Is it time for a Council of Sea Management for WOWS?

This isn't CCP this is CCCP you go gulag now.

Wargaming already has the Clan supertest as a base of highly competent, relatively unbiased players, yet their feedback sadly seems to have very little impact. I don't think there is any hope of a CSM-esque thing ever happening for WoWs, especially considering how WG seems to be heavily suit-driven.

War Thunder tried doing that. It... didn't end well.

I get that a lot of casual EVE players see the CSM and think that could work as a model for other games, but I don't think people understand the sheer, unadulterated autism released in your average CSM meet. We're talking in excess of 15000 rotagens of autism here. EVE is the only environment it can even work in.

As a member of Warframe’s Design Council and a former ST for WoWS, no. Long story short, this is a lot of effort for little to no gain - and the gain isn’t even largely determined by the council’s effectiveness.

This idea will not work unless exactly the right sort of people are elected, and repeatedly elected. Doing so is asking a lot of any community, never mind an Internet one. It also requires WG to accept their authority, which is a big question that we’ll unfortunately never have a definite answer to. Threading that many needles for a form of feedback that’s only a minor improvement over what we have now - at best - yet comes with more risk isn’t worth the effort.

For one, these kind of positions are too easily manipulated and warped for personal gain by their holders. At that point, they become useless to players and devs. The risk is especially high when you have to be elected to the post. Player councils may be “the voice of the people” in theory, but in practice, unless all discussion between the council and WG is kept under NDA, you will inevitably incite circlejerking. Council members will say what’s expedient to keep their positions, and we’re going to end up with a combination of the problems we already have with CC fanbases and clan politics mixed into one.

More importantly though, developers believe these elected bodies are representative of player opinion and will reduce their grassroots community outreach as a result. Even if we assume this council doesn’t run into the pitfall above (and some communities have managed not to), the fact the devs will increasingly trust the community representatives to collect feedback for them creates a lot of holes for for genuine ideas to be lost in, simply because community reps don’t have - and shouldn’t be expected to commit - the time to sift through and read everything.

This also doesn’t factor in that most people will favor their own ideas, and that acting as a middleman to the devs gives reps the power to censor what they don’t like. That can very easily creates the illusion of the council being a ruling junta. Alabamagate has also shown this isn’t an illusion the community has trouble believing, and that it can take widespread hold under proper circumstances: the accusation that STs are a “cult of imbalance” looking to ruin WoWS for their own enjoyment still periodically turns up.

Lastly, the council could be as virtuous as Christ himself to the last member, but that matters precious little if WG does not see their word as worth acting on. ST feedback is, contrary to assertion, already listened and even responded to, but much less often acted upon. And this is a group WG selects, not the community - they’d have even less reason to trust a player-elected council. Where the council character issues come into play is that any one of such cases might give the devs the notion that the council can’t be trusted - as Warframe’s Design Council did on more than one occasion. And then it loses any practical purpose.

Coming from EVE as well, I do feel we need this.

CSM was a good idea that has occasionally been wonky, but the heart was there.

Down for this.