Posted by Lieutenant Commander Daggum Hammor (Chief Engineer) in OOC - The Future of Athena

Posted by Captain Orvos Legen (Commanding Officer) in OOC - The Future of Athena

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Liam Madison (Chief Science Officer) in OOC - The Future of Athena
Posted by… suppressed (3) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Good morning all!

This is going to be a bit of a harder post to deal with. I want to be honest with everyone. And Im hoping to not hurt anyone’s feelings in doing so. Please know that I am not trying to point fingers or attack anyone.

I have really been struggling lately. There isn’t a whole lot going on right now for Athena. Sage is on LOA due to some serious RL concerns. But I’m struggling to to see the future on Athena. If I’m going to be totally honest, I could see the ship at some point being decommissioned.

Now, I want to be forthright here. I acknowledge that my current thoughts are influenced by my feelings. I struggle doing things a certain way for so long in order to see very little progress made. That’s on me.

I’ve had some private discussions with some of you. Please feel free to share what you wish here.

But what I need from everyone is to know your level of commitment.

How invested are you? Do we want to be here? Or is this all out of obligation? How important is this ship to you?

I need to know your thoughts everyone. Be honest! And be bold if choose to. I need your genuine feedback about all this. I don’t want to rush into entertaining these thoughts if I have my understanding wrong. Help me out. Tell me how you all feel.

I appreciate all feedback, positive and negative. We can work together, but I need to hear back.

Thank you in advance for answering these questions.

-Tony

I can only speak for myself but I do want to be here. The Athena is near and dear to her heart and not just because I was the CO for over 10 years. The characters I’ve written here are among my favourite. But as someone with ADHD, it’s really hard to maintain motivation to keep up the storylines when threads lose momentum so often or for long durations. It takes me time and effort to get back into my character’s heads. And I have been lacking bandwidth to do that repeatedly for awhile now..

Everyone is dealing with stuff offline and especially these days, it can be a lot. There’s no question that that will always be a priority. We all have reasons we’re not able to be present at times. But is hard to keep a ship going when the majority of a crew are all dealing with other stuff at the same time. It’s more than just a slow period too. Usually these things are cyclical but it had felt less like this might pass (but of course I could be wrong), but I understand where Tony is coming from. The Athena has been fighting to keep going for awhile. And that is draining.

I want to be here if everyone else can be. But everyone has their own variables to deal with and at the end of the day we have to figure out for each of ourselves what we realistically can and can’t give to this ship.

~Linds

I know exactly what you’re feeling, Tony. I’ve been having pretty much the same problem with the Saracen. We were on the bubble, finally got a new GM, started a new sim that everybody was involved in. Then, GM had some health issues, which I pray (mostly for her, but the club as well) are getting better!!

As for your question, I just joined the Athena (which was one of the first ships I RP’ed on when I first joined the club), but I would like to stick around and make this work if at all possible!!

Lt. Cmdr. Harrison Callahan
COO-USS Athena

Due to RL, little late getting to this and discovering I have ADHD recently. Between struggling to get meds approved, forgetfulness, and more, it is not easy for me to keep up with this ship. It takes a lot out of me as I try to balance everything. It’s also why my responses take ages to get done.

However, I want to be here. I want to see this ship thrive and grow especially since now it’s my own ship. It’s been fun to write here and let my creative freak flag fly.

Until my RL issues are solved, I can’t fully give a clear picture of how well or much I can give this ship energy wise. However, I want to try my best and that’s all I can promise. Apologies to anyone I’ve kept waiting or forgotten.

-Janice B.

Thank you Linds, Terry, and Janice for your replies! I know that it can be hard to share such things, but I find it vital to my own understanding of where everyone is at. Thank you!

I know we still have the rest of the crew to share. Even if you’ve chatted with me in DMs about this, please let me know your thoughts here. Having our thoughts here in the open can be a real asset for all of us. So for those who haven’t yet replied, I do really want your input.

-Tony

Let me first start by echoing the previous comments: it’s been hard to keep going on here, but the characters on this ship are some of my favorite in the entire club. And not just mine. I love reading everybody’s posts, however feeling far between they may be at times. And that isn’t a criticism; that is an acknowledgment of my failure to be as present as I should be on the ship.

I would like to see the Athena succeed. I would like to be a part of that success. I don’t know what that is going to take from all of us, though. That isn’t me saying we shouldn’t try, but it’s an acknowledgment of where we are not just on the ship, but in the club as a whole. We desperately need new people. We need new writers to bring that spark of energy and excitement that comes with the influx of new characters new writers and just new people to talk to and get to know. I think the issues that we have here are symptom of that, and I would like to believe that as a crew we can overcome that in this small portion of the club. Basically, this is a very verbose way of saying I’m in if everybody else is!

James

Hammor, CE

In my mind Athena is and always has been the flagship of the fleet. For the Pioneer fleet, she fields the best and the brightest. And that’s both in character and out of character. My intent, my desire for this ship is always to be some of the best writers in the club. That’s quality skill. Lower knowledge. People that are passionate about. The setting. Ethos. The mythos. But that also includes taking initiative. Building. Not just passively consuming, not just sitting on the sidelines.

One of the precepts. Of this club that I think people have gotten away from is the fact that anyone can run aside Sim. And they don’t have to be department related. And they don’t have to be just social threads. So, you know, not just hang out in a lounge, not just hanging out in the holodeck. But I feel like. The structure of the club. Gets people into this narrow set of ideas for stories. When I first came here, there were all kinds of different people doing different things. For instance, on outpost 42, you might have an entire group that weren’t even on the station doing a thing. Long term away missions. Spy missions. Espionage. Umm longer vacation threads where people got into things. Trips to Risa. And I don’t see that as much anymore. And this disappointing and disheartening with the quality of writers we have on the ship. I think there’s been a lot of. Passive wait and see and see what kind of content other people serve up. Instead of. Taking action and doing something that you. You want to do or initiate something you want to do. There’s no need to ask a GM or commanding officer for permission if you want to do something cool unless you know it might affect the ship as a whole.

And I’m not saying this to point fingers. I’m genuinely not, because I’m guilty of it too. And I feel like some of the most recent outings in Trek have given us a lot more room in leeway to do things. Seasons of Picard smooth discovery. Writing a post does not make you a creator, and I feel like we’ve lost a lot of that creativity in the club in general. People come here as a hobby and to be entertained, but it’s passive entertainment.

I do think the club has an image problem. I think that a lot of the way the club is set up right now stifles creativity at a certain point. Which I’ve talked to Tony about at length. But that’s not an Athena problem. Those are high level things that. The ship can’t really do anything about. That’s something that has to change in policy and government and. Foundational design. And there’s a lot that’s rooted in misunderstanding and fear about how things actually work. You know, things like fair use and stuff like that.

And yes, we do have an image problem. I don’t know how many people I have tried to recruit that were interested in this place, that as soon as they get here they bounce off of it because it’s like, EW, this thing looks like it was built in the 90s. Placement, wait times and a lot of our on boarding is bad and the overall user experience for new users is bad. If researching anything on the site as far as policies and government and stuff, you have to really know your way around. So like navigation. There’s a bad user experience, there’s a whole bunch of things that need to be fixed. And brought it to parody. But again, those aren’t Athena problems.

As for the Athena? I think the Athena is very savable. People just have to make it a priority and make it a focus. They have to be here. That goes for me too. And that’s all it takes is focus. Be here. Find your investment.

Athena deserves to live and that’s all there is to it.

But it doesn’t happen without everybody pulling their way, doing their part. Most of us have discord. We have the communication system TECH built. We need to be keeping in contact with each other, working with each other, collaborating with each other. Not just using for emergencies or every once in a while or for a walls. Every ship is a micro community. Athena is a micro community. And it doesn’t live without participation and active engagement.

Sam H.