BB 80 - Voices

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 80th edition! For more details about what the blog banters are please visit the Blog Banter page.

Blog Banter 80 - A Voice for All Players? 

CCP Seagull encourages you to get involved in CSM12 and put your name forward to be a Space-Politician. On his blog Neville Smit noted that CSM11 had done a good job with minimum of drama. However he said he'd not be covering CSM12 like he has in previous years as he sees no point. The power-blocs will vote on who they want and unless Steve Ronuken manages to get on CSM12 it is almost certainly going to have every seat taken by the big null-sec blocs. 

Is Neville right? Is the CSM moving more and more into just a voice for 0.0? Is this a bad thing? Are the hi-sec, low-sec and WH players going to lose out badly or is it really not an issue as its the same game? Could a totally null-sec dominated CSM 12 give a balanced voice for everyone?

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EVE Online has always rewarded the largest groups of organized players. The Goons' dominance for so many years was predicated not only on their size but how well they worked together towards common goals. It wasn't until World War Bee when a larger group as well organized was able to dislodge them from their throne in the north west.

When the CSM was seen as ineffectual the null sec blocs mostly ignored the voting and a diverse group of players would get on. However, when the blocs saw some things they didn't like come from CCP without any or adequate resistance by the CSM, they responded with their most potent weapon: organization and coherence. The result has been dwindling diversity of playstyles on the CSM and an increase of bloc representation. Unless you have explicit and implicit endorsement of a null sec bloc (or two, or three), your chances of getting on the CSM are very low. And with the CSM downgrading from 12 reps to 10, things get even bleaker. You need to be in the top three choices of a lot of ballots to get elected.

While there may be more players in high sec, they lack the incentive to have cohesion in their voting patterns. Null sec pilots understand taking orders and not having to determine their own ballot, but the individualists in high sec have no pre-existing basis for even taking recommendations from anyone trying to organize the high sec vote. IF they can be persuaded to vote at all that is.

So yes, high sec, low sec, and wormholes are going to be under-represented on the coming CSM, if they have any at all. I'm hopeful that faction warfare can get someone like Scylus Black voted in to pull CCP's attention to iterating on Faction Warfare at least a little bit, but I'm painfully cognizant that even getting the militia pilots of four factions and numerous unrelated allainces/corporations on the same page is nigh impossible.

I hope I'm wrong.