A Game Committee voted by Players

The Politics of Creative Ownership: EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management brought up an interesting idea, by having a group of voted dedicated players help steer the directions of the game, highlighting the features requested by the community.

Source: Gamespot

Though it might sounds like a good idea, but isn’t that what real life politics should do for us as well? We vote for our preferred candidates, and he or she is supposed to look after our rights and benefits at the central government; sadly we are disappointed most of the time as it doesn’t really work as intended due to several “political” reasons.

Summary about Council of Stellar Management:

• Why not just use a forum? Poor signal-to-noise ratio.
• Election is held to select committee (with 10-14% voting rate)
• Being a committee can be a full time job without pay; spending few hours answering request does eat into the gameplay (should we offer small allowance for our committee for their community work?)
• Eventually the committee is given more “power”; by allowing them to sit in company’s voting in allocating certain resources to certain teams or certain features.
• Like any politics, there shall be “corruptions”

Like in real life politics, the committee sounds promising yet it seems little progress is made (some progress in solving the lag problem). The EVE seems to be released in 2003 (8 years), and it seems to be the most popular space-themed RPG; yet it is not that “interesting”. My brother tried it before (I didn’t), but the games seems "slow" (with limited queued slots up to weeks) and seems to focus on mining rather than actual battle. Again, I am ill-informed regarding this matter.

I wonder how World of Warcraft handles their requirement gathering for expansion pack.