Capsuleers,
For the longest time, the CSM has been a black box where opinions and suggestions go to die. It appears that, even now, the CSM cannot, or will not, effectively advocate for or against things that may greatly improve or degrade our quality of life.
This week, the CSM failed to prevent a sweeping change to asset safety fees that saw cost reductions for Titans and Supercarriers. In a forum post, CCP Swift clarified the intent of this change was to normalize the values of some of these high-end ships, which is fine in and of itself.
The problem comes with one small caveat in the post itself—a backdate to November 25th. If you’ve been living under a rock, you wouldn’t think anything of this. You’d think, “What a nice way for CCP to help the playerbase!” Of course, you’d be wrong, considering this date is exactly when assets from the Keepstar Pandemic Horde lost in R-AG7W were available for retrieval.
Considering that the goal here is to normalize the costs of asset safety and that the ships in question have been hyperinflated for years, why not backdate the change even further? In the thread, CCP Swift indicates that reimbursement is an automated process, so how much more difficult would it have been to backdate it to include everyone who paid the inflated costs?
Now, I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I can see something for what it is and what it looks like. And this looks strangely like CCP throwing a helping hand to one of the largest (former) groups of players in a desperate attempt to claw back lost subscriptions. The decision, regardless of who posted it, creates a highly damaging appearance of corporate favoritism that our elected representatives should be loudly condemning.
Yet, where is the CSM?
In the official thread, you can find a variety of players arguing for and against the change, or against asset safety existing at all. But one thing I was unable to find was the voice of any CSM representatives. In over 178 replies to the thread, not a single CSM piped up one way or the other. What gives?
Their silence suggests they either were not consulted on this major economic change (a failure of CCP) or they approved it knowing the backdate’s specific consequence (a failure of the CSM to represent the entire community). We have thousands of players in an uproar, and the CSM is silent. What did we elect them for?
The CSM has no accountability. We elect them. They do nothing. The cycle repeats. CCP creates the status quo—scarcity, arbitrary changes that affect one group more than others, etc. And the CSM watches, benefits from, and props up this status quo without us knowing one way or the other.
This is why I am running for CSM. For years, we have elected groups of people that pretend to work on our behalf, but are really just more interested in getting that free trip to Iceland or pushing through their favorite pet projects. When I am on the CSM, this will change. You’ll know where I and any other representative I advocate for stand on these important issues, as transparency is key.