Posted by Rear Admiral Sarah Hemenway (Second Assistant Personnel Director) in Discussion Topic: Smaller Ships vs. Larger Ships

Posted by Thomas B in Discussion Topic: Smaller Ships vs. Larger Ships

Posted by Adam W. in Discussion Topic: Smaller Ships vs. Larger Ships
Posted by… suppressed (5) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Discussion Topic: Smaller Ships vs. Larger Ships

As you can see from the tie-breakers, small ships will generally have more likelihood in receiving a new member over a larger ship. (As an aside, a recent criticism I’ve received is that the PDept favours larger ships over smaller ships, but I really don’t see how the procedures allow for that.)

There’s certainly some pros vs. cons about this.

The criticisms that have come up are:

(1) Often larger ships are the healthier ships. While I’m not convinced this is the general case, there’s certainly something to be said that some smaller ships are small because they have more retention problems then other ships. I can say that there are some small ships we give new members to over and over again, with lots of turnover.

(2) Larger ships expose the new member to more posts, more members, and more RPG-ing.

So is there a right answer to this question? I don’t think we should remove the full department rule. But the first tie-breaker is fewest JOs in the department, and the third tie-breaker is fewest crew members all together. Is that the right balance?

Again, I would like to hear what others think before we think about changing this.

Daniel Lerner
Personnel Director

I don’t see a need for a change on this one.

Adam W.

Same.

Same

One point. You said this:

I can say that there are some small ships we give new members to over and over again, with lots of turnover.

If that’s happening, that should be taken as a problem with that particular ship, not with small ships in general. That shouldn’t allowed to reoccur.

Joe

Not everyone wants to be on a large ship. I find larger ships to be overwhelming in terms of posts and potential things to reply to.

As Joe says, the issue with turnover on particular ship/s is an issue with that particular ship, not ships with small crew sizes. Discussion with FComms/AFComms and/or CO/XO in question may be needed.

Russell

It is likely difficult to track, but I agree that the success of placements on a ship should be noted. There’s a certain point where we have to balance being fair with giving new members the greatest chance of actually sticking around.

Sarah, VP/2APDir

I disagree. Are there any ships that have a good rate of retaining new placements? I suspect no ships have a good rate of retaining new placements because people who join usually either don’t post or don’t last long. Instead, I think we should note any ship that seems to be good at retaining new placements and figure out why that is.

Adam W.

I’m not sure with what you disagree since you said something similar to what I did. Can you explain so that I can make sure we’re on the same page as to what I meant?

On a practical level, the mechanism for tracking this is roughly the same and shouldn’t be that intensive. PDept would need to keep track of who joined, when they joined, where they were assigned, and schedule a check-in x days + x weeks in the future. A good schedule would be 7 days, 14 days, 28 days, and possibly 56 days. This could be as simple as a quick Master Roster check or as detailed as checking in with COs/the person themselves.

It would be important to track the reasons for turnover, regardless if you’re specifically looking for “positive outcomes and why they happen” or “negative outcomes and why they happen.” Personally, I think since you’re gathering data for both anyway, it is incomplete to look at either of these without also looking at the other. Based on the number of new applicants I see reported in PDept Reports these days, I don’t think this would be intensive. Essentially it’s a end-of-the-week check of anyone who shows up on an Excel sheet with good conditional formatting.

I was thinking about this further this morning and I came to the same conclusion. This isn’t actually that difficult with information we already collect in the spreadsheet (activity level at the one month, two month, and three month marks as well as the ship assignment).

On Small v Large ships… Ship size is not a good indicator of ship health. In my view, very few things on their own are actually reflective of ship health and assessing this really needs to come from looking at a few different factors in context. Ultimately I think ship size is something for the player to identify their preference on. It makes sense to be mindful of the ship’s capacity to train. In some cases, it is possible to be too small to offer good training (whether through lack of crew, which PDept filters should catch, or crew inexperience), and it is also possible to be too large to offer good training (too many people to keep track of on the crew, or an imbalance in time in the club/RP knowledge). So long as the ship’s capacity to train is the true tiebreaker, that is better. It requires a more mindful assessment than just looking at flat out population size, but will promote better outcomes

Thanks,

-Thomas

I agree with this. I’ve never been able to come up with a great metric for ship health, to be honest, because there are so many factors that play into it and, at a certain point, it’s a gut feeling from sheer experience in STF. I’m curious if we could come up with some sort of objective measurement here, as I know that the goal of the PDept placement policies has historically been to remove any subjectivity from the process.

Sarah

This is something that I have to think about a lot for my job - how to assess systems that may not have all that many super easy ways to say “this is definitely working well” or not. Data over time tends to be the best starting place. You could, for example, start utilizing data that we already have in better ways.

It’d be interesting to me if the site could track when a character joined the ship. If a ship has a consistent CO/XO/GM for a certain period of time, that lends itself to a certain degree of stability. Same for DHs to a potentially lesser extent. Similarly, you could look at the ship AWOL limits on the master roster and take the total number of people AWOL/the total # of ship crew. This % would negatively impact smaller ships, so it would be useless on its own. But… what you could do is have the % be used in a point-based system of ship health that changes depending on ship size (ex: ship size 10-15 [0-15% AWOL = 5 points; 16-25% AWOL = 3 points; 26-45% AWOL = 1 point; >46% AWOL = 0 points] and adjust for sizes - I’m not suggesting these numbers just giving an example).

Metrics I would consider using are longevity of senior staff (perhaps separately), longevity of department heads, turnover rate in the last x (6 or 12, for example) months (# new crew left/# total new crew last x months), AWOL rate, average time between when a position opens versus when its filled (no idea how you’d calculate that or if it would be truly reflective - but to an extent it might demonstrate senior staff engagement). You could think of a lot of different variables. You’d want to make sure that they either don’t adversely affect small/large ships, or that they are properly weighted in use to negate potential bias.

This is how project performance tends to be monitored on projects I work in. You have point values associated with metrics that add up to a total. You then judge that total number as reflective of some objective “health” or other quality. It would be a rather intensive way to track the health of an online roleplaying game, but you could do it - after deciding what reflects health, it’s only about setting up the math. I would anticipate, however, that some COs would not enjoy the idea of a maths formula saying whether their ship was healthy or not.

I’ve been developing monitoring forms and policies this week so this sort of thing is somewhat in my head.

-Thomas