Sounds fine to me.
Joking apart, I genuinely don’t think it should be that difficult to organise the CSM so that it’s both more representative and better from a democratic point of view.
There are several very straightforward ways that CCP could do this. What I’ve written below is based on the assumption that the CSM would want to retain a maximum of ten representative players at any given time.
1 . Home Stations
You could divide up the player base, using the location of their home station of choice as a metric starting point and then subdividing them into 10 constituencies with roughly the same numbers of players in them.This would ensure that ensure that each representative came from and represented a fairly divided chunk of the player base.
2 . Geographic Division
You could subdivide the map into constituency areas. I had a go at this.I freely accept (especially as far as null sec goes) that what I’ve done might very well be clumsy and flawed, but I did it really to illustrate a principle rather than to produce a final version of what the map might actually look like.
Essentially using this breakdown there’d be four representatives coming from high sec, one from each empire, plus four representatives coming from and serving low security space, plus two wild card reps, who might stand on the basis of representing wormholes, Trigs, etc. (aside of this there were also a couple of areas of space where there didn’t seem to be an obvious ‘fit’).
3. Career and Endeavour
You could subdivide the player base up by their activity in the preceding year.Given that CCP is totally focussed when it comes to the demographics of the player base (which is awesome because the sheer scale of data that they present for things like ‘My Year in EVE’ is fairly mind blowing ) you could split players into constituencies based on this metric.
For example, you might have four seats for null sec (because it’s a special case) plus a seat each for miners, industrialists, haulers, merchants, explorers and PvP.
This is all coming off the top of my head, so I’m definitely not suggesting that any of these ideas are worked out to the extent where they could or should be deployed tomorrow.
I do think there should be some reflection and serious thought applied to how the CSM functions and how representative it really is of the overall player base in EVE and hopefully this post will help to facilitate this.
In terms of what I wrote, I was very conscious of the need to balance representation so that there is a voice for both null/low sec and high sec because I genuinely believe that both deserve representation on the CSM. It’s not a case or either/or it’s a case of both.
At the moment the CSM is just not that representative, and as said above, some voices ring out loudly and repeatedly and others are completely silent time after time after time, which is not really that democratic.
