Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

CSM8 Status report: Week twenty-two

Sort of a tale of two weeks this week.

During the early part of the week, CCP was getting ready to head out for an employee retreat.  This was something that I was intending to keep quiet but CCP Explorer was good enough to spill the beans.  This makes the week a lot easier to explain.  The early week was spent with a lot of CCP devs in the Skype channel asking for immediate feedback on threads they planned to post to Features and Ideas (some of the ones tagged "[Rubicon]").  The devs in question wanted to get those threads out before they had to board flights out of Iceland, and also in preparation for the first Singularity build and for player feedback.  That's why a lot of those threads are dated October 1 and 2.

Anyway, as a result, the Skype channel was very busy as was the CSM private section of the forums, right up until Thursday evening or so.  At that point, CCP got on a plane... and pretty much at the exact exact wrong time, the SOMER iScorp thing happened.  By one of those evil coincidences that happens sometimes, TMC published their piece at nearly the exact worst possible moment.  Whoops!  But that's why it's taking CCP so long to respond to this.  There is now an initial statement from CCP Manifest on this issue.  Obviously, the entire CSM is waiting for a fuller explanation of this issue as well as CCP's response.

It certainly hasn't stopped some CSM members from expressing their opinion on the whole combined SOMER Blink issue in colorful ways...

As a result of all of this, I'm not sure very much got done on the CCP end with the Summer Summit minutes.  CCP Dolan now has the majority of the written minutes sessions in his hands and we've started pestering him to get the first block published.  If he published what he has in his hands now, it would be about half of the sessions.  But that said, he was gone part of the week along with those people at CCP that would have to approve the minutes.  I'm still really unhappy with how this process is going.  Between the long delay starting on the minutes and the various scandals in the weeks since, there just doesn't seem to be enough time for CCP or for the CSM to actually keep this moving forward.

Of 24 total sessions:

• Trebor Daehdoow has written five sessions (PvE, CSM as Stakeholder, Security, Future Plans, Team True Grit);
• I've written four sessions (Introduction, Sales and Marketing, Team Kuromaku, Team Game of Drones);
• mynnna has written two sessions (Reasonable Things, Team Superfriends);
• Ali Aras has written two session (EVE Economy, User Interface);
• Mike Azariah has written one session (Art);
• Mangala Solaris has written one session (Language Support and the CSM); and,
• James Arget is still finishing one session (Launcher).

There are eight sessions left to do:

• State of Balance (being worked on by Chitsa Jason);
• Team Five-0 (being worked on by mynnna);
• Projects One, Two, and Three, which are currently heavily NDA'ed;
• DUST 514 Link (being worked on by Mike);
• EVE Valkryrie (being worked on by James); and,
• the Hilmar meeting which the more I edit, the less I think will actually get a set of minutes.  Dunno.  I'll give it one more try this week.

So overall we're really close, but a couple of CSM members need friendly bumps to finish up what they've signed up for.  We're also somewhat hampered by the fact that the recordings of some of the sessions are either damaged, missing, or partials thanks to the video conferencing issues that I mentioned on the day-by-day updates I wrote at the time of the summit.  The recording for the Sales and Marketing session, for instance, was missing entirely.  I wrote that one based on my notes.

Reading through the minutes sessions myself, a lot of what we'll have to present you guys already know at this point thanks to those Features and Ideas threads.  But there's still a lot of good information that can be shared.  Note to self: start pestering Dolan on a daily basis...

As with any crisis week, not much happened that wasn't related to the crisis.  I got to tease Mike Azariah about his bounty passing seven billion ISK.  I suppose that counts.  ;-)  I already mentioned Ali Aras getting a Mangala Solaris kill-mail this week.  But overall and barring surprises, I really feel like CCP is bearing down these last five weeks to get Rubicon ready for delivery.  The CSM shouldn't have a whole lot more to contribute for feedback other than maybe little tweaks here and there.  We still have a couple of stake-holder meetings before release as well.  That said, there are still two features (one big, one little) that we haven't been fully briefed on yet.  Note to self: ask about those, too...

More next week.
Source: CSM8 Status report: Week twenty-two