Posted by Steve Johnson (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 Fleet Captain Adam W. (EGO) in Proposal: New way of measuring and displaying a ship’s speed
Posted by… suppressed (2) 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

So the discussion on this issue has gotten all over the place, so let’s bring it back, and see if we can come up with a solution to this problem. I do believe that there is an issue with our current 3 tier system. With most of the ships falling into the medium paced category, there is not an easy way for new people to look at a ship and get a feel for how many posts happen in a given time period, without putting in a large amount of hours to read back through a ships previous posts.

Clicking the read notes button on an MOTD and looking at how many posts there are over a week or over a month is a pretty easy way to assess this quickly. Is this too time consuming for those failing into the category of “new people?”

But what about if we went and looked at the last 30 days of any ship in STF right now? They would all be showing less posts, because of the holidays. Does that accurately reflect the ships normal posting? I know Dan originally proposed 28 days, but there was discussion on extending it out to the last 60 or even 90 days. You can’t easily look at the last 2 or 3 months worth of posts as it stands today, and get a good snapshot of how many times people are posting.

That’s also untrue. It took me twelve seconds total from the Command MOTD to click read notes, search for posts in the last three months, and do a “find” search on the page that informed me there had been 226 posts in Command in that time frame. It is easy if people know how to do it, though it could be easier to display a stat if the resources used to do so are worth the benefit gained. It’s difficult for me to tell what we would gain and which of those timeframes you mentioned would be the most useful because this discussion keeps varying as to what problem it is that we are trying to solve.

I think there are actually 2 problems here that need to be addressed.
Problem 1 - Our current 3 tiered system is based around minimum posting speeds for the ship, with a large majority of the ships in the middle category
Problem 2 - The posting speed is up to the CO/FComm’s discretion

I think Problem 2 is potentially the harder one to solve, especially based upon the discussion so far. But also has the most potential to be beneficial. We’ve been on this new platform for over a year now, so we do have some decent data. Yes, there are always going to be swings in the number of posts per month, with LOA’s and holidays, but a rolling average would help to even that out.

My thought is what if we take an additional step to help even out those highs and lows, and divide the medium posting speed into 3 additional brackets. So based upon a rolling average of posts, a ship could be classified as a “Medium-Fast” ship, “Medium” ship, or a “Medium-Slow” ship. It doesn’t change the minimum posting limits, but would give us a better idea of how much interaction is happening on the ship. It also takes out the pure number of posts as a means of measurement.

Steve

Are these problems actually problems? Why?

Adam W.

Also I think we would be served to follow the proposal format and address this question: Why is this problem important to address?

Adam W.

It is important to address because we are already not being consistent with our policies regarding posting speed in STF. And we haven’t for a very long time.

Right from the beginning, on the new member application form, which has been carried over from the last several systems, we are not asking new members what is the bare minimum they are willing to post. We ask them how often are they going to be logging in, and looking at their ships. And not only that, we have it divided up into 5 different categories. Maybe I’m wrong, but if I’m checking in and see that there is something new for me to respond to, I’m going to be more excited. But if things have not progressed, I’ll forget about it, and maybe come back to it the next time. And if this continues, I’d probably stop checking in, because nothing ever changes. So why waste my time.

By having an idea of how often a ship is actually posting per day, per week, per however you wanna divide it up, it will help the PDept place new members more accurately to their indicated activity rate, and help to keep them interested in our group.

And if we place this information on the ship profiles, it would allow current members a way to quickly look at a bunch of ships and give them a place to start when looking for a new ship to join. Should they base it off of just that posting speed number, no. I would still highly recommend that they go read the ships to see if they will like the environment. But it gives them a quick glance method to see if there is one that would fit into their posting schedule, and narrow it down from having to read every ship, to only having to read a couple.

Steve

Okay, so you’re talking about multiple things we’d try to improve. There’s a tool for Personnel Department placement and information for current members to assess ships. I got out of the discussion earlier that the primary purpose was to address neither of these, but rather gather data for the Personnel Department so that they can determine how to adjust their policies. I’m in favor of picking one primary issue to focus on before continuing this discussion.

Adam W.