(Developers Note: This is a Guest Blog written by the 8th Council of Stellar Management (CSM), as part of their ongoing efforts to help CCP and the EVE Online Developement Teams in shaping the direction and focus for the future of the EVE Online Universe)
They're making a list, and checking it twice…
Welcome to the CSM Summer 2013 "Reasonable Things" Prioritization Crowdsourcing. The purpose of this exercise is to develop a prioritized list of "Reasonable Things" — small to medium-complexity changes and improvements to the game that hopefully provide high "gameplay bang for development buck".
CSM will use this list in our discussions with CCP about the planning for the Winter expansion — and beyond.
There are 3 steps in the process:
1) Initial List Development (now until July 24th).
Our starting list includes all of the top items in the "Help Me, CCP Soundwave" Little Things thread ( https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=167795 ), and we would like to publicly thank thread-starter Hershman for his hard work in developing that list. However, we want to expand this list to include not just more Little Things, but also slightly more ambitious proposals — call them "Medium Things".
In the comment thread for this blog, post your suggestions for Reasonable Things, one per post.
Each suggestion must be described by a single short sentence. If you can't tweet it, it's probably too long.
The suggestion must appear on a line by itself, prefaced by the string "Suggestion:"
For example:
Suggestion: Improve right-click menus by implementing the Amazon Menu Hack
You may optionally include a line containing keywords that categorize the suggestion, prefacing them by "Keywords:" Good things to include are what playstyles (ie: "Industry", "PVP"), player categories ("Newbies","Enablers") and/or areas of the game ("Wormholes","Hisec") it targets.
For example:
Keywords: user interface, menus, everyone
You may also include a line giving extra information about your suggestion, prefacing it by "Note:"
For example:
Note: See http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-dropdown for a complete explanation of this improvement.
Links to threads in the forums that discuss the idea will be particularly useful.
These lines will be automatically extracted by our software to create the initial list. However, you should feel free to elaborate on the above for the benefit of thread readers.
Putting it all together, the above suggestion might look like this:
Suggestion: Improve right-click menus by implementing the Amazon Menu Hack
Keywords: user interface, menus
Note: See http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-dropdown for a complete explanation of this improvement.
Navigating multilevel right-click menus is a pain in the butt, but this cute hack that Amazon uses makes them much easier to use. If this could be implemented, it would improve every right-click menu in the game.
2) CSM List Pruning (July 25th – 31th)
CSM will then combine similar suggestions and get some feedback from CCP about item feasibility and difficulty (for example, whether they would be Little Things or Medium Things)
We will then prioritize them (the exact method has not yet been decided, but how each CSM voted will be made public)
3) Community Prioritization (August 1st – 14th)
The top 99 items (as determined and ranked by the CSM) will be presented to the community for prioritization, in a similar manner to the previous crowdsourcings. We also intend to analyze the data in new ways (including using the same Wright-STV method used in the CSM elections), and the raw data will be made available to the community for further analysis.
The CSM would like to thank all participants in advance for taking the time to help improve the game. We greatly appreciate your efforts.
Sincerely,
The Members of the 8th Council of Stellar Management
PS: This process is open to all members of the community, so we welcome suggestions from disreputable groups such as gankers, scammers, pirates, hot-droppers, market-manipulators, alliance leaders and even devs.
PPS: Allegations that CSM members can be bribed to ensure that particular suggestions make the final list are, of course, totally ludicrous.