From bad to worse

I didn’t want to have to write this blog post. Turns out, when I wrote the last one, lots of other people had the same idea. In that last post, I posited that seven days into the election, we had seen very little CCP promotion of the CSM election and this was rather disappointing as we were told by CCP Dolan and CCP Fozzie to expect something new and interesting. Since I wrote that blogpost, all we have had is a mass evemail.

Seriously. A mass evemail. That is the stretch of CCPs imagination. And if six days was probably too late, eleven days, which is where we stand as I write this is certainly is. It’s vastly, disasterously too late. CCP has massively dropped the ball. Between the terribly rolled-out new voting system, a catastrophic primary, the ‘false positive’ issue (which I am happy to put down as simple human error, but nevertheless) and the complete dearth of any dynamic and interesting promotion from CCP, the CSM8 election has been a disaster.

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe voting figures are way up. Except CCP haven’t released any figures and have explictly told CSM7 they are not allowed to go public with them:

Rhavas ‏@EVE_Rhavas

@HansShotFirst @midi2304 @wartzilla @CCP_Fozzie @grrusso @Seleene_EVE How far behind is voter turnout?

Hans Jagerblitzen ‏@HansShotFirst

@EVE_Rhavas @midi2304 @wartzilla @CCP_Fozzie @grrusso @Seleene_EVE The CSM hasn’t been authorized to say, CCP should have been reporting it

Some people would suggest the reason those figures aren’t public is because they are bad. I mean, if the figures were good, CCP would be singing them to the heavens right? So obviously, given this election is almost certainly far too late to salvage, we are seeing CSM7 coming out all guns blazing, right? As a player advocacy group, they are keeping the player base informed about what they are doing to fix this mess, right? We have an official statement from CSM7 denouncing the terrible mess that the CSM8 election has become, right?

No, no we don’t. We have tweets from a couple of individuals such as Hans and Alekseyev stating they are unhappy. The CSM7 chairman has made no official statement advising the players what the CSM is doing to resolve this. There is no collective statement or blog post from the group as a whole. Not only do CCP seem not to care about the election, we are getting nothing from the current CSM about what they are doing to fix a massive issue that is clearly at the forefront of the community’s concerns.

It is clear from tweets from certain CSM7 members that they are unhappy with what is happening. I have spoken to certain members of CSM7 privately and they are giving nothing away other than to confirm that they are very disappointed with the situation. I presume they are working with CCP on a solution. But we have complete radio silence from them as a body publicly. CCP had to apologise to CSM7 for by and large ignoring them in the first six months of their tenure. Then we have a situation where CCP seem unwilling to invest any real effort in the election despite assurances to the contrary. And yet CCP clearly appears to have CSM7 in their pocket, telling them anything they need to hear to keep them quiet.

I don’t know what’s more heartbreaking – the disregard CCP are showing the CSM as an entity or the disregard CSM7 are showing the players.

This isn’t about the effort I or anyone else has put into this election. This is about making sure as many people are involved in the CSM process as possible and that must come from the top-down. How do we fix this? I don’t know. I’d love to see maybe a Twitch stream from CSM7 talking about what’s going on. Maybe a Twitch stream with Unifex and Dolan? Maybe, as someone suggested, some kind of voter lottery where anyone who has votes before the close of election is put into a hat and the winner gets something cool (I don’t know what and to be honest, I’m not even sure if bribing people to vote is a good idea – I’m just brainstorming). Maybe they could extend the election and do something cool to announce it. Explain the issues up to now and why CCP are so thoroughly behind the process? I’d love your ideas on this one.