I'm going to start off with a quick statement: The CPM has been nothing short of absolutely stellar. The times we have been able to use them as the resource that they were supposed to be has resulted in amazing feedback and progress. To everyone that believes that they have been doing very little, I would beg to differ and I would believe it completely disingenuous to call them useless. They have made themselves available at nearly any time we ask, ready to give instant feedback on any and everything. Yes it's behind closed doors at the moment, but that's the NDA - it's a double edged sword.

While the NDA prevents the CPM from telling the wider community a large number of things, what it does do is allow us to run raw ideas and sanity check crazy proposals without fear of the larger community taking it the wrong way. A number of truly ridiculous ideas have made it to the cutting room floor with the help of the CPM, and some excellent ideas have been proposed by them, been expanded by the development teams and actually borne fruit. There is absolutely no way that many of the details that we have shared with them so early would be disseminated among the wider public, as the ideas are too raw and unrefined to be ready for mass feedback. Doing so would result is a vast sea of half-built responses that would inundate the development teams, drowning out the well planned responses in a swarm of half-baked ideas due to a lack of a solid base for people to give feedback on.

The CPM is meant to be an advocacy council taking issues they see from the player base and raising them with us. They're also an amazing sanity check for our plans. While many of you can't see the impact they're making, trust me when I say that while we haven't always been giving them the support they deserve, they have been putting in mountains of work. But they do not dictate development. They act merely in an advisory capacity, and the final call will always remain in CCPGÇÖs hands. Infact, I have seen instances where CPM members have stated that their preferred play styles need to be nerfed for the good of the game.

The reaction that many of you are having right now is exactly the same reaction EVE players had when the CSM was first formed. Over many years they have had the ability to prove themselves as CCP has grown to include them as part of the development process. The CPM wonGÇÖt integrate overnight, but we do need to put more work into it. We can make it work, and we are committed to making it work.