The Council for Stellar Awesomeness
CCP and their online game EVE Online is a delightfully disruptive force in the MMO industry. It was no surprise when I saw this on the Kill Ten Rats blog:
CCP [the makers of EVE Online] just started accepting candidacies for the Council of Stellar Management, or as their news post was amusingly titled, the Council of Stellar Awesomeness…This is a player-elected council of nine members who represent the playerbase to CCP, and CCP in turn promises to “attempt to accomodate all reasonable requests by player Representatives” and to “do everything in its power to resolve the topics presented.” They’re taking it pretty seriously, too — each term of the council requires a face-to-face meeting at the CCP offices, with travel (to Iceland!), lodging, and food paid for by CCP.
Incorporating user/player/resident feedback is an interesting phenomenon for MMO publishers. It is a hybrid of community management, governance and user-generated content.
This move by CCP is not the first time a sandbox MMO has attempted to give their high profile users a formal outlet to provide input and influence the publisher.
Second Life Views was a program started by Linden Lab and described as “a series of bi-monthly meetings with SL Residents to discuss the design and implementation of new features for SL.” To the best of my knowledge, the Views group has not met in quite a while. More recently, I noticed a Governance Team lead by Linden lab holding in-world office hours for residents to stop by to ask questions and discuss topics.
What makes the EVE Council different than other attempts like SL Views is the fact that players will be responsible to fellow players, not just advising the publisher of the MMO.
A major drawback of programs like SL Views and Town Hall forums is that users are likely to overwhelm the publisher and their ability to properly manage the input. After all, well managed MMO publishers have far fewer employees than they have users, right?
If you want to see more details about the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), you can download a brief on it here. I’m excited to see this in action in the coming months!
March 22nd, 2008 14:59
[…] I learned on the Electric Sheep Company blog that CCP and their online game EVE Online accept candidacies for an elected 9-member council representing the player base. The council is called Council of Stellar Management. […]
March 22nd, 2008 20:47
Way back in the day, in Anarchy Online, they had something called the Council of Truth, which was more role play based but came along with the notion that you can involve players directly with the happening of the storyline. While, yes publishers do have fewer employees than users, they can have setups like the CSM or CoT to not only encourage and engage users but to manage the feedback (an example, although not the best, the Second Life JIRA.)
When you deal with MMORPG’s though, these institutions act more than just loops of feedback but ways to become immersed and add value to the game. The only problem is that, unlike a world in Second Life, much of this involvement falls into leisure. The publisher benefits more from this sort of activity (although it does ‘trickle down’ to the player.)
My question is, when a publisher in the MMORPG space does something like this, what are the rewards/benefits to those involved?
March 25th, 2008 16:29
“It is a hybrid of community management, governance and user-generated content.”
I think that’s an excellent way to summarize EVE’s new player council.
A lot of people only seem to react to one piece of this, particularly the community management piece, e.g. “this doesn’t mean anything — it’s just customer service with fancy window dressing.”