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CCP Speaks On Player-Elected Advisors For EVE Online
Kheldon points us to an MMOGamer interview with Petur Oskarsson, Valerie Massey, and Dan Coker from CCP Games about EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management, "a democratically elected group of players who serve as advisors to the development team." The elections happen every six months, and regarding their effectiveness, Oskarsson says, "I did some numbers checking and the council has brought up 128 topics for CCP. And out of that, nine have been denied. The rest has been either injected into a backlog, or if it was already in the backlog it has been given an added prioritization." In a related interview on Massively, he said this is a tool he thinks most new MMOs should use, since it facilitates two-way communication, especially in situations like the recent economic exploit.
With many MMO's (WoW coming first to mind obviously) having their playerbase divided into realms/shards to cope with the load, a lot of players never come in contact with oneanother. Selecting two or more advisors (for different factions that might or might not be able to communicate) from large amount of reals could quickly produce unreasonably large amount of elected folks.
Using WoW as an example, I'm rarely confident that the MMO developers already listen to the community concerns by keeping an eye on moderated and intelligent conversation, such that happens on Elitist Jerks forums (http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php) for example.
In a way, the most respected and popular discussion forums are elected to represent community as it is. The votes are simply count as "page views" and "posts".
No EVE just have the highest amount of overly vocal whiners then any other game so it appears lots of people want something changed when its only a small majority bitching and crying cause they fail at Eve and sadly that small vocal part trolls the forum 24/7 till they get what they want over what the larger silent majority thinks or wants.
I disagree with that. Players have a limited view of the game, but there's a lot of them within their view that know the game far better than the developers. On subjects like balance and the economy, the players are very knowledgeable and often able to predict in advance what problems will be caused by CCP changes.
I'm a member of Goonswarm, both the largest alliance in EVE and the one whose reputation for meta-gaming might persuade you to think that we would use the CSM to give ourselves an advantage. While we openly admit to working as a group to get people into the CSM (we have enough votes to get 1-2 every time), as far as I know we haven't even tried to use it for our own political advantage because it would be almost impossible. What kind of change could we possibly propose that would benefit us over our enemies? Asking them to do something like improving the quality of the space we live in (which is the best in the game, anyway) would be transparent and silly. At best, we can (and do) ask them to fix some of the absolutely broken 0.0 mechanics such as POS setup times, titans, broken loot tables, among other things. While this does benefit us as an 0.0 alliance, all of our enemies are 0.0 alliances as well, so there is no real advantage gained. 0.0 alliances are not in direct competition with low-sec or empire alliances, so there is no advantage gained there, either. Of course, we also push for changes that affect the entire population, such as fixing broken ship types (probably half are worthless) and general balance tweaks (ewar springs to mind as the recent example).
I'm not saying that we wouldn't exploit the CSM for our own gain, but it just doesn't have the potential for doing so.