Our concerns right now go far beyond making sure CCP notices this thread or that thread. Even amongst the trolling which only makes sorting through the information a more difficult chore, there is no shortage of expert advice amongst those of you in the community documenting the changes, discussing the problems with them, and posting effective solutions. The problem as I see it is that the expert advice is not being utilized efficiently (or at all in some cases) and a feedback loop has emerged where frustrated players post up solutions, see no result, get more frustrated, post twice as hard, and then get twice as frustrated.

This has of course come to a head with the deployment of Uprising, resulting in forums that have been unusable for days. I personally believe that this is a natural consequence of making noticeable and frustrating changes to the game without proper documentation, and without cluing the community into the reason why any of these changes were made in the first place. This is a perfect storm of the following:

1.) Seemingly arbitrary balancing changes made without advance notification to the community.
2.) Some balancing changes (like weapon ranges) completely alter the feel of combat and create negative side effects
3.) Lack of supporting explanation of said balancing changes
4.) Wasted player effort on trying to compile data that should be made public anyways, and weeks in advance
5.) Wasted player effort on trying to assess WHY a change was made, when the developers could just tell us.
6.) Forums that are inefficient at best and unusable at worst because discussions are not contained to concrete threads initiated by the developers responsible for the balancing changes.

Regardless of Telcontar's laughable claim that we are some spineless entity who exists to assist CCP with PR and who refuses to say anything critical to CCP, neither I nor the rest of the CPM will be standing idly while these issues continue to threaten the potential that Uprising has, which many of us saw at Fanfest. The reward for us sitting around parroting CCP's statements or whitewashing problems is a fundamentally worse product, and CCP gets no benefit for their investment by having us pretend everything is peachy.

With the "CPM SUX" abloobloo out of the way, we'll return to the subject at hand - there are indeed noticeable difference between the two builds, latency is clearly not the same as when it operated on private servers, and most of you are plenty familiar with the bug affecting KB/Mouse controls. On top of that, weapon and suit performance appears to be different as well. CCP was honest with attendees that the builds were not exactly the same, but we still deserved more information about what was changed and why.

None of these are insurmountable problems, and if enough effort is made to fix these issues in the immediate future, Uprising will still be a step forward for the game as a whole. What it does mean is that we need to get into the nuts and bolts of balancing with an unprecedented level of transparency, as Dust 514 deserves to be a hardcore FPS with rock solid core gunplay. I personally believe that having a stable, balanced core with excellent latency, hit detection, polished weapons, and logical suit bonuses with a satisfying pace of progression should be CCP's #1 priority. FW, PC, none of these exciting game modes will be fulfilling if the game is frustrating at its core.

The CPM's top priority at the moment is finding out what can be fixed between now and May 14, as well as correcting the communication patterns that have created the current forum culture and justifiable unrest. Be assured we will be doing as much as possible to ensure that we secure this dialogue surrounding core gameplay with the level of transparency that you deserve.

Just as those of us on the CSM successfully transformed the way that the we interacted with the development teams last year and secured our status as a stakeholder, I am confident the CPM will successfully change the way that CCP interacts with the community in the days ahead as well. In the meantime the naysaying bullshit will continue (as CSM7 endured all last year until everyone saw Retribution's subscriber numbers and the Odyssey feature list), but the claims that the CPM can't make a difference have already been torpedoed once, and I'm happy to dumpster them again and again as often as I'm given the opportunity.

Thank you all for your patience and hard work in the meantime. I welcome you to get into contact with us personally with your concerns and suggestions, you have created far too many threads for us to grace them all with our presence.