Round beginning - 36 candidates remain
31294 votes, 10432 quota
Initial talley:
4314 "Sion Kumitomo"
2944 "corebloodbrothers"
1915 "Sugar Kyle"
1692 "Steve Ronuken"
1655 "progodlegend"
1521 "Ali Aras"
1453 "Matias Otero"
1418 "Mike Azariah"
1171 "corbexx"
970 "Major JSilva"
959 "DJ FunkyBacon"
857 "Mangala Solaris"
853 "Psychotic Monk"
828 "Asayanami Dei"
786 "mynnna"
775 "Xander Phoena"
691 "Aram Kachaturian"
653 "James Arget"
645 "Gorski Car"
602 "DNSBLACK"
528 "Jayne Fillon"
518 "Proclus Diadochu"
483 "Podli"
474 "PsychoBitch"
437 "Alner Greyl"
355 "Awoxing Pizza-Spymaster McBlushooter"
324 "Angry Mustache"
266 "Einear Lightfingers"
235 "Azami Nevinyrall"
201 "riverini"
190 "Psianh Auvyander"
162 "commander aze"
141 "Karen Galeo"
97 "Xenuria"
93 "Ramirez Dora"
88 "Karma Bad"
Actions:
Elimination: "Karma Bad" with 88.000000 votes
Source
I bolded the candidates who went on to become CSMs.
Some pretty interesting things emerge.
Condolences to Psychotic Monk and Asayanami Dei who came 13th and 14th respectively in the first round but didn't make the final 14.
Well done to the CFC for ordering their ballots efficiently enough that they got guys in despite their polling 15th and 16th in the first round.
I suspect what's happening here is the power of the full list of 14 names. For people who didn't simply copy a list 14 names is quite hard. I picked a bunch of people I liked but that only got me to 8. Then it was just people I dislike or people I'd never heard of. I think a lot of people simply didn't fill out the 14 and that's possibly part of why Mynnna and Xander got in simply by being on many people's ballots while not first choice.
So the low turnout (31k votes out of "500 000 subscribers" - probably including Serenity players who would not be eligible to vote) may actually be even lower once things get down to to the last elimination round.
In fact here is the last elimination round.
Round beginning - 3 candidates remain
18936 votes, 6313 quota
Initial talley:
7784 "Ali Aras"
6055 "Sion Kumitomo"
5097 "Steve Ronuken"
Actions:
Elected: "Ali Aras"
Transfer from "Ali Aras":
Votes: 7784.000000, Factor: 0.188977, Excess: 1471.000000
726.240108 votes to Exhausted
587.719681 votes to "Steve Ronuken"
157.040211 votes to "Sion Kumitomo"
Elimination: "Steve Ronuken" with 5684.719681 votes
So only 18936 people voted for a full set of 14 candidates.
Also interesting is that Ali Aras came 6th in the first round and finished top. While she wasn't top on as many people's lists as other candidates she did manage to appear on most voters' lists.
Some conclusions I have:
- it's dangerous to assume that views of the CSM precisely represent the Eve player base. We've had ongoing disputes for some time between one end of the playerbase spectrum that can be characterised as extrovert/event-attending/pvpers and introvert carebear soloers
- only 31k/500k accounts voted and many of those, especially the nullsec and wormhole guys will be multiple accounts. That's about 6%.
- one could argue that it's not right to count the Serenity server as those players are not enfranchised. I don't agree. They are still Eve players, CSM influence on how Eve develops still shapes their game. It's probably a really bad thing that those players are disenfranchised, if there are major cultural and attitudinal differences between that small subsection of the Eve playerbase that is vocal and Western and the Chinese players.
- 40% of voters didn't complete the full ballot (including me). A significant proportion of those who did were probably copying someone else's lists. This means a small number of people, those who make the list, are having a very large impact on the election results.
- Steve Ronuken who just missed out last year did amazingly well. This echoes Jester who failed 3 years ago then got a sackful of votes last year. Standing for the CSM even if you don't get in seems to help future campaigns.
- Mynnna got a surprisingly low number of votes. One expected his Goon constituency to vote for Sion first Mynnna second as per instructions but he went from top last year to barely scraping in this time round.
Actually, no. You don't need 14 names to not get exhausted and Mynnna didn't get in for that long ballots. A ballot that contained only 2 names, Sion and Mynnna were more than enough for him.
ReplyDeleteAlso, a ballot that contained only Steve and Ali did not get exhausted even until the 2-man round.
Mynnna did not get surprisingly low votes. He got elected in first round. He just get low first votes, but that doesn't really count in the STV system.
Well it depends who you vote for. If you vote for unpopular candidates you could be exhausted even with 14 votes.
DeleteI still think it's surprising Mynnna got low first votes. He's been on various podcasts, eve tv, he writes a blog, writes for TMC, is very active on the forums.
Looking through the data Mynnna's vote share went up a lot once Angry Moustache, another TMC writer, was eliminated. He got about 130 votes who would have put 1. Angry Moustache and 2 Mynnna. If Angry Moustache had got enough first votes to get through then Mynnna may well have placed 15th.
And I don't think that was planned or organised by the CFC. They basically got lucky here - they should have split the Goon vote between Sion and Mynnna to get both on, this could easily have been a disaster for them.
Yeah, it seems odd to me that the people on Serenity can't vote. Are there plans to add them in future, or maybe give them their own CSM?
ReplyDeleteI was glad to see how much support Steve and Sugar got. They and Mike were in the top 3 on all my ballots.
What do you think could be done to increase turnout? And do you think higher turnout would be a good thing? (I've heard some say they PREFER low turnout, but they made it clear what their reasons were for that.)
To increase turnout, you pay each player who votes. Perhaps 100m ISK? A PLEX? Then, you add a whole bunch of noise to the election. Win?
Delete(As you can guess, I am one of those nasty anti-democracy people who actually talk about suppressing turnout in the interests of superior representation. If 10k more completely ignorant people would have voted, would Sugar have been elected?)
An informed electorate typically is a good thing, so I'm all for a balance of quality and quantity.
ReplyDeleteI think the voting process/interface is kind of clunky. I'm stubborn enough to go through the whole thing 3 times and vote all 14 slots, but some may not have the patience.
I wouldn't want to pay people *that* much to vote, but a cheap token of some sort and an entry in a drawing for something nicer? Maybe.
A better interface that has a summary of candidates' positions would be good. Not paragraphs and paragraphs of stuff to get through, but radio button responses and maybe short answer (Twitter length, say) stuff. And links to longer articles if the candidate feels the need to go into greater detail.
I was joking about paying people to vote. It's idiotic -- not only does it cost CCP revenue, they get worse representation because of it. People who are voting because they have been paid to are not going to bother spending time on self-education. They will either vote a slate someone else told them, or randomly pick, or perhaps vote for one guy whose name they heard. Low-information voters add noise, except when they are a bloc. Then it is not noise, but it is not signal that we want. It's The Mittani.
DeleteNo, the right direction is the opposite one: institute a steep poll tax. I would say a PLEX is a bit too much, but perhaps 200m ISK. This would cut the voting numbers down to perhaps a tenth the numbers, with much higher quality.
As for the voting itself, are you aware that voting multiple accounts was easily done after the first? The thing kept track of your ordering. The clunkiness, from my perspective, is a good thing. It's like a poll tax in weeding out low-motivation voters. Although honestly I did not find it clunky; for what it was (ranking a set of candidates) I thought it was quite well done.
What if players prefer to quit than to pay a poll tax?
DeleteA misunderstanding. I was (unknowingly) using American English there. Here, a poll tax can have two meanings: a capitation tax (tax per person), or a tax paid for the privilege of voting. Evidently other English speakers don't have that second meaning; to them a poll tax is just a head tax. (Here's the wiki page.)
DeleteNow: a capitation tax is, in fact, how EVE is programmed. You pay 1 PLEX per 30 days, or some amount of real-world money. Increasing this tax, of course, might well sour players who would quit.
In any case, that's not what I was talking about. Rather, the idea is that to vote for CSM you must pay 200m ISK.
The idea doesn't grab me either way but thanks for clarifying.
DeleteI think the main point of the CSM is to cause players to buy into and feel ownership of Eve's vision. I don't think either of your suggestions would help that aim.
I don't think reducing voter numbers improves quality. If you take it to the extreme, one person would pick 14 candidates and if that person's an idiot or a troll you get 14 idiots on your CSM.
ReplyDeleteI think the main reason for low turn out is an enthusiasm crisis in Eve. Players simply aren't so invested in the game. Invested enough to log in, skill, do a bit of casual pvp or iskmaking but not really excited. (As I write this my alliance is collapsing due to leadership apathy).
There are small things that CCP can do to improve turnout, maybe a poster for your CQ after you vote, adding CSM to the NPE and so on but the big thing is they need people to get really excited and motivated.
if that person's an idiot or a troll you get 14 idiots on your CSM.
ReplyDeleteYou think that the most motivated voter, whoever that might have been (perhaps Gevlon?), is an idiot or troll? I agree with the possibility of the former -- I can see a griefer going to great lengths to screw the vote -- but I do not agree with the latter. As such, you need only to get a large enough mass of motivated voters to make trolling the vote practically impossible. This is not a large number.
There's a real danger if the turnout is low that the CSM won't reflect the players. In perhaps a more realistic scenario, suppose null sec is unduly influential and high sec is marginalised despite being the biggest demographic. Suppose the game gets developed in such a way it's more fun for null sec players but not much fun for higseccers and they decide to move on to other games.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that's happening but we're not a million miles away from it.
A million miles away from it?
DeleteIt is here now.
Why do you think that CCP refused to release the numbers required to calculate the sub base, which I believe is unprecedented.
@Von: Yeah, I knew the bit about paying people a PLEX was a joke. :-) (As for the UI, I didn't do all my accounts at the same time, and cookies got dumped, so it didn't retain the preferences.)
ReplyDeleteRixx raises some interesting points today about why people don't vote.