencing could support! Fortunately, we could handle those few remaining questions we had for the team via voice chat. It may be an issue later in the year; I've already started joking that we need to split CSM8 and assign the two halves to be stake-holders on two different teams...
Very shortly, I'm going to be posting the announcement on Jita Park for the first CSM8 Town Hall, but I'll give you the time and date here so you can mark your calendars. It will be Sunday June 16 at 1900 EVE time, for one hour. We'll be using the same mechanics that CSM7 used: questions coming from EVE players via an in-game channel (to be announced) and the EVE University Mumble server. We'll be broadcast on EVE Radio during the second half of DJ Wiggles's show. I want to thank EVE University and EVE Radio for continuing to help out the CSM in this important player communication!
While trying to explain the finer details of agile software development to those CSM members like myself who are a little bit ouf of date on modern software development, one of the CCP devs pointed us at this Youtube video which explains the topic so nicely that I thought I'd share:
Not something that you have to watch unless you really want to know a little finer detail about how CCP goes about making the game we all love. It probably should be required viewing for any potential future CSM member, though!
Xander Phoena, hero of the CSM8 election cycle, has started doing a series of CSM8 interviews. He wants to interview two CSM members per month for the duration of our term. The first interview is up, and was myself and Malcanis. As with the election cycle, the questions that Xander came up with were absolutely excellent! This is a really good interview that I recommend you go listen to if you've read this far down into this post. ;-)
Finally, something a little more fun. Malcanis now has the distinction of inflicting the finest troll on a fellow CSM member. We were joking about our relative bounties and how those bounties must reflect how much various people hate the fact that we are CSM members. Your humble moderator, for instance, started the term with a relatively paltry 100 million or so (alas, a good portion of that was paid out to the people who killed my first Gnosis a few weeks back) whereas Sala Cameron's bounty is a more impressive 2.1 billion. I forget where Mike Azariah's bounty started but whatever it was, Malcanis joked that his "feeble bounty is not compatible with the dignity of the CSM" and then the Podside podcast asked that Mike be given a decent bounty.
So now it's 3.25 billion ISK. Hee!
I keep intending to point to a couple of posts about CSM8 election statistics, but I think I'll do that as a separate post so that people who aren't interested can just skip it. So that's all for this week, I think!
Source: CSM8 status report: Week three