EVE Online experiments with virtual democracy

By Eric Reuters

SECOND LIFE, May 7 (Reuters) - It can be difficult for the most well-meaning of virtual worlds companies to understand what their customers want. But CCP, the company behind the sci-fi world of EVE Online, thinks they’ve solved the riddle: have users elect their own representatives.

Sixty-one candidates are vying for nine spots in open voting on EVE’s website. The top vote getters will become the official representatives of EVE’s player community, and flown to Reykjavik, Iceland to share their thoughts on the game at the company’s headquarters.

The player representative body, known as the “Council of Stellar Management” in keeping with EVE’s science fiction theme, will serve a six-month term. An earlier iteration of the council was hand-picked by CCP, a practice also employed by MMO’s like Star Wars: Galaxies and Everquest. Petur Oskarsson, a researcher at CCP, said the EVE elections are breaking new ground in virtual democracy.

The council, once assembled, will give EVE players more formal input into the game’s governance than any other virtual world. But the elected representatives will have no power other than to raise issues with CCP executives, who promise only an open dialogue.

EVE Online, which celebrated its five-year anniversary on Tuesday, is a virtual world set in deep space. The world employs a blend of elements, some similar to Second Life with no set objective, and others that follow quest-based games like World of Warcraft. New players are offered a handful of training missions before heading out into deep space in search of glory and profit. CCP seeds the universe with raw materials, and prices fluctuate in an open economy.

While elected player representatives will enjoy the opportunity for direct dialogue with CCP executives, the company is clear that the council’s role will be solely advisory.

“If they ask for something, I’m not afraid to say we can’t do it, either because it hurts our money flow, or because we just don’t know how,” Oskarsson said. “But if they ask a question, I want to make sure they have an honest and transparent answer.”

The elected players will be asked to send in a list of questions and issues they want addressed two weeks before their trip to Iceland. Questions about how the game works along with real-world issues like lag and billing support are fair game for discussion.

“As long as it concerns EVE, I don’t see any problems,” Oskarsson said. “But if they want someone fired from CCP, I don’t see that happening.”

Oskarsson said he wants as much input from players as possible, but stresses all decisions are ultimately CCP’s to make. “If players want pink ponies, I’d say no, because pink ponies don’t fit into EVE,” he said. “Pink ponies is an absurd example, but I’m sure we’ll get some absurd questions.”

“The issues I expect for the first meeting will probably be game balancing, the technical implementation of how the game will run,” Oskarsson said.

The player politicians of EVE have their own ideas. “We need to find out which things we can influence - apart from pure game mechanics stuff,” said Michael Rasmussen, who’s running for the council. “No one knows what ‘powers,’ if any, the CSM will actually have.”

Rasmussen, 39, a software developer from Copenhagen, Denmark known as “TornSoul” in the game, has been in EVE since the beginning and was one of CCP’s hand-picked representatives for the previous player council. He says he’s not running on any specific platform, but on his reputation for fair dealing as head of an in-game corporation.

As a campaign strategy, Rasmussen has started an election website, and contributes actively to the forums on eve-online.com.

While Rasmussen has his own bevy of in-world concerns — he feels EVE’s network of hyperspace expressways converge at laggy chokepoints that can’t handle the traffic — he hopes to address issues in CCP’s relationship with its customers. If elected, he plans to press for greater transparency in how CCP prioritizes bug reports.

While Rasmussen is an old hand at EVE, James Emdin, 34, of Stuttgart, Germany, is running for the council after being in the game only nine months. He thinks it’s important that newer players, who are arguably at a competitive disadvantage, have a voice.

“If I had an ISK [EVE’s in-world currency] for every time I was called a ‘newb,’ I’d be a billionaire,” Emdin said.

Emdin is more focused on in-world issues. “The stock market is a wonderful idea that hasn’t been developed,” he said. (EVE’s game currency is not directly exchangeable into real-world currency like Second Life’s Linden dollars, which largely avoids many of the concerns over securities fraud that plagued Linden Lab’s world late last year.) Emdin also thinks EVE’s bounty hunting system needs reworking, as too many players were letting their friends “capture” them for a cut of the reward.

But whatever their complaints, both Rasmussen and Emdin are enthusiastic about the prospect of virtual democracy, or at least a move in that direction. Which, to CCP, is this whole point.

“If you’re playing an online game with a subscription model that people invest lots of time in, it’s normal to want some input on how it’s run,” CCP’s Oskarsson said. “If there’s 250,000 players, why not pick a few of them, it can only help us.”