There’s always a push and pull between players and developers in video games, and doubly so for an MMORPG. EVE Online is no exception, and even early in its 22-year history, it became clear to certain developers that they needed to stay in touch with the playerbase.
Enter the Council of Stellar Management, a player-populated, player-elected group of 12 players who are a go-to group to help CCP’s decision-making, and now in its 19th Council. While the CSM doesn’t have a fully official sway in final decisions for EVE, it’s seen as a resource, like an extended focus study populated with well-versed players.
As EVE is an ever-evolving game, while MMORPG has spoken to CSM members in the past, the members that are voted in, and the issues they’re brought on to talk about, change even year-by-year. Right now, CSM is about halfway through its 19th Council, but hearing from both these members and CCP itself, this one has already proven to be a more unique coalition.
We were welcomed at this year’s EVE Fanfest to chat about the state of the CSM with two of its members: Dujek Oneye, a player of 11 years and part of the Brave Collective, and Drake Iddon of Rote Kapelle, a Pochven resident who was selected into the council as a runner-up by CCP. They spoke to the challenges that the council faces as members and as a whole, and how they believe they’ve started an initiative to overcome them that’ll define the future of the Council.
Bringing Everything To The Table
The Council of Stellar Management has been a part of EVE Online since its first session in 2008 as an “advisory board” of sorts, after community team members pitched it around in 2007 to both players and CCP developers. After all, much of the game’s gears spin due to player activity, especially EVE, where, especially at that point, many of the wars and territory wars existed largely independent of developer involvement.
Each year since then, the CSM has remained the player-elected advisory board of sorts for CCP. Players of all walks of the game (over sixty days since account creation, at least) are asked to self-nominate, after which a number of nominees are selected to vote from. Then the political engine engages, and players are briefly put through interviews and other campaigning work.
Voting players, which are those with an Omega account, can vote for as many members as there are seats. Ten are directly voted for through this process, and two more additional members are selected from the 11th to 20th place winners. For the two additional players, it’s worth noting CCP’s choice in CSM members usually flags what the team is focusing on based on what players bring to the table. This is a relatively new step in the process, only having been introduced with the election of CSM 18.
With such breadth in the EVE Online player base, all the nominees hope to bring their own issues to the table with CCP developers. Drake’s initiatives include his “home” system of Pochven and advocating for more blind-accessible gameplay. At the same time, Dujek, who is part of an organization that’s heavy on (and successful in) recruiting, looks to topics for new players and the queer player base. As Dujek explains, though, what the representatives want to push isn’t the only thing they need to think about. He outlines it as a few categories of things that get talked about heavily in the CSM.
Firstly, there are these particular issues, like the ones mentioned before, that they bring to the table on their own, and likely the ones players expect are discussed when electing their representatives—and indeed, they and the developers do try to make time for these issues. Then, there are the things that CCP wants to do on its own, because they’re a game development company, and, as he reminds us, that’s their job.
Finally, there’s the “zeitgeist,” the current lingering community problem that both the developers and CSM are being pressured to tackle, and that this year, apparently, brought the CSM members together.
A Collaborative Coalition
During a press session, a CCP developer mentioned that this particular CSM session had taken CCP by surprise in a positive way. I asked these two what the CCP staffers could have meant (at least, what they were allowed to talk about), and the answer, said aloud, was straightforward: This CSM needed to collaborate.
Of course, it’s not for a complete lack of coordination in the past. As it’s explained to me, the CSMs do try to learn from each other, guiding them around the pitfalls of previous sessions, all while certain CCP community team members—especially community developer Peter “CCP Swift” Ferrell, a former member himself—try to keep that bridge of advocacy open. But in this year’s case, the CSM members saw an opportunity, arguably a need, to go a step beyond and work together in advance.
“There’s one big topic that has been tackled, or attempted to be tackled in the previous two years as well, and the first year and the second year, it obviously failed,” Dujek explained. “But also, the word got out in the community that this was a difficult problem to solve. We came in this year with the expectation that we really just needed to solve it, or it would be solved for us.”
“And because we had this sword of Damocles hanging over us, we sat down outside of the meetings and talked it over. We polled like, who can live with this situation? Who cannot live with this situation? What is the most common denominator of what we’re okay with presenting? And we found something that everyone could get behind.”
Both members recall that throughout a recent CSM trip to CCP’s offices near Reykjavik, every common space that CSM members shared became an opportunity for them to talk about the issues at hand. They congregated and discussed over drinks, over dinner, and even in the lobbies of hotels where they stayed.
When it came time to meet with the CCP developers, the day was packed with round-table discussions about varying topics. Even with things moving so fast, the CSM didn’t lose sight of what they’d put together.
“We needed to prioritize what we’re going to talk about,” Drake explained. “If someone suggests something off the cuff, and then someone responds to that, then it becomes a discussion or an argument—it wastes time.” He says the resulting efficiency has been “the best strength of the CSM this year.”
Dujek agrees, pointing out that they didn’t want this issue to fall through for three years. As he describes it, if there’s no consensus about what players feel is best for the whole community, the developers might try to fix it in a way that makes less sense. It becomes a curl of the monkey paw; as the legend goes, the wish is granted, but not in a positive way.
Technically, the topics of the CSM conferences are under wraps thanks to NDAs, and the community doesn’t necessarily dictate what’ll be talked about. Still, context clues can provide hints of what else is on CCP’s mind. For example, the runner-up pick of Drake Iddon by CCP was especially peculiar, as he’s a prominent “resident,” per se, of Pochven, the Triglavian Space or “T-space,” that was introduced with an expansion in 2020.
As recounted by Drake, the rollout of Pochven was rocky. After several years and content updates of story-related content to introduce the area, the players found themselves with not only a dearth of things to do but also a slew of problems and bugs that weren’t addressed for a while. In short, it was a disappointing ending to a very well-executed storyline. Drake recalls coming in strong to the CSM about these issues, explaining that as much as he and a massive Slavic contingency of the player base still love and occupy Pochven to this day, a rollout couldn’t happen like that again.
Regardless of the timeline of these events and EVE’s ongoing development, it seems at least that CCP had something in store to improve the quality of life there, and stop some gameplay abuse. Players can utilize “filaments” to move in and out of certain areas, including the Pochven T-space. Both a blessing and a curse was that these could be used near-immediately to essentially drag a small fleet of ships out of battle. With a recent patch, a “spool-up timer” was added, with a duration based on how many ships the filament could carry.
Filaments were certainly frequently abused by players, so there were likely a few dissatisfied capsuleers. More than that, it was an example of the CSM understanding what was better for the game than just pleasing certain “constituents”—and CCP’s next step in righting some wrongs, as Drake sees it.
Towards A Hopefully Stellar Future
In the long run, even if the Council of Stellar Management does indeed come up with a stellar idea, they’re under no impression that their suggestions will make it into the game in a timely manner, if at all. Even as CCP Swift advocates for them, their expectations are tempered quite early on by former CSM members about the role and impact they’ll have. Factional Warfare, for instance, did make it out the other side, but it almost came as a surprise given how long it took for changes to happen.
“There’s been a lot of Faction Warfare and low-sec oriented CSMs, and they’ve all given their input and essentially given insight for minor tweaks,” Drake explains. “Nothing has happened up until Uprising, two years ago now, which is probably one of the most favorably received expansions of all time, besides Apocryphal [in 2009]. So maybe the Uprising expansion was a culmination of a decade of CSMs.” The Freelance Job system, introduced at Fanfest this same weekend, is also a similar outcome, one that aligned with CSM suggestions.
Especially in hindsight, it can seem easy to conjure up a solution as a player, but given its sprawling opportunities populated by super-corporate alliances, small bands of pirates, and everyone in between, EVE Online’s player base can vary widely in its needs and goals. Therefore, the Council of Stellar Management tries not to expect too much from its sessions (at least, not immediately), and stresses that players expect as much, too.
“There’s a friction where, because we are essentially space politicians, we do have a constituency, and the constituency expects us to do what is best for them,” said Dujek. “But our purpose is actually to do what’s best for the game.” Some CSM members often came in on that flawed premise, as they understand, which made it harder to come to a consensus.
“This is why some of these problems are hard to solve—because not everyone comes in with a thought that ‘perfect is the enemy of good.’ So some people will see an imperfect solution and say, no, I’m going to wait for something better.”
Plus, as Dujek explains, the CSM isn’t an infallible concept, as CCP is a game development company, and CSM is a nonessential voluntary advisory board. While CCP’s decisions can be informed by CSM meetings, CCP isn’t beholden to them; sometimes there may be some questionable decisions made that shake the community up, and fingers get pointed. But as Drake points out, if CSM and CCP do talk their way out of a particularly bad idea, it won’t be as obvious; after all, that discussion didn’t make it out of the meetings. Either way, all the players can do, especially during big reveal events like Fanfest, is wait and see the details.
In the meantime, while, obviously, not every EVE Online player, issue and angle can be represented in every CSM and every discussion, they believe it’s important for players to research and vote for the representatives they believe in. And especially in the wake of this Council’s inclination towards cooperation, while these members aren’t perfect either, Drake says it’s important for CSM members to learn from those that came before them—and to remember their passion for the game.
“Take the lessons,” he says. “If you build on what we did and keep running with it, CCP will open up more. They’ll trust the CSM more, and then that information flow is going to get more and more efficient. The CSM will become more efficient, and the game will just be better as a whole. Even if I disagree with what future CSMs might want, that’s the beauty of democracy.”
