You know this entire topic is really starting to aggravate me. CCP has done nothing for the past two years but listen to the constant whining and complaining from the vocal minority on how they should design their game.
The CSM and the player base are not customers, they are at best active investors and at times hostile investors. Almost all of the anger and rage you seen over the past few years has been the Carl Ichans of the eve community trying to protect their sandcastles in game.
This is does not allow sane and rational design implementation to be put forward. Then when CCP does make changes based on the vocal minority community's desires we have to sit around and hear a month of complaining from the same people on how CCP didn't get it right.
Instead of having a vision and coming up with what CCP feels is a direction they should head in, they have been compelled and brow beaten to listen to these horrible "game designers" inside the CSM and the vocal minority player base on how and why they are somehow qualified to design an MMO.
During the summer of Rage a few years ago, CCP was trying to find alternative income streams and go the direction of literally every other single MMO in the genre by bringing in microtransactions to the community. Instead the player base was whipped up into a frenzy by a few people screaming from the hilltop that there was going to be gold plated ammo, which was never CCP's intent. They were just looking for income stream via things like skins so that they could potentially move their product to a different subscriber model.
All that came out of the summer of Rage, which there was a few shining points as CCP went back to work on some of the game aspects that were broken, is a cultural shift in the company to listen to the unqualified masses on what they should do, as if any if these people have a microsecond of experience running a company, being an entrepreneur or designing a successful mmo.
As a result what we seen in the past 3 years is a continual slide down the hill that in my opinion is directly a result of bad game design decisions that I can only blame squarely on CCP for listening to the ignorance being spewed forth by people who consider themselves important. I don't think CCP should ignore its customers, on the contrary please take their ideas into consideration, but they certainly should not have let them basically run the show. All the community has managed to do is wrongly force them down paths of "improvements" which instead nearly crashed and burned the game and company.
CCP has did pretty damn well themselves in making smart business decisions and by finding a niche in the market. We do not need design by committee, we need another Soundwave / Hilmar to walk in and say this is what we're doing like it or gtfo.
If it dies it dies based on a clear leadership structure instead of this round table decision-making, were really at the end nothing ever gets really done and we get half measures because she see if he doesn't have the time or resources to keep going back over some of these very dramatic and fast changes.
Long story short let's let CCP tell us what their design is going to be and the CSM / community keep their mouth shut and only advise on small iterations, instead of trying to be game designers.
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