EVE dev blog: Council of Stellar Management Summit recap

The latest developer blog posted at the EVE Online site is a brief report to the community about last week's Council of Stellar Management (CSM) Summit, the first meeting between the player-elected council of representatives and CCP Games. The CSM Summit gave the delegates a chance to discuss, face-to-face with CCP, how the players they represent would like the game to change. CCP Xhagen reports that CCP views this first meeting as being a 'resounding success.' The CSM delegates were well-prepared and clearly put a lot of time and effort into the topics on the agenda, Xhagen says.

The next step in the process is for the discussion topics from the CSM Summit to be sorted in terms of viability and priority. This involves a few factors, namely the time and work required by CCP to implement the game changes. From there, the CSM will prioritize the topics in light of the technical feasibility already established through talks with CCP. Afterwards, the proposed changes will enter development pipelines; future patch notes will indicate which issues or changes are the result of the CSM's efforts. CCP Xhagen cautions that some requests will take longer than others to realize in the game, but stated that the devs will do their best to roll out the changes and communicate timeline estimates. Xhagen finishes by saying, "The most important results of the Summit may not be immediately evident, but the seeds planted by the CSM into the minds of the EVE dev team members are already sprouting."

While the dev blog doesn't break down exactly what the prioritized topics are, the CSM delegates provided that information in this related discussion. Feedback from the players remains largely positive, although there's also a fair amount of skepticism and negative sentiments regarding the CSM and what player involvement with game design will actually amount to. No doubt there will be more difficulties faced along the way, but for what it's worth, this writer voted in the CSM elections and remains optimistic about what the player-elected council will achieve in the months to come.