Crowd Control Productions (CCP), the company behind the MMO EVE Online, has responded to concerns raised by players of their game and the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), the player-elected representative board which recently completed a summit in Iceland.

After the most recent CSM summit, many players have expressed concerns that CCP has devoted significant resources to ongoing development projects, including major expansions to EVE Online and related projects, while not giving enough attention to problems with the current state of the game.

After the minutes of the June CSM meetings were published, a significant number of players complained that too much attention was going into new content and features while existing problems were being neglected. Some have even gone so far as to call for the CSM to be disbanded.

Arnar Gylfason aka "CCP Zulu", the Senior Producer of EVE Online posted a blog entry to the EVE Online official blog in which he lays out the CCP development plan for EVE Online through 2011, in significant detail, including details of the ongoing development of "Incarna", an expansion which will allow players to get out of their starships and interact with one another and "DUST 514", a first persn shooter, which will be linked to EVE Online, allowing events from one game to affect events in the other.

Gylfason directly responds to player concerns, saying "We have seen a number of players talking about us moving from new feature development... we‘ll certainly focus more than ever before on iterating and polishing up all the features..."

He goes on to address the CSM issues raised, saying "I have to say I‘m quite taken aback...I felt the discussions were very constructive and I had great dialogue with the council members" and promises to work on improving communication with the CSM.

CCP has had a history of sometimes-rocky relationships with their customers. The CSM itself was formed in the aftermath of another major shakeup with CCP's management of EVE Online and in fact recently experienced another scandal with the removal of a CSM member for breach of a non-disclosure agreement.

It remains to be seen whether the experiment with the first player-elected group to be an official stakeholder in a game developer's development process will be a long term sucess or not.