Posted by Rear Admiral Daniel Lerner (Personnel Director, EGO) in Discussion: Proposed changes to the new member application form (alt-RPGs)

Posted by Rear Admiral Daniel Lerner (Personnel Director, EGO) in Discussion: Proposed changes to the new member application form (alt-RPGs)

Posted by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) in Discussion: Proposed changes to the new member application form (alt-RPGs)
Posted by… suppressed (2) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Background

Pursuant to the FCOMM bylaw, a new member may be placed on an alt-RPG ship if two conditions are met:
(i) The ship’s alt-RPG charter allows new members to be placed on the ship, and
(ii) The new member specifically requests to be placed on that alt-RPG.

At the moment, the following alt-RPGs have charters that allow for them to receive new members:
-Chernov (Abramsverse) (NOTE: library version of the charter is out-of-date - see Dedul Edict #5
-Ogawa (medical-theme ship)

As an aside, the following alt-RPGs have charters that either do not allow new members or are silent on the issue (the bylaw requires express permission), but that may change in the future:
-Bonaventure (Enterprise-era ship)
-Constellation (Comedy-theme ship)
-Merrimack (TOS movie-era ship)
-Oed V (planet RPG area)

Originally, the new member application form only allowed for new members to pick from “Academy” and “Non-Academy” (or however we phrased it back then). After a Command discussion, Abramsverse was specifically added to the membership form. (Strangely enough, it took a number of years before the Chernov’s charter was actually amended to formalize the practice). Now, new members can request “Academy”, “TNG-era”, or “Abramsverse”.

Problem

There have been a few related problems to just allowing new members to pick to be placed on the Abramsverse with no further input or discussion. I’ll review those in the “Discussion” portion, but there are serious retention issues with that practice.

In addition, it’s not clear how the PDept is supposed to address the Ogawa, or what to do if the club ever changes the charters for our other alt-RPG ships.

All of the above calls for a change to the membership application form, including changes to what the club previously approved in a Command discussion.

Discussion

I’ll start with the retention numbers. I’ve pulled some numbers from my reports over the past 12 months. These are very, very rough numbers, based on small sample sizes, and doesn’t address the “weirdness” (as I’ll call it) from late 2018 and early 2019. Putting that aside, here are the numbers.

Within approximately one month of a new member being placed, the Academy has a retention rate of 40%, the main fleet ships have a retention rate of 51%, and the Chernov has a retention rate of 14%. I am only counting members who posted and were not AWOL at the time their status was checked (rostered or otherwise). Even with those rough numbers, the problem appears right at the start.

(You may be asking why non-Academy appears to be doing better than the Academy. That’s because (a) the statistic includes returning members who ask the PDept to place them, and (b) the Academy gets so many more placements than the main fleet that they also get an increase of people who just aren’t interested after applying.)

The numbers get even worse when you fast-forward a month. While both the Academy and main fleet go down a bit (30% for the Academy, 42% for the main fleet), the Chernov goes down to zero percent!! In the last twelve months, we have not retained a single member on that ship to the two-month mark!

By the third month, the numbers go down a bit more for the Academy (20% and stabilize outside the Academy (42%). But the Chernov never recovers.

I believe there are a few factors giving rise to this:

(1) When a new member is requests an Abramsverse ship, we are limited to a single ship. Problems on that single ship directly impacts a new member able/willing to stick around.

(2) Alt-RPGs are hard to administer properly at the best of time, and often required experienced members in many of the leadership roles. Ensuring the alt-RPG theme is kept, filling vacancies from members who may not be interested in the theme, etc., all contribute to the difficulties an alt-RPG has. Trying to add mentorship for a new member who may be a complete newbie to role-playing is a difficult task to throw on top of that work.

(3) It takes a certain amount of experience level to role-play in an alt-RPG of what is already a somewhat unique role-playing club. You can’t look to other ships for as much guidance. Members on Discord may not be as familiar. The descriptions we have about departments, positions, are different because of what is contained in a unique ship charter.

Proposal

The Personnel Department is proposing a few changes to the membership form.

The big change is to remove “Abramsverse” from the list of options for new members.

To make up for that change - and to allow members to also pick other alt-RPGs if available for new members - we would add text at the end of the application that states “Star-fleet.com also allows players to role-play in alternative role-playing ships that offer different themes (such as a specialized medical ship) or a different time period (such as the Abramsverse movies). If you are interested in having your first character placed on an “alt-RPG” ship, please let us know in the comments area and one of our staff members will discuss it with you shortly.”

In addition, we also propose to add a new drop down menu that will ask the applicants to state their RP experience (novice, limited experience, experience but not with our style, experience in multiple styles) which will assist our discussion with them. This information may also assist with other initiatives in the future.

The Personnel Department hopes to make the changes shortly so we can start addressing the retention issue for Abramsverse requests. We hope to make the change by the end of the November, so we would like to close this discussion before then.

Thanks,
Daniel Lerner
Personnel Director

Given the current condition of the Chernov, I think this would be a good move. If it were to improve I might feel differently.

Adam W.

Well, that’s an interesting topic in itself, the idea of a “current condition” of the Chernov.

The theory behind allowing people to join the Chernov originally was that it was important to have people join our only Abramsverse ship because Abramsverse movies were still being made and it was felt that it was important to give new people coming to the club because of those movies a choice of having that experience. I don’t know that I was ever personally convinced that was ever going to be a large number of people, but it made some sense at the time.

If the Chernov is in unusually bad shape compared to the rest of the club, yet we do not think that this is some inherent feature of being the Abramsverse ship, as Adam’s comment implies it isn’t (whether or not that implication was intended) then… why don’t we just fix whatever the problem is with the Chernov? I mean… it seems like there might be a larger problem here than whatever the choice is on a form, and I don’t know of a compelling argument to close off this particular choice for new people if we’re only talking about a problematic period of “late 2018 to early 2019” where retention has been bad when this option for it to take new members has existed since 2013.

Why is the Chernov retention rate so uniquely bad? Has it always been this bad and nobody noticed? Does the strategy in 2013 still make sense today (assuming it made sense originally, which… ehh)? These are questions I’d want to know the answers to before we decide to do anything here, and definitely before we start adding qualifiers like “current condition” as the justification for doing it.

Joe

While the current retention rates are probably what triggered us to look into the issue, the PDept is not basing this proposal just on the current retention issue.

The stats I cited are from the last 12 months just because they are easy to pull up. By memory alone, I don’t think the problem began only 12 months ago. I don’t know any member in the club who started on an alt-RPG ship.

We want to be able to deal with alt-RPG ship placement requests(not just the Chernov) on request-by-request basis. This gives us more freedom to see if the new member’s request makes sense in all of the circumstances, keeping in mind the limited info/experience they have with STF.

I seriously doubt Abramsverse is so popular that we need to keep it expressly stared on the application form. The fact that not a single person we placed there has stayed in the club for any reasonable period of time is arguably objective support of that.

Daniel

(Not sure why there was a double post before - sorry.)

I should correct my statement. I know one new member placed on an alt-RPG - not the Chernov - who stayed in STF. He made a very specific request in his application for a very specific reason, and the PDept considered it before agreeing that it would work out. That’s what we want to replicate for all alt-RPG ships that are allowed to receive new members.

The Chernov’s current health is irrelevant. Back when I was the ship’s FComm, the Chernov was one of the largest and most active ships in STF. I gave the ship’s CO a cabinet-level commendation for how well the Chernov was being run. Still couldn’t hold onto a single new member who picked the Chernov simply because it was on a drop-down menu on the application.

We made the change to the application form back in 2013 I am told. Well, I think the six-year experiment is over, with a clear conclusion. It isn’t working. Let’s try something else.

Daniel

I’ll take a crack at answering if the Chernov’s retention rate has always been uniquely bad.

I looked at placement data from July 29, 2016 to August 23, 2018, which is the time period of data that happens to be easiest for me to look at. I omitted any returning members. In that time period, 16 new members were placed on the Chernov. Only one of those is currently listed on the master roster (Trinity). So that’s a 6.3% retention rate from that time period to present. By comparison, 37* new members were placed on other main fleet ships. Of those, three (Melissa Aragon, Sean Bigbee, and Sara Rastellini) are currently found on the master roster, or 8.1%. So I wouldn’t say that the Chernov has always been uniquely bad with retention based on that data.

If we’re going to continue with a system that places a very high percentage of new members on this ship, it’s very important to make sure it is well-suited for that.

*Actually it was 38, but the last one I don’t know the name of.

Adam W.