Posted by Fleet Captain Adam W. (EGO) in Proposal: New way of measuring and displaying a ship’s speed

Posted by Sarah Hemenway (Vice President) in Proposal: New way of measuring and displaying a ship’s speed

Posted by Fleet Captain Adam W. (EGO) in Proposal: New way of measuring and displaying a ship’s speed
Posted by… suppressed (3) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Problem

Currently, we track a ship’s speed based on it’s official speed, as set out in the FCOMM bylaw or an alt-RPG ship’s charter. This information is displayed in a ship’s profile, and is currently (and historically) used to determine placement policies and for current members to identify an additional ship to join.

The problem is that the official ship’s speed has nothing to do with how frequently or infrequently players post on a ship. They are the minimum posting requirements for each player on a ship, which says very little about how many posts a person has to read through each time they check their ship.

For example, imagine an officially slow-posting ship with a huge roster. Officially, a junior officer does not have to post except once every 10 days. But if there’s a massive number of people posting - and if some of those people feel like posting frequently - when that JO check in 10 days later, they are swamped with unread posts. Now that may be attractive for some players on a slow ship, but not all.

Another example is a person who joins a fast ship because they want a fast-moving sim with less wait time, which they have the time to log in frequently enough for. If there are very few people on the ship’s roster, with JOs posting once every five days, the sim can still move along the same pace as a regular ship’s sim.

Basically, we’re using the wrong information (or incomplete information) to determine the posting frequency of the ships, which is therefore adversely affecting various initiatives and policies in the club.

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).

Discussion

I think it would be useful if TECH can advise if this is do-able, and what downsides there might be from the technical side of things.

Beyond that, I don’t see really any cons with this proposal, but I’m sure they will be pointed out… :P

-Daniel Lerner

I’m going to avoid commenting on the technical feasibility of this for the moment, other than to say that it is possible to calculate the required value. The intent would have to be explained in greater detail for me to provide useful commentary about the effort required and feasibility beyond that simple statement from a technical point of view. So I’m going to say no more about that for now.

What I’m confused by, is who is this statistic supposed help?

The biggest group that this statistic helps is the Personnel Department. I’ve seen “regular” speed ships (e.g. ones with a 3/5/7 posting requirement) vary from 100 posts a month to 600 posts a month during my time in STF (and that’s without a particularly high number of AWOLs or LOAs or what have you). Having both pieces of information for each ship allows the PDept to better match new members to ships.

I mean, I understand someone could want to join a ship and find it’s not running at the speed advertised by the formal speed. But… I don’t see how providing this number is going to help make that decision, especially if it’s a number that changes based on the past 28 days (Why 28? Why not 30?). You’d have to have some intuitive sense on how this statistic translates into your roleplaying experience, which I think is extremely unnatural at best. I don’t think real people would decide what kind of ships they want to join this way; people who count posts are typically doing it for administrative reasons.

Dan is proposing an average weekly post count calculated from the last four weeks. Four weeks * seven days per week = 28 days.

I mean… I don’t like ships that are too “busy” with too many players or certain kinds of threads that I find to be repetitively tedious and boring. Looking at the weekly posting frequency isn’t going to tell me if:

• Most of the posts are a “party” side sim in the lounge, where everyone is posting that they’re present at the party but nothing is really happening (I hate these threads a lot)
• There are a lot of posts of two characters doing something in private that I can’t or don’t want to join
• If people are playing in the sim or are just doing their own thing all the time

I avoid these sorts of things by reading the ship before joining it. Shouldn’t people generally be reading ships before joining them? Can’t the problem described just be avoided just by reading a ship for a week before you join it? Or reading back a month or two of posts before deciding to join it? That’s going to tell you a lot more than whatever this number is.

New members aren’t back reading ships before making their selection; they’re being assigned by the PDept. I fully agree with all of these as valid reasons why purely quantitative metrics are a poor judge of ship health.

Also you cite an example that hits close to home for me:

Another example is a person who joins a fast ship because they want a fast-moving sim with less wait time, which they have the time to log in frequently enough for. If there are very few people on the ship’s roster, with JOs posting once every five days, the sim can still move along the same pace as a regular ship’s sim.

This could describe the Europa, where I’m the CO. I’m unhappy on Europa at the moment because, for reasons we don’t need to discuss in detail here, it runs slower than it is supposed to (the limit for JOs is 4 days after all, not 5), and slower than I would like. Part of how I would like to fix that is by attracting players who are willing to play at a faster speed than it is currently running. If we start crafting policies to try to pair people up according to what the posting rate of the last 28 days were, then I think that would sabotage my efforts to do that, since these policies that you’re hinting would be based on this measure would effectively be trying to encourage people who are slow or average to join the ship that’s supposed to be fast. I really, really don’t like the idea of that, and I’ve already had to struggle against this problem on and off over the years when prospective GMs try to join the ship but say they’d like to go slower than the stated speed. Trying to formalize this with this counter and encourage every player who would join my ship to go slower would be even more frustrating.

So, I really don’t like this idea. Even though it could help some people, I think it will hurt others. I in particular would feel unusually undermined in a way that no rule here has ever really done before. And if the point of this is to support some other, future policy that isn’t defined, I think it would be better if we skip straight to debating whatever that policy is rather than taking about some specific metric that you think we ought to use for that policy.

Joe

I’m concerned that you feel like this would undermine you personally to that extent and I’d like to hear more about that either here or privately. I’m leaving a lot of your post for Dan to respond to since he can better speak to his proposal, but in my mind, this is a simple, easy piece of data that would (1) help the PDept better match up new members to ships and (2) let existing members easily see if a particularly high activity level one week is “normal” for the ship or not. In the case of your ship, I don’t see how this would necessarily match up a slower or average poster that would detract from your desired AWOL policy; they would still be subject to the minimum posting requirement. The posting requirement gives us this minimum requirement (e.g. each junior officer will post at least once a week or once every four days or whatever), but we have no information about an average or a maximum, which are both relevant and useful pieces of information (how relevant and useful likely depends on how much they diverge from the minimum). I’m sure we could construct a much more involved metric to figure that out and maybe that’s either part of this discussion or a future one, but I like the simplicity of what Dan is proposing here.

Sarah

The primary purpose of this proposal is to create a tool to influence how the Personnel Department places new members. The Personnel Department’s current placement policy does not permit such a tool to be used to influence how the Personnel Department places new members.

I am opposed this proposal as its primary purpose is encourage the Personnel Department to ignore their own policy.

Adam W.

I’m a little confused on how any forward progress could be made on PDept policy, then, Adam. It sounds like you disagree with this proposal because the PDept would use the information to change how it places new members against the current placement policy. The natural corollary is that the placement policy change should come first, then, but that’s impossible without the information tool in place. How do you resolve this? Do you have any other feedback about this proposal?

Sarah

Actually I don’t believe it’s impossible to change the placement policy without this tool. If analyzing placement policy is what we’re trying to do, I think using a metric that didn’t continuously change would be more helpful. Like how many posts were on a ship in a given month, for example. That would give us history to look at instead of being limited to a current snapshot.

Adam

I’ll just say:

(a) This proposal is meant to accomplish a few things at once, not just data collection and review. I know as a current member that I would find this stat on the ship profiles very helpful when deciding on my next ship, and I’ve heard the same from others. So showing the current busyness of a ship, averaged over the last month or so would be more helpful than one that isn’t updated that often.

(b) Have you seen my PDept reports? :P If there’s one thing the PDept is good at is taking real-time numbers and collecting them into something meaningful. It won’t be a problem for us to see how many ships at the time of a placement match an applicant’s requested busyness level (I’m going to come up with a different word than “busyness”), even if we’re only using that at the last step of the process under the current policies. Plus, we need to to watch in real-time for a bit how these numbers actually work if we’re going to actually given any meaning to a given numerical value.

Daniel