[...] Via Raph, news that players of Eve Online will have the opportunity to elect the members of a player council that will dictate in-game policy. Seems like an exciting experiment in MMO democracy — looking forward to hearing more about it. [...]

[...] target of criticism is considered a developer. Source: Psychochild Categories: Bloggers 18:04 Eve Online’s great experiment For those who don’t know, the  player council in Eve continues to move forward. In the past, I [...]

There is no separation of powers.

There is no delegation of authority, no representation, no acclaim even.

There is no securing of borders, authorization to tax, standing army, compact ethnic groups, you know, nation stuff.

There is no constituent assembly.

These things are ingame…

EVE is one of the few MMOs that give power to players for control resources and territories and organice thenselves in corps and aliances resulting in authentic states with his own economy and rules, some corps can act how democracys, other how jerarquic empires, other how pirate gangs, etc.. They dont need rule the game world because currently have power ingame with the actual game rules.

For me the EVE council is a system for have some player control on the devs decisitions for avoid disasters how the SWG-NGE experience, where devs changued almost completly the game landscape without listening the player base real needs.

The EVE players dont need control the game for changue it because they liked EVE in the current form and the power that the gameplay give to then, they not want dont see their beloved game turned in other WoW, for that they need have some control in the future of the game and have a voice for point the game problems and claim for a fix to the devs.

That are the reasons because some game worlds need advisory councils, I dont see how these situations can have place in a social world without gamerules giving objetives and gameplays that need be conservated or balanced.

In RPG game worlds players want adapt theselves to a world with his own rules and have a place inside or build something in that world. In social world they need build all without the objetives or reasons giving by game rules, for socialice and shopping they have the real world and web features connected to the real world needs and objetives, and for that they perceive social virtual worlds how boring, no inmersion, no other world, only the same real world but in a virtual space.

As a channel for player input, this council has the ability to make cognent suggestions in a fairly direct way to dev’s, on the flip side of the coin it serves to focus the minimal power each individual player has. At the very least it would look very bad for CCP if their own little experiment in player “governance” backfired, and the entire council cancelled their subscriptions, like entire hardcore raiding guilds disbanding and leaving one of the most popular MMO’s to date because all the new content sucks, except of a greater magnitude

I think one way to mitigate this risk is to ensure you’ve selected from a broad pool of views available. I can see trouble for player governance with real ability to influence change in a game like EVE, where those changes can unfairly benefit some factions over others. I’d need some serious reassuring as to these people’s personal integrity and ability to be impartial and fair in their recommendations.

After all, some players will leave when they aren’t being treated as the exclusive ‘golden children’ anymore. You need a good mixture of raider and non-raider, pvper and non-pvper, casual and hardcore, and a lot of mixtures those dichotomies don’t cover if you want a discussion on what is in the cohesive best interests of the game.

They will most likely get to vote on the theme for the prom, and if they are lucky they will get to help pick the destination for the class trip.

CCP is still the Principal.

By the same token, I guess the players have no power either…

…But if an unpopular change goes through, and half the player base is lost, you can be certain that CCP will feel the hurt, so I guess they *do* have power, don’t they? Just not direct power.

As a channel for player input, this council has the ability to make cognent suggestions in a fairly direct way to dev’s, on the flip side of the coin it serves to focus the minimal power each individual player has. At the very least it would look very bad for CCP if their own little experiment in player “governance” backfired, and the entire council cancelled their subscriptions, like entire hardcore raiding guilds disbanding and leaving one of the most popular MMO’s to date because all the new content sucks, except of a greater magnitude…

I already posted this, but here it is again:
“It cannot be stressed enough that the council will not have any formal power within CCP; it will function solely as an advisory council to CCP by serving as a communication conduit between the playerbase and CCP.”

There’s no deciding to be done here, they explicitly are *only* a communications conduit. This is a way to deal with the logistics of getting reasonable responses from a player base approaching 300,000 users, nothing more. They’ve said as much in about as clear English as can be expected. And that dev blog post that this comes from is dated 4 days ago, so this can be expected to be up to date information.

That doesn’t follow. The council has however much power CCP decides to give them, and that’s a subtle but crucial difference. Saying that the council “has no power” is like saying a company executive “has no power” simply because he has someone to report to. It all depends how much freedom his boss gives him, and how strong of a leader the executive is.

From what’s CCP is published, it’s clear that they don’t intend to give the council anything approaching absolute power. But there’s still a wide range of possibilities left.

It’s really not a player government, but it is a player elected system of representation, which we haven’t really seen much of to be honest. I just think it’s odd that he’s questioning *why*, since the most obvious reason is that Eve could actually benefit from a clearer communication with the player base, or at least the appearance of clearer communication. The more gameplay elements you have, the greater use there is for out of game systems for communicating information. More things to balance, more things to complain about. Where with a primarily social game in game communication is more important than out of game, and that’s stuff that players can do all by themselves given the right tools. So you never need to elect officials or anything, the players will attend to themselves.