STF

Discussion Topic: Balancing the Fleets

Posted March 25, 2020, 11:20 a.m. by Commodore Calé Reilly (Assistant Personnel Director) (Calé Reilly)

Posted by Commodore Calé Reilly (Assistant Personnel Director) in Discussion Topic: Balancing the Fleets

Posted by Rear Admiral Sarah Hemenway (Second Assistant Personnel Director) in Discussion Topic: Balancing the Fleets

Posted by Russell Watt in Discussion Topic: Balancing the Fleets
Posted by… suppressed (6) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Discussion Topic: Balancing the Fleets

As you will see from my intro post, for non-Academy ships, the second most important tie-breaker is to see which fleet has received the fewest placements in a calendar month.

Why did we have this as a priority? The idea was to try to keep the number of new members balanced between the fleets, to reduce the workload in each fleet.

STF has changed a bit since we added this to the policies.

First, measuring by calendar months is kind of silly these days for non-Academy placements. It’s usually between 1-3 non-Academy placements per month (less since we made changes about alt-RPGs on the application form). So even if balancing the fleets is still important, I think we need a better measure than calendar months.

Second, is this still important? I would really like to hear from FComms/AFComms - current and former. Right now, the only thing more important than this is the size of the department. It is higher in priority than the size of a ship or how long a ship has gone without placements.

Another interesting point as a result of changes to STF is how to address the fact that there are alt-RPG ships that can accept new members (Chernov and Ogawa). A new member must specifically request this for us to place them on the ship, but let’s say we do place them on an alt-RPG ship. Is that a placement that calendar month for that fleet? I guess it depends on what our current purpose is if we keep a balancing tie-breaker.

What do others think?

Daniel Lerner
Personnel Director

I don’t feel balancing fleets matters. And if someone requests a specific ship (alt-RPG or not) then to the degree possible we should honor that request.

Adam W.

We try to–at least for the most part from my understanding. The biggest problem with not balancing the fleets is that, using the rest of the tiebreakers, you can end up with the same ships getting new non-academy members until their departments are full. At some point we’ll end up with the problem of “all the qualifying ships are full” due to various things, including if we happen to get a large influx of members. What would we do then?

I, personally, believe that we should change from “calendar month” to 28 or 30 days (28 might be better, I’m not sure) for the balancing time period. This would allow us to continue to keep the rest of the tiebreakers intact if we so choose.

Katy

I think there might have been a misunderstanding about my reference to alt-RPG ships and why I raised that here, so let me clarify.

We do generally place a new member in the Ogawa or Chernov if there is a specific request (other alt-RPG ships are off limits as per FCOMM and the various ship charters). The only reason we wouldn’t place a new member in one of those ships is if the ship is full, or both the CO and XO are absent at the same time, or something like that.

The reason I raised it here is the role of these fleet balancing considerations for subsequent placements outside those two ships. Does the alt-RPG placement count as a placement in that fleet for future non-alt-RPG placements? There’s been some dispute about that in the past, and to some extent is only answerable by understanding why we have this consideration (if there is still a consensus to keep it).

If we get rid of fleet balancing all together, this it is a moot point.

Daniel

Yeah, the alt-RPG placement is a placement in that fleet. I see how someone would have ended up questioning that though.

I think it should be a moot point though. Balancing ships is more important than balancing fleets. Ships within a fleet operate independently of each other.

Adam W.

Having just done two main fleet placements today that both hit several tiebreakers down, I’d like to get back to the simpler question of whether the number of new members assigned to a fleet should be a higher up tiebreaker. Can one of the many former Personnel Directors here give me some background as to what the “pro” is? Why is a new member providing work at the fleet level?

Sarah, VP/2APDir

Way way way way way back when I was PDirector (Sarah, you should remember that time - you were President) I dimly remember going, ok we have 7 new members wanting mainstream ships, we have 7 Fleets, let’s see if we can put one in each Fleet, I’d already have the listing of ships that previously had new members recently and so look at the other ones. Check the rosters for missing staff and AWOL staff and eliminate them. Then consider 1st department requested by the new members, and try to match them up with ships that needed them.

Back then there was a statistic we tracked called placements by Fleet, (not sure if that still happens), if we placed 10 people in the mainstream fleets in the month, 1 went to Fleet 1 (10%), 2 to Fleet 2 (20%), 2 to Fleet 3 (20%), 1 to Fleet 4 (10%), 2 to Fleet 5 (20%), 1 to Fleet 6 (10%) and 1 to Fleet 7 (10%).

It was a statistic in the report and we continued it, don’t know much more than that about it.

(And yes, I know I used 7 first of all, and then 10, I find dividing by 10 easier than dividing by 7, so there. (sticks out tongue)

Russell (remembering to sign off this time).

Well, I don’t think we’re going to ever have a situation again where we get roughly the same number of applications in one month (I think it was around 80? that month) as we currently have members in the club. :)

I really recommend removing this as a tie-breaker. We had another mainstream placement last night where three fleets were just entirely ruled out immediately because they’d had a placement this month. While that hasn’t been coming up much with the lower application numbers, it still seems unnecessarily restrictive to trying to match up a player with a good choice of ship (and to make sure that all ships receive a fair number of new members).

Actually, instead of removing this, I think the tie-breaker at this point should likely be the number of placements that particular ship has had (not fleet).

Sarah

I agree with Sarah on this one. Remove it as a tiebreaker referring to the number of placements a fleet has had to the number of placements a ship has had. It would require ships to keep rosters and vacancies up to date to ensure that we know where new players are wanted or needed because otherwise we assume that a placement can happen and I have had COs in the past who could take someone capacity wise be unhappy with the placement because they didn’t want more than one JO in the dept for that point in the ship development.

Cale

Bumping to put back on the board


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