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!

Presented by John Bates of Entropia Universe, Eyjólfur Guðmundsson Chief Economist of CCP, and Craig Sherman of GAIA.

Some Gaia statistics:

5 million visitors/month, 3 billion page views/month, 1,000 auctions closing daily, 1 million forum posts per day (second only to Yahoo!), $1 million/month in digital goods, and “many thousands of dollars” per day is being made off prepaid cards sold in Target stores.

Gaia is launching an MMO this summer that will be Flash-based. It has been in development for two years and they expect it to almost immediately become one of the top MMOs.

Panelist discussion:

Can a virtual world or MMO exist without an economy? Panelists agree it’s not likely because any time users perceive value in the world, a market will emerge regardless of terms of service.

Things without dollar value still have value. The acceptance of these MMO and virtual world economies will continue. They look just like traditional economics (inflation/deflation, economic utility) just a different currency.

Taxation on virtual world revenue is not really that exciting. When people pull money out of a virtual world, it is income and therefore should be reported as income to taxing authorities.

There will be a fundamental switch to micro-transaction economy in place of subscriptions. This change is well underway in Asia and is starting to happen here in the U.S.