Eurogamer Interviews the Eve Council Chairman
The peasants are revolting.
I actually have no regrets about that as the minutes aren't related to what we saw in the video - it's an important distinction. The biggest takeaway from the emergency summit was resolving concerns around CCP adding gold ammo or pay-to-win microtransactions in Eve. I am still convinced and have no concerns about them doing that sort of thing. This is not going to turn into World of Tanks.
It's an issue of nuance and there are two levels to being on the CSM. There's dealing with developers and on that level, we've changed tactics from the past CSM's by being really chill guys with them. We hang out on Skype whereas previous councils would be very confrontational. Instead we've been more persuasive and almost everything slated for the winter expansion that we've seen has the CSM's dirty paw-prints all over it. That's one level.
The second level is when you're dealing with upper management. I think they saw us getting along, being chill and reasonable with the designers and thought this meant we were push-overs.
After the Emergency Summit - once it became obvious that Incarna was a failure - we see the PCU (Peak Concurrent User) graphs but can only infer that the subscriptions graph is roughly correlated. Otherwise I don't think CCP would have tried to adulterate the minutes. They will always say they weren't going to adulterate the minutes, just that there are issues of tone. But the CSM saw it as an adulteration. That's why we are saying: "No more Mr Nice CSM".
It's never been the case. There's always a small paranoid mindset about that. If you have a null-sec empire, your enemies assume the worst. People who paid closer attention to the election would have seen every null-sec bloc get together, work together, and ensure our candidates were there.
It's important to note that the health of the game as a whole is the macro level that the CSM deals with. It's not possible to get on the CSM and promote the narrow interests of your Alliance. That behaviour would be very transparent; you'd be ignored by CCP, shoot your credibility in the foot - and the rest of the CSM would get very angry with you. I've advocated for nerfs that currently benefit Goonwarm.
I never actually joined the game to destroy it - that's Darius's [former Alliance leader] line about what we do in Goonswarm. We aren't here to destroy Eve - we are griefers and a home for the Something Awful community in Eve. It's a hysterical propaganda line from people we've crushed under our jackboots.
I care very deeply about Eve and God knows I waste too much time playing and running my Alliance. The sort of issues that the CSM is faced with are ones that deal with the very survival of the game itself. I'm afraid that's the situation we're in today.
That's a tactical question, and talking about "loud statements" was before I expected you guys to snap this up and kick off the media storm. I was preparing my Alliance to get ready for a formal CSM spotlight and to be able to implement our media strategy once that spotlight hit. I don't know that we'll bother with a formal spotlight now - the horse has already left the barn. We've moved on to the next stage of the strategy which is to make ourselves available to the media. Hopefully we'll see results, but I think this is our best shot, the media pressure angle.