Discussion Topic: Ship Speeds and all that

Posted Feb. 18, 2020, 7:13 p.m. by Vice Admiral Daniel Lerner (Personnel Director) (Daniel Lerner)

Discussion Topic: Ship Speeds and all that

Right now, we ask new members to tell us their expected activity rate. We give them the following choices:

-Infrequent (once a week or less)
-Slow (1-3 logins per week)
-Average (2-5 logins per week)
-Regular (4-7 logins per week)
-Frequent (daily or almost daily)

Within the Academy, there’s really no room anymore for ships of different speeds. We did that back when we had four ships, but we’re now down to one ship. Everyone goes into the one ship, except for Infrequent (and we will contact the new member to address the situation). If the Academy ever started having different speeds again, we would use a similar model to the non-Academy ships.

Within the Academy, we match as follows:

Infrequent –> Slow ship
Slow –> Slow or Medium Ship (priority on slow)
Average/Regular –> Any speed (priority on medium)
Frequent –> Fast or Medium Ship (priority on fast)

The current procedures have the flexibility in them because sometimes are hands can be really tied if we’re stuck with looking for one speed ship. For example, there are currently no fast ships in the club willing to take a new member. There are currently only three slow ships in the club able or willing to take a new member. And the PDept is not involved in any discussion about changes to a ship’s speed - so if all three available slow ships decided to become medium speed ships, we would have no slow ships.

One issue that has come up over the last year or so is that the minimum posting speed of a ship (Slow, Medium, Fast) doesn’t reflect how many posts there are on a ship. A large, slow ship can often generate many more posts in a very short period of time than a small, fast ship.

Also, it is easy for a medium ship to just start posting more frequently to the point where everyone is posting the equivalent of a fast ship’s expectation without needing to change the ship’s speed (whereas a medium ship couldn’t start posting at a slow ship speed rate without formally changing the ship’s speed. So while we have (and are seeing) some medium ships look to formally changing to a slow ship, the PDept sometimes becomes aware of a “fast ship” that is still formally a medium speed ship.

So that all raises a few questions about the current policies that I can think (perhaps others have more):

-does the current link between requested speed and placement speed make sense? Should we be changing the categories on the application form?

-does it make sense how we address a situation when the specifically requested speed is not available (like anyone requesting frequent outside of the Academy)

-should we take into account how many posts a ship generates on average, and have that as a new tie-breaking rule (or even a new elimination step)? (This is related to the proposed metric discussed in Command last month.)

Daniel Lerner
Personnel Director

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