Bravo Fleet
As has become tradition, I’m pleased to present you all with the Roadmap for Bravo Fleet through 2024 as I see it. If you’re interested in the history behind these Roadmaps, please feel free to check out 2023 or 2022. I think I’ve done a good job being transparent with you all regarding the goals that I, as BFCO, set for the fleet and what I expect and hope to accomplish throughout each year. Setting these goals, making them achievable, and moving forward with them gives everyone a direct and clear path that Bravo Fleet is heading as an organization. But first, let us look at what we accomplished last year.
What We’ve Accomplished
- Fleet Actions — Bravo Fleet concluded the first 2023 Fleet Action, The Lost Fleet, directly on the heels of the end of Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard. Ambitious as that was, we also saw an opportunity to complete two Fleet Actions in one year by wrapping up 2023 with We Are the Borg, a conclusion to Bravo Fleet’s story beginning with PIC S3, Frontier Day, and ending with that Fleet Action. That also presented us an opportunity to keep the Borg around narratively but reconcile the ending of Picard. The tl;dr is that the Borg are back but the Queen is out!
- Campaign — we did not accomplish this because instead, we turned what was to be a Campaign into a second Fleet Action, We Are the Borg!
- Starship Articles — this was a big point of emphasis for the Tech Team, especially with all the new goodies that were coming in PIC S3. We added all of the new classes that premiered very shortly after the season ended, which can all be found here! I will also add, for those who may be curious, one of the single largest organic attractors to the Bravo Fleet website is our starship articles!
- Bravo Fleet Academy — the Academy launched in 2023 and throughout the year it continued to grow. As promised now has 5 fully realized programs!
- BFMS — we didn’t hit our goals on this, but more on that below.
- Refinement — one of our biggest goals for 2023 wasn’t to revolutionize anything as we had been spending years doing that. We wanted to continue to refine what we were doing to continue to provide better experiences for you, the member. To make you want to spend time with us in Bravo Fleet. I think we’ve definitely done that and continue to improve in these ways almost every single day.
What We Expect for 2024
Bravo Fleet Management System (BFMS)
As much as 2023 was about refinement (so many updates already!), 2024 is going to be back to the revolutionizing business.
I will start by saying something I’ve often said: much like Q, I am just an idea guy. You can ask quite a few people and they’ll tell you that I very literally have pages and pages of ideas for things for Bravo Fleet. My ideas and thoughts for how Bravo Fleet should function as an organization can only go so far without the infrastructure to back it up. Much of what we have been able to achieve has been made possible because of the hard work of both Emily and JonM over these years by building and building onto BFMS brick by brick. It is also the thing that has kept other groups who are trying with extreme desperation to copy us from being successful (although having the ideas for the future helps!). Double kudos to both Jon and Emily for taking my brain soup that I spit out at them and turning it into the magic that is BFMS.
Last year we had lofty goals to build an entirely new BFMS. We fell short of those goals. We stepped back, reassessed, and realized that we can still move forward on top of what we’ve already built. The biggest thing with BFMS is to finish the “front end” of the site. This will make the flow-through of each system more seamless and keep people from having to navigate the back end of WordPress! But we have much bigger plans…
Fleet Assets
Jon’s recent announcement was just the first phase of many changes already in the pipeline. One of those changes, which Jon cryptically described as BFMS v3.1, is a new system we’re calling Fleet Assets. In short, this will be the biggest change we’ve made since Bravo Fleet relaunched in April 2020 and will be the lynchpin for a lot of systems going forward and how people interact with Bravo Fleet. This is a system that will be replacing, almost in their entirety, the Bravo Fleet Registry and the Command Policy.
The whole idea of the Fleet Assets system is that it is essentially an economy within the fleet. Everything you do earns you Prestige (shoutout to the old Starfleet Command games!): participating in competitions, earning service ribbons, earning merit medals, earning promotions, holding a staff position, etc. Each of these possible things you do has a set value of Prestige you can earn. Also when you do these things, your Task Force gets a very small percentage of Prestige as well. So what do you do with this Prestige?
Each ship and station in the Bravo Fleet Registry has a cost. Instead of being subject to the strength system and, for lack of a better term, the whims of the Intel Office, it is just a cold, objective calculation — do you have the credits needed for the ship or station you want?
This will do a lot of things for Bravo Fleet. Primarily, it allows members much better transparency in what they’re doing, what they’re earning, and what they can work towards; our primary goal in anything we do is recognizing and rewarding the activity of our members. It allows members to make strategic choices about what they really want to do in Bravo Fleet and what they want out of Bravo Fleet, as well. It’s entirely based on member performance. It’ll also (we hope) help diversify the ships of the fleet. Instead of the Nova and Reliant costing the same as they do now, we can have more nuance in what everything costs. Want a starbase? Buy the starbase slot and then purchase a base. Want a second ship? Buy a second ship slot and buy the ship. Want to slot new phasers? Buy them. These are just general, non-finalized type ideas. This opens up a lot of options for us, also, not just in the ship/station buying arena. We have a lot of long term goals with this system, but for now Phase 1 will be very straight forward.
For now, we will continue using the Command Policy and strength system for squadrons until this system is implemented. Continue as you would! While this is a very brief 30,000-foot view expect more detailed and explicit information as we get closer to Fleet Assets going live!
Collaborative Writing
Another big initiative we have this year is looking at how we do collaborative writing. It’s been no secret that for many years now, both inside Bravo Fleet and out, that the RPG/simulation format of writing has been dying a slow death. There are so many reasons for this outside of anyone’s control. Within Bravo Fleet, it was greatly accelerated by the fact that there have been other writing options within the fleet for years now. Our biggest weakness has been people willing to step up and be Game Managers. We recently opened the USS Valkyrie as our newest RPG and we still have the USS Denver going strong. With the utmost honesty, this has been a tough nut to crack for Bravo Fleet. Consistently the thing we’ve heard that keeps people from running a RPG is that the startup and maintenance of an RPG can take a lot of energy. But within Bravo Fleet the startup and maintenance have never been easier. But I firmly believe we should have offerings as long as people want to do them!
We’ve already added collaborative sandboxes, which are basically free writing playgrounds, in Starbase Bravo, Avalon Fleet Yards, and the USS Columbia. But these all take effort not insignificant amounts of effort by staff to maintain. This year we want to look at ways to lower the barrier for people to write together in more traditional formats (a captain on a ship and the senior staff). Ways for people to write their commands together for “joint missions”. Inviting guest writers to your Command for a single story. We want to keep adding to the available offerings for Bravo Fleet.
This Years Events
As of right now, we’re looking to run one Fleet Action and one Campaign this year. In 2023 we got ambitious with a second Fleet Action as we saw a prime opportunity that Frontier Day gave us. However, that led to a noticeable burnout. This year we want to keep back to the normal schedule. We are looking at ways to improve — or perhaps a better term is “transfigure” — the way Fleet Actions might work. The Intel Office has been throwing ideas back and forth and so far it looks like they’re really cooking some good stories up!
Tentatively we would look for the Fleet Action to start sometime in early Summer and the Campaign to start in late Fall.
Department Quick Hit Goals
A few really short, tl;dr, quick goals for 2024 for individual departments that haven’t been discussed yet…
- Operations: One of the biggest goals here is to open a new Task Force this year!
- Communications: Increase recruiting, ads, etc. Growing our social media following, particularly on Instagram.
- Academy: Recruiting and mentoring additional staff. Looking to add new programs, but also revamp some existing ones including the CCP and CMP.
- Security: Driving engagement with Action Ribbons. Expanding Supported Games to include a few more multiplayer games.
- OCS: Redevelopment of the competition system within BFMS to feel more organic to all users involved.