Posted by Vice Admiral Daniel Lerner (Personnel Director, EGO) in Proposal: New way of measuring and displaying a ship’s speed
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Proposal

I am proposing we change the Ship Profiles to create two fields, instead of just the current single field we use for ship speeds.

The first field is minimum posting requirement, which is still slow, medium or fast, as set out in the FCOMM bylaw. That’s would be what we currently call ship speeds at the moment. That field is fixed, as this can only be changed with the Fleet Commander’s consent, as per the bylaw.

The second field is weekly posting frequency, which is an automatically-generated field that counts the total number of posts on that ship for the past 28 days, and divides it by four. Therefore, you know over the past four weeks how many posts per week this ship generated on average, which tells you how busy the ship is. Some members would be looking for a high value, while other members may be more comfortable with a low value.

This additional information can help inform members when looking for a new ship, and help us in updating placement policies for new members (as we will be tackling the application form and placement policies later this term).

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-Daniel Lerner

Wow! For something that I thought would not be that controversial, this sure generated a lot of discussion…

Rather than doing a ton of different reply posts, I thought I would do my best to try to address various points in a single post. I’ve done my best to identify and respond to as many points as possible, but if I missed something, then I apologize in advance as ask that you let me know.

Why is this being proposed again?

We think it is beneficial to have an objective measure and display of how “busy” ships. Different members and prospective members want and have different experiences in STF, and knowing how busy a ship is before being placed in will help people find the ship that is best suited for them. This is different from posting requirements and how quickly a person is declared AWOL, as I will explain in the next paragraph.

I will use my own STF experience. Over 12 years ago, I had lot of time for the club. I was actively gaming in my spare time, trying to find new ways to let out my creative interests, etc. I was that member that was happy on five or six different ship, reading lots of side-sims and character development threads from other players, and trying to engage with as much as could on each ship. I was also a busy law student. I wasn’t going to be posted every day, or every other day, etc. In fact, when projects happened, I could be away for at least a week. But every time I posted, I loved to spend my time readings and replying to as much as possible.

My current situation and interests have changed drastically in the intervening time. I can probably get online quite quickly these days (which I do for a lot of my STF administrative responsibilities). However, because of my RL career, when I do go online to role-play, my time and energy is limited, and I tend to want to focus on the main sim, and maybe a side-sim or two. I want to be limited to just one or two ships, and know that I won’t have to read through a huge amount each time I log in.

Both of the above are valid experiences for STFers. But it has very little to do with the minimum posting speed of the ship I am or was on.

Right now, I can see this assisting in a few ways:
1) Current members who are looking for a new ship (for whatever reason)
2) Academy graduate placements (I know when I was involved in that process, I tried to estimate how busy a potential ship was to match it to the cadet’s experiences while in the Academy)
3) PDept placement of new members (as explained more in this post, for now it would probably just be used as an additional tie-breaker; when the policies get reviewed later this term, it may play more of a role - we do want to ask the question on the membership form along the lines of “Do you want to read a small amount or a large amount of posts when you log in, or does it not matter?”)

In addition, there may be future plans that I cannot predict where knowing how busy a ship is may be of assistance.

How will this be used to measure ship’s health? Will this unfairly cause Ship A to be compared to Ship B??

The main reason for this proposal was not as ship health measure. As mentioned above, both a very busy ship and a very quiet ship have equal value to the club, as there are different members looking for different experiences. For ship health purposes, there shouldn’t be a comparison between ships.

Up to each CO and FComm, but comparing how a single ship’s measure is changing may help identify developing trends on a ship that can be looked at and addressed - many COs and FComms try this already in an informal way. However, as with all metrics, no single one can be used to identify ship health issues.

Will slow posters be placed on a fast ship and fast posters be placed on a slow ship?

No.

A ship’s speed - how frequent it’s players are expected to post for threads and sims to move along - is absolute. A fast ship is a fast ship for a reason. A slow ship is a slow ship for a reason. A player should only be joining those ships if they expect to post that fast or that slow.

This is to measure how busy an individual ship is - that is, how many posts need to read every time you log in. I may be someone who can post ever 3-4 days (or more) but each time I log in, I don’t want to read too much. Or I may be someone that can only post once every 6-9 days, but I love to read a huge amount each time I do log in. This provides that additional information.

How will this work with current PDept policies?

The current polices state the following:
-If someone says they will post infrequently, they are placed on ship that specifically allows for that infrequency; otherwise they will be contacted and probably placed on a slow ship
-If someone says they will post slowly, they are placed on a slow or medium ship, with preference to the slow ship
-If someone says the will post average or regularly, they are placed on any available ship, with preference to a medium ship
-If someone says they will post frequently, they are placed on a medium or fast ship, with preference to a fast ship

(Why don’t we just have a strict policy of slow-to-slow, medium-to-medium and fast-to-fast? Because due to a number of factors we may not have an available ship at the requested speed.)

A number of other factors go into to determining what ships are available, as set out in the polices. Often, at the end of that exercise, there are still multiple ships available (what we internally call “ties”). We then have a lit of increasing “tie-breaking rules” until either we are down to a single ship or we flip a coin or apply some of our own common sense. (If a ship has to be passed over due to bad health, that can only be done by the PDir, and a number of things flow from that decision.)

For a number of reasons I’m not going to get into here, it is not unusual to get to the “flip a coin” these days, at least on main fleet ships. If we are going with our common sense, and we were asking the new member how many posts they want to read every time they log in (a lot, a small amount, it doesn’t matter), we can take it into account at that stage.

In addition, as the current policies are becoming less and less relevant these days in STF (I think I formalized them sometime in 2007-2009, and they have never been updated since), we plan this term to do a public review and update on them. This new measure may take a higher role in the formal “tie-breakers” (or maybe even determining ship availability at the start, although that seems unlikely). Having an idea of the numbers - both what new members are saying on the application form, and how many ships fit in different categories, will certainly help with development of any revised policy later this term.

Should we measure posts per ship per roster member, instead of just posts per ship?

I don’t think so. Our goal is to measure how busy a ship is, which in part will most likely be affected by the number of players on that ship. I think we lose the point of doing this if we average by the number of players on the ship.

Not that that isn’t a useful metric for ship reports, and other things of following the trends and progress of a ship - I’m all about more data than less data. But I think that info will more be more useful for COs and FComms then prospective players on a ship.

What about OOC posts?

If the point of this is to determine how many posts a person may have to read every time they log in - with someone wanting a lot, some wanting little, and some not caring - then I think it’s okay that OOC posts are included. I don’t think we need to worry about developing a way to eliminate those from the count.

What about the holiday season and other fluctuations?

I had a few thoughts about that. First, if we’re using this metric to see how ships compare for how busy they are to find the best suited ship, one might think they every ship will be affected by the holiday season in the same way, so it doesn’t really matter. (Although, I will admit, there are probably a few assumptions built into that.)

We’re also averaging over four weeks. I’m not married to that figure. We could increase it to eight weeks of posts (so 56 days of posts, divided by 8), which averages it even more to reduce fluctuations. Of course, the longer period you are averaging over, the less reflective it becomes of what to expect when you join the ship now.

Why 28 days instead of 30 days?

Because I was envisioning number of posts per week, so we should be working with multiples of 7 days. 28 days if we go with the original proposal of averaging over 4 weeks. 56 days if we averaged over 8 weeks. And so on.

Can’t people just back-read a ship before joining?

New members can’t. Graduating cadets can’t. Less experienced members may not think of doing that. Other less experienced members may only look at the number of posts in the past week (the default when you pull up the ship’s threads), which may not give you a true sense of how busy the ship is. Also, we’re trying to make things easier for our members and increase retention - why force members to have to manually count the number of posts per week on a ship when we can just display it (or display a category, or whatever).

Anyway, I’ve probably missed some issue or comments, so just let me know.

Thanks,
Daniel

Thanks Daniel for taking the time to go through the post and compile your reply.

If I took out my earlier points I might still ask about resource allocation. How much effort would go into this and to maintain it vs the resources (people) we have to dedicate to it? I mean if the people who would do that already have a list of prioritized items to achieve (Like a Vision 2020 strat plan) and this is not planned in can they realistically do it? If they give themselves X amount of time per week to STF and they are already operating at 110% of that X amount is this doable? Are there other resources open to accomplish it? Just some business case questions but I’m not hating on the idea even if I cannot see the absolute value of it. I can see that it can have value in administrative areas such as PDept. As a CO I would look at it but not sure how specifically if were keeping the OOC stuff in. I do remember once getting a high post count rate one month and being congratulated on it but in reality we spent that month doing a lot of OOC discussions and in fact the ship was not as healthy as it seemed even though the assumption was the opposite.

Sidney