The Council forum

The design idea and the summary paper

The voting booth

Candidates are campaigning for a seat in this council and sometimes heated discussions can be seen on the forums, either between the candidates or between the candidates and voters. Things are pondered, the past is brought into the light with words such as "...but here you said something that could be interpreted as contradictory to your current statement..." In other places candidates and voters share the ideas conversed and the atmosphere can only be described as 'harmonious'. This is exactly what we wish to go gain from the Council of Stellar Management: discussions, arguments and progress via talks are our goals.

Eligibility for voting is simple, if your account is 30 days or older, you can vote. There is one vote per account – meaning that those with multiple accounts have multiple votes.

A short rundown of what the CSM will do:

• All players can propose a topic to be handled by the Council.
• A topic can consist of anything, and deal with any EVE related matter.
• Players have to convince one, or more, of the Council members to bring the topic up at a Council meeting.
• A 'support' system is in place to allow players to declare support for a topic in a CSM forum channel which will be opened after the election.
• This 'support' system will make it easy for the Council members to get an overview of which topics players are concerned about.
• If 5% of the voters support a topic, the Council is required to bring it up. This is done to accommodate the voters, not the Council.
• All Council meeting minutes will be documented by the Council members and published for all players.
• Topics, reaching the Council, have to receive a majority vote from the Council members before the Council can escalate the topic to the CCP council.
• The minimum time a topic has to stay open on the public forum is 7 days before it can be brought up by the Council – this applies to topics put forth by the Council members, or the voters.
• A topic is brought up in the Council if a Council member decides to bring it up there, yet never before the 7 day discussion period is up.

Each Council is elected for a mandate period of 6 months; no representative can be elected more than two mandate periods.

The Council will meet with the CCP Council in Iceland once per mandate period. They will also be able to send in topics, via mail, twice during that time. The topics sent in will be replied to by CCP and the answers will be made public.

CCP commits to give honest and transparent answers to as many of the topics brought up by the Council of Stellar Management as possible. While the Council does not have any formal powers within CCP, it is a very important communication conduit between CCP and the players which is why we encourage you to see what the candidates have to say. Our players are why we make this game after all.]]> http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=555 2008-05-09T17:15+00:00 CCP Xhagen 555
Now, this blog is to tell you a thing or two about the statistics of the applications received and the approved applicants, now lovingly referred to as candidates.*

But on to the statistics.

• We received 97 applications.
• We accepted 64.
• We rejected 33.

  Rejection reasons:

  • A scan of the passport was not supplied and either a personal photo was supplied instead, an expired passport or another type of identification that was not a passport.
  • EULA violation by the applicants.
  • Two applicants requested to be withdrawn and thus they count as being rejected.
  • Two applications were sent in by CCP for testing purposes when the service was reported as being down and they are included in these counts.
  • One applicant managed to apply twice due to some technical glitch we were unable to reproduce, one of those applications was rejected.

  This brings down the actually rejected applications to 28.
  

• 3 females applied and 61 males, making the female applicants 4,687% of the total pool. This corresponds very neatly with the overall player ratio, where the female population is 4,46% of the whole (according to user account information).
• 51,5% of the accepted applicants have more than one account, making the ratio more than double of what goes for the entire EVE player base.

The list of applicants will be published soon and will be viewable from this section.

We wish everybody the best of luck in the upcoming elections which will be open between the 5th of May and 19th of May 2008.

* I would like to refer to them as being between a rock (players) and a hard place (CCP), or the other way around.

Information on the CSM:

CSM pdf
CSM Summary pdf ]]> http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=554 2008-04-18T16:28+00:00 CCP Xhagen 554 This is not going to be a "here are your new features, go forth and pontificate" blog, so if you're just after hard details, you may be disappointed, sorry. Instead, I'm going to take the opportunity to just talk about some things that may or may not be interesting to some of you.

The first and most important thing I wanted to talk about is the weather (can you tell that I'm British?). We had several inches of snow on Sunday, IN APRIL!?! Clearly this is ridiculous – I'm thinking about starting an online petition, but I'm not sure who to send it to. This kind of thing shouldn't be allowed though, and I feel it's time someone made a stand for sensible weather, particularly with the First Day of Summer (hah!) coming up next week or so.

Moving away from the weather a bit, this week I have been mostly working on (CENSORED), which we're not talking about quite yet – expect to hear more in the next couple of weeks though. I can however talk about some of the stuff I've been up to, in a non-specific way.

For example, this morning we were running another small playtest of some of the new systems with the help of the GMs. This is turning out to be very productive – we've found some things that need tweaking, and there were explosions, so everyone's happy. Last week I spent a fair amount of time getting to grips with the procedures needed for adding new stations and stuff, which it turns out involves an awful lot of staring-at-the-map and jumping-around-looking-at-stuff. It's less fun than you'd think, to be honest.

What else? I've been working with our Mercury volunteers on and off, reading over news submissions and talking in IRC and generally making sure that everything is heading in the right direction for (CENSORED). Oh, and translating for Ginger when he's having one of his 'moments'.

Another neat thing I found this week – we have an automatic name generator built into our authoring tools. Not sure who's responsible for it, but it's handy – you just pick a faction and it'll throw out fifty character or system/constellation names. Occasionally tools like this just pop out of the woodwork; the rest of the time huge Excel files do the job well enough, particularly when they're nice and colorful…

That's it for now, anyway!]]> http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=553 2008-04-18T11:25+00:00 CCP Greyscale 553 No NPC sell orders for shuttles and trit prices In the latest patch a major change to the economic system of EVE was introduced when NPC sales orders for shuttles were withdrawn. Previously shuttles where available in every station at a fixed price of 9000 ISK per unit, this allowed pilots to purchase shuttles at a low price and great convenience. There was a side effect to this though – an artificial price cap of 3.6 ISK per unit of tritanium. To read more about that please see this Dev Blog.

It is true that the convenience factor is important. It was debated internally if the benefit of removing the price cap outweighs the loss in convenience. In the end the opinion that current options of travelling in the capsule, warp to zero and free rookie ships minimizes the loss of convenience and hence the benefits of removing the price cap clearly outweighed the loss in the convenience factor.

The benefit from removing this price cap is that the price of tritanium will be more in line with the underlying demand for tritanium at any given time. This makes the mining industry more profitable in the long run and will balance the benefits between mining and other professions in EVE.

I also have full faith in that EVE industrialists and traders will supply shuttles where there is a demand, but of course at a reasonable price for convenience. There is no reason why NPCs should be subsidizing cheap travel in EVE at the cost of the mining profession. Another benefit is a new opportunity for industrialists to produce and sell shuttles of course.

This change is also along the lines of our general philosophy of the design of markets in EVE, that all items should be player produced and based on the incentive to make a profit from providing the item to other players.

Speculators will try to cash in on the short term shortage of shuttles by buying up the current stock and reselling it at a very high price (this happened within hours of patch deployment), that will in turn make it more profitable to industrialists to start producing shuttles and selling them at a good profit. At the same time competition among industrialists will drive prices down, the market should therefore stabilize within a relatively short period of time.

Tritanium is the building block of everything in EVE and hence we expect that in the short run this will create some turmoil on all markets, especially the mineral market and the market for Tech I items. Again, speculators will affect the market for tritanium, most likely by hording trit in the hope that now that the price cap has been lifted the price of tritanium will increase (note: just lifted, not completely removed). This has already happened, prices for tritanium started to increase almost immediately, but have since declined a little from the highs last night (see this thread for good discussion on tritanium prices after the patch). But again, the beautiful workings of the invisible hand will help us (thank you Adam Smith) due to the greed we have for ISK. With higher tritanium prices, mining of veldspar will become very profitable, and since it is readily available in safe areas, needing only low cost equipment to mine, we should see the veldspar flowing very soon and tritanium prices stabilize, but at what level? At this point your guess is just as good as mine.

No time to write more at this point – must go and mine some veldspar.]]> http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=552 2008-04-17T16:05+00:00 CCP Dr.EyjoG 552 While the title of this blog may have some of you crying in dismay, rest assured that everything is fine. I got quite lucky this time as I asked the head of the next team I'm going to talk about to write a bit, and he wrote a lot, enough so that I don’t really have to say much in fact! So, without further ado, here is Hutch, Vice Admiral of the YARR team:

The Yulai Archives & Record Repository Team (YARR) is the most recent addition to ISD. We have been formed to be the administrative team responsible for the new EVElopedia. For those who may not have heard of the EVElopedia project, it has been on the horizon for some time. The EVElopedia will be the best resource of information about EVE. Although it will be an official CCP endorsed resource, it will allow anyone who plays EVE Online to add, remove, alter or reformat it; it will be very similar to Wikipedia, but completely dedicated to the universe of EVE.

"Wait" I hear you say "Does that mean if someone wants to, they could replace every link in the EVElopedia with a link to Rick Roll and his unique dancing style?"

Well the answer to that is no, and that is exactly what YARR are being formed for. We will be maintaining, monitoring and making sure that everyone who puts effort into adding to the wiki will not have all their work ruined if someone thinks that "The Hoff" should be featured on every page. We are here to safeguard this tome of knowledge so that it may be passed from generation to generation.

I am sure many of you know the phrase: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime", and I like to think this applies to the EVElopedia. CCP could give you an instruction manual and it would stay up to date for a few months, instead CCP are giving you the tools to make the best manual and information resource EVE has ever had. YARR is merely one of those tools to help you make the EVElopedia great.

YARR are currently recruiting and we are looking for a few people to help us administrate the EVElopedia. We are looking for people who are enthusiastic about EVE, this project and who want to help make this a success. Wiki experience is useful but not needed to get into the team.

That concludes Hutch's message. As this team is very new we have a different application process for it until we get the website and tools up to speed, please email yarr@isd.eve-online.com with your interest and we will reply with an application for you.]]> http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=551 2008-04-14T12:45+00:00 CCP Ginger 551 There are also the macro miners and mission runners, complex farmers and assorted rabble of this sort that causes general nuisance and keeps the regular players from being able to enjoy EVE as they would like. Price of minerals, ore, ice, implants and so on is driven down by this kind of activity and thus ways for normal players to make ISK are effectively ruined. Finally, the RMT element will not hesitate to commit real world crimes, such as credit card fraud or theft, to keep their business running.

Purchasing ISK directly supports and encourages these illegal activities!

While we are determined to root out the evil that are the ISK sellers in EVE, we do realize that there will always be demand for ISK. For those that need more ISK than they can gather via normal game play, there is another way. We are of course talking about the Secure ETC Trading System, designed and created by CCP's finest. Now, every time we start denouncing the ISK sellers, some people call us hypocrites because we allow the ISK for ETCs but not ISK for RL money and claim this is the same thing. Nothing could be farther from the truth; the differences are enormous.

When you buy an ETC and then sell it for ISK via the Secure ETC Trading System you are directly contributing to the growth of EVE as the code will be applied to an account and someone will be using it to play. Some players do not have the means to pay for their subscriptions with credit cards or similar and the Secure ETC Trading System helps them pay and play. The economics are quite different as well since wealth is redistributed between active members of the community rather than injected into the game.

Another thing is scale. The regular player who wants a few hundred millions in his wallet will have no problem using the Secure ETC Trading System for this purpose, while at the same time helping another EVE player pay for his subscription. Supply and demand dictates that it would be very difficult for an individual to gather tens of billions of ISK with the secure system and thus game balance will not be upset. Corporations, or even Alliances, should not be able to fuel their wars and other activities like they have done in a number of cases with ISK bought for real world money.

For a list of official ETC resellers, please go here:

https://secure.eve-online.com/etc.aspx

Although somewhat hampered by limited resources, we are doing our best to keep RMT in EVE at bay, such as the recent deployment of new features to curtail the real money trade spam that players were receiving. This new system includes a few new trial restrictions that should not significantly affect actual players, as well as a large number of behind the scenes features that we have added in. These so far have been very successful, and we have seen a very dramatic reduction in the amount of spam that is reaching players.

However, we need your help. If you need ISK, then please use the Secure ETC Trading System. This system is completely secure and risk free and the ISK you get this way is yours to keep, while we will mercilessly remove ISK bought for real money from ISK sellers, and we remove tens of billions of illegally purchased ISK every day. If the illegally bought ISK has been spent, then the wallets will simply be put in the negative, making any form of market activity impossible, as well as preventing any actions that require ISK to be spent such as new clones or buying ship insurance.

A permanent warning will also be placed on accounts involved. In extreme cases and for repeated offenses a permanent ban from our server will be the end result. Also note that trading ETCs outside the Secure ETC Trading System is a violation of our rules and will result in warnings for those doing it, and eventually bans should they persist.

We know that most players out there dislike the macroers, ISK spammers, complex farmers and other RMT spawn just like we do and we ask for your assistance in dealing with them. Tell your friends that buying ISK is against the EULA if the subject is raised. Tell them about the Secure ETC Trading System. Help us raise awareness about this whole issue and together we can change the world of EVE for the better!]]> http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=550 2008-04-08T12:27+00:00 GM Grimmi 550 Here at CCP we care very strongly about our product, and we're constantly evaluating new paradigms and thoughtspaces in order to better realize our Total Market Potential. Our goal is to enhance the customer experience by offering new product channels and opportunities, allowing our customers to participate through selective transactional channels and fully realize their potential as Valued Income Partners – VIPs!

Today we're announcing an exciting new service family, which we're calling "Subscription 2.0". In the spirit of Web 2.0, this new Integrated Business Bundle will allow VIPs – that's you! – to participate in the global product community, creating your own Tailored Product Packages in a way which best matches your Ideal Product Experience.

Just as Web 2.0 is built on top of Web 1.0, Subscription 2.0 will be built on top of Subscription 1.0. We're not changing the underlying Service Provision Model – you'll still be paying a monthly fee as part of your Community Participation Agreement – although certain product areas will be migrated across to Subscription 2.0 in order to enhance user choice through Selective Resourcing. Subscription 2.0 will allow you to invest in optional product areas on an ad-hoc basis, so you only pay for what you actually want!

Our launch product for Subscription 2.0 will be AmmoAnywhere!, which will be fully integrated into the client next week. It does exactly what it says on the tin – simply click the new "AmmoAnywhere!" button in the UI, and a new stack of ammunition will appear in your cargo hold. We've done everything we can to streamline this process, so there's no fiddling about with details and authorization: once you've set up your account to enable Subscription 2.0, clicking "AmmoAnywhere!" will automatically bill your credit card for the transaction as part of the Customer Experience Process. No hassle, no fuss, instant ammunition!

Of course, we've had to make a few changes in order to fully realize the Product Delivery Potential of this new service. First up, all weapons will now use "NanoAmmo", which automatically morphs into the desired ammunition type at the point of firing. This ensures that there's no confusion over what ammo types you need to buy, streamlining the customer experience.

Secondly, as we're projecting universal uptake for this service, we're removing the ability to manufacture ammunition in order to prevent people from erroneously utilizing manufacturing lines to build ammunition. This means more manufacturing capacity for everyone!

Contingent upon a fully realized Product Delivery Potential, we have an additional range of Subscription 2.0 services in the pipeline which will further enhance the Customer Experience Process. These include InstaClone, Dock-O-Matic, T1 and T2 releases of BlueprintNow!, and many more.

Subscription 2.0 – the future is TODAY!]]> http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=549 2008-04-01T00:38+00:00 CCP Hammer 549 Hello everyone, I am Ginger and you may remember me from such blogs as "Immersionalism, it rocks" or "WAR, it’s beautiful". Well now I am the new volunteer manager and I’m here to talk to you about our volunteers and what they do to make EVE a better place to be.

The plan is to devote a blog to each of our volunteer teams to give you a general overview of their purpose, day to day running, an idea what it’s like to be in them, and what sort of applicants they look for.

So, I would imagine a fair few of you have no idea what the volunteer team is. Its official title is the Interstellar Services Division, or ISD, and it was created many moons ago with the intent of creating teams of volunteers to help support and improve EVE. Within it are housed several teams of volunteers which each concentrate on a separate aspect of EVE. Many of our employees here at CCP, including me, came from the volunteer program which only goes to show you in how high regard we hold it. Let’s have a quick look at each team before getting into the gritty:

Equipment Certification and Anomaly Investigations Division Bug Hunters (ECAID) : Team with the longest name possible that most of the time even I can’t remember what it is, so we all call them the Bug Hunters. The bug hunters are the tinkerers, prodders, engineers and conniving geniuses that live on our test servers assisting the CCP QA department in a whole manner of work including filtering bug reports, investigation bug reports, investigating defects and making fun of QA behind their back.

Interstellar Correspondents (IC) : Our in game volunteer news agency, crewed by intrepid journalists who venture into many dangerous territories, from the savage barrage of emo’ness to the painfully bludgeoning forum discussions to bring you all the politics, personas and wars of EVE. In short they bring you the news, most recently with their excellent accomplishment covering the Alliance Tournament.

Support, Training and Resources (STAR) : STAR is our new player support group. Gentle shepherds for the flocks of young starship pilots, it is they who wave with a big smile on their faces to passing newbies asking if they want help making their first tentative forays into the dark, sometimes unforgiving and potentially soul destroying but ultimately fantastic world of EVE.

Mercury (M) : See below.

? : Something else on the horizon

The information we have on the website is somewhat out of date and will be updated soon so please don’t take it as gospel, however you can find a short FAQ as well as the application page for ISD. Now let’s talk the first team to highlight in a dev blog and the newest one at that:

Mercury is the secret that’s not in my pants, well not anymore at least. Mercury is what arose when our old AURORA team was brought to an end. We needed a volunteer team to assist the content and storyline department in all kinds of fictional works and projects so we created Mercury. They have been kept under the radar somewhat while they mature and gestate but are now big and strong enough to face the daylight.

They have already completed several key projects for us including the Region Descriptions (of which they wrote the majority), storylines introducing new patch content such as the black ops ships and the boosters, the code aria inquiry, fiction news for the alliance tournament and various other storyline and descriptive works for CCP content/storyline.

I’ll let Galen, head of mercury describe them in his own words:

"The back story of EVE Online is huge and detailed, full of incredible stories and history and much more than just a simple backdrop for a game. We build on that and expand it; we add more detail to this background. Mercury provides you with the fiction that is at the core of this universe.

We aim to show that there is more to being Amarr than the hoods, more to being Minmatar than the sunglasses. When you enter EVE you are surrounded by billions of living and breathing beings that exist only in story. We give some of them a voice and we try to show that you have a chance to tap into an immense repertoire of fiction and that using it can enrich your EVE experience in ways you might not have thought of.

As the Irish poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy said, ‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.’ "

The work in this team is varied, there are generally multiple projects running at any one time and you need a very good understanding of the fiction of EVE and a good writing ability to be able to join Mercury. Mercury is now accepting applicants so please click here to apply and select “Fiction (Mercury)” as your team and good luck!

Please post any questions about mercury or the ISD team in general on the comments thread and I’ll do my best to answer them, details on the other teams will be forthcoming in future dev blogs. Fly safe all!

]]> http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=546 2008-03-27T16:33+00:00 CCP Ginger 546 Game Design, the Boost Patch and more

Speakers
Zulupark
Greyscale
Fendahl
Chronotis
LeMousse

You can either listen to the recording in the flash player just below, or download it from here and listen to it in your own mp3 player.]]> http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=547 2008-03-19T19:23+00:00 Live Dev Blog 547
Below is the timeline for the next half a year concerning the CSM so you should be able to make preparations in time should you wish to throw your hat in the ring as a candidate. Two additional documents are included that describe the election process: one that details the reasons, background and the intention of the CSM and the second is a brief summary that contains the gut mechanism of the council’s functions.

It cannot be stressed enough that the council will not have any formal power within CCP; it will function solely as an advisory council to CCP by serving as a communication conduit between the playerbase and CCP.

Here is the timeline involving the council and, hopefully, this will provide the opportunity for all those who wish to participate to make the necessary preparations.

- March 18, 2008: Call for candidates
- April 1, 2008: Candidate entries ends
- May 5, 2008: The two-week voting process begins with all candidates that have been verified and approved
- May 19, 2008: Voting ends
- May 21, 2008: Council members announced
- May 24, 2008: The first CSM meeting online
- May 31, 2008: CSM delegates sign Non-Disclosure Agreement
- June 19, 2008: Council members travel to Iceland. Preliminary meeting between the CSM and the CCP Council on first day.
- June 20, 2008: The first CSM and CCP Council meeting
- June 21, 2008: The second meeting
- June 22, 2008: Third meeting, if needed
- June 23, 2008: The council members depart for home

Apply for Council]]> http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=545 2008-03-18T16:44+00:00 CCP Xhagen 545