This is very true and I'm just going to say, once again, that anyone who chooses to just throw out labels (the null-sec CSM, etc..) you're robbing yourself of a potential ear to your issues. The current CSM may not seemed 'well balanced' at a glance, but look a bit deeper and you might be surprised. One advantage of a 'veteran' CSM is that most of us ran for CSM not because of a bad last year or two of decisions by CCP but because of frustrations that go all the way back to the launch of the game.

I've been playing EVE since April of 2003. I mined Omber for three weeks to get the money for a Maller BPO because that was literally the only way you could fly one - build it yourself! I've been a CEO for most of that time. Corp mining ops, running an industrial corp, building everything from Rifters to Outposts and supercaps, etc.. I created and ran Mercenary Coalition which was primarily an Empire War alliance for the first two years. I ended up working at CCP for over three years in Game Design and, let me tell you, nothing else wipes out your prejudices about "null sec" or "carebears" faster than having to actually work on various aspects of the game and really understanding how interconnected all of these elements are. Today, I'm in Pandemic Legion because I'm still an old mercenary at heart and PL is the best place for that sort of thing. Add it all up and I really don't have an opinion about NULL SEC versus HIGH SEC or all that crap. I just want the game as a whole to improve and so does the rest of the CSM.

Every CSM member could probably write a paragraph like the above. We are a lot more varied and 'deep' than the haters want to give us credit for. For all the **** everyone likes to throw at Mittens, he spends a hell of a lot of time asking other CSM members and players questions about stuff and then moves to act on it. If he's prejudiced against anything but supercaps (which I can't blame him for tbh) I haven't seen it. Trebor and Messia are impossible to label in terms of what they support because they are cynical and knowledgeable about everything. The CSM alts like Two Step and Prometheus have been invaluable when it comes to discussions with CCP about various balance issues.

My point is that even if you think you don't have someone on the CSM representing, you might very well be wrong. We're a pretty varied crew and I think the composition and experience of this CSM is a big reason why we're getting EVE Online: Crucible and not EVE: NPC Dance Challenge.

While we're talking about it, let's just be honest and admit that Crucible is the 'low hanging fruit'. This expansion is full of everything that should have already been taking place over the last 2+ years. It's great stuff and I take nothing away from the hard work being done to get it all done but it's also the 'easy' stuff in the sense that it really wasn't that hard to find things to do / fix / iterate. The hard part starts after Crucible. It's still up to us as players and the CSM to help keep CCP ummm... 'focused'.

As I've said previously, what we're looking at right now with the amount of resources that have been refocused on EVE is the potential for an 'Apocrypha' every 3-4 months. That's not bullshit, it's actually possible due to the fact that there are literally five times the number of teams working on EVE today as there were two months ago. The actual content of what is to come is certainly going to be the subject of most of the December summit. I saw a comment on Twitter a couple days ago that referred to Crucible as a 'tactical' expansion in preparation for the more 'strategic' stuff still to come. That's pretty accurate. As Mittens said, in the aftermath of the 'October War', everyone is gearing up for the inevitable 'Feature War'.

Will CCP stay the course? Based on what we've seen recently I'd say, for at least the next year, yes. What will happen over the next year is anyone's guess but, aside from the 20% stuff, morale within the office is way up primarily because folks are getting a chance to work on the things they've been banging their heads against the wall about for years. I'd say we're looking at a solid 12 months of full throttle EVE EVE EVE before CCP takes their foot off the gas. That's fine with me for now because when the people working on the game are doing stuff that they WANT to do and actually have the resources and mandate to do it on a level that's never existed before, we'll probably see EVE evolve quite a lot in the next year..