Problems with the CSM

  With a CSM member "quitting EvE" and seemingly endless chatter about the CSM being upset at CCP there is plenty to talk about.  Letrange brought up a good point that I thought could use more elaboration here: http://letrangeeve.blogspot.com/2011/02/teadazes-trees.html  He mentioned that the CSM are players and that players almost always have one area of concentration, or at least a favorite that they would rather focus on.

  I think that critique should be taken a bit further.  The CSM requires a huge commitment to getting out there in EvE just to win, not to mention once a player is in office.  This isn't a bad thing but it does immediately exclude a certain set of players.  What you end up with are a set of CSM members who have historically been representatives of a smaller segment of the population.  I'm not sure how this can be helped but a good start would be an in game menu where each candidate has answered an array of questions posed by player (prior to the candidacy period) and where you can vote right in the game.  The old voting tool can be kept but this would get many more players voting and perhaps get them voting more accurately for their desires.

  As what Consider to be an upper level causal player (meaning more commitment than many casuals but less than many hardcores)  here are the things I consider important:

• I do think lo-sec sucks; but not for pirates, for everyone.  It should be heavily re-worked.  Pirates get on a high horse and preach about not boxing in their game play; in the same sentence they ask CCP to box in the game play of others so they can have juicy targets.  This is ludicrous.  The reason no targets come to lo-sec is because lo-sec inhabitants only destroy, they do not build.  If you want to play in the sandbox then don't just kick sand in peoples eyes.  There needs to be something that can be built or done by player groups in lo-sec, I'm not sure what, just something.  I don't mean more L5's or mining or whatever.  Few sane players will risk such expensive ships and all that effort when they can be killed by a pirate in a cheap battlecruiser who just happened to be roaming by.
• The CSM shouldn't even be spending so much time talking about lo-sec since no one goes there.  
• Faction warfare was a neat idea, and one that can still be made great.  One thing it needs is more publicity and less spies
• Which brings up spies, we need tools for addressing spies.  I don't even want to go close to saying that people cannot play EvE any way they want.  But I do want to see it be harder to be a spy then just joining up and being in the corp/alliance.  Perhaps we could get some tool that allowed us to compare online times (via the corp/buddy list) of a suspected alt spy with his suspected main.  This would cost a lot of isk and would still require human research.  I'm sure the EvE community would have even further ideas.
• Keep jump bridges for crying out loud.  It's hard enough to get around 0.0 as it is.  Actually owning the systems should make it easier.  And yes, I do think the people who live in a space deserve an advantage, welcome to every human conflict ever.  

Okay, that's enough bitching.  I would also like to say that I love EvE and CCP even though there will always be problems with something so complex.

-Meatay