Bravo Fleet
Hello members of Bravo Fleet:
As we approach the best holiday of the year, Halloween, we’ve also been very busy with other housekeeping chores in Bravo Fleet since the end of the Fleet Action! You’ve heard a few times about an “AWOL system” which would be a way of parsing active and inactive members throughout the fleet. One of the big reasons we’ve been undergoing this effort over the past 2+ years is continuity. For a lot of people in our hobby, this ebbs and flows. Under the old system, it was really difficult to pick up where you left off when you returned to active status. Now, with our new system, you can pick up right where you left off!
How does it work? Like all content management systems worth their weight, BFMS tracks everything we do, but critical to this feature is the last login time. The system is now optimized, thanks to Emily, so that if someone doesn’t log in for 53 days, the system generates a notification for task force staff. From there, staff go in and punch a button which will email a user an inactivity warning email letting them know to log in or they’ll be transferred to the Reserves. After 7 days, if the user doesn’t log in, TF staff go back in and punch the button again (this time red, for effect!) and it will generate a transfer request for that inactive user to the Reserves which the OCS will then process.
What does this mean for you? As long as you’re logging in at least once every 60 days, you won’t be considered inactive and won’t go to the Reserves automagically. No matter the activity you do in BF, if you’re active in the fleet, you should be in a task force even if you’re just hanging out in the corner of one RPG! It is as simple as that. If you are inactive and need to go to the Reserves for some time? All your writing, awards, ranks, etc. stay on your dossier and are preserved for when you have time to return! The only thing that you will “lose” is your primary command if you go to the Reserves; this is mostly just to prevent 400+ “good” ship names from being locked up in the Reserves years from now. When you’re ready to return to active status you simply log in and request a transfer back to a task force!
The OCS recently processed our initial AWOL batch which we knew would be quite large. Many members left in the splits that happened in the beginning and middle of 2019 before I returned to BF. In addition to this AWOL feature going forward, we’ve also decided to transfer all cadets into a task force. The remaining cadets have been randomly sorted into one of the task forces. Starbase Bravo now is only a host to the Bravo Fleet Senior Staff. What does that mean? That means there will be more people to help out with cadets! Not only have David and Cap been doing an awesome job with cadets, but now TF staff will be available to help as well. Additionally, this may help mentors in the Mentorship Program grab a cadet much earlier than they may have before! Additionally, because of this, all new joins will be round robin’d into one of the task forces upon joining. The whole idea behind this is that new joins will be surrounded by the same people through all steps of their BF journey instead of being constantly passed off to another group.
I know I’ve said this before, but Bravo Fleet was about to close in May of 2019 and there was hardly anyone left around. But also we’ve seen incredible growth since we switched to our new way of doing things and continue to gain new members each week. We’ve also seen an uptick in members who are returning to Bravo Fleet who may have left in frustration in years past who are really engaging and digging what we’re doing now! The only thing we’ve ever asked is to give us a chance and take a chance on what we’re making available to everyone now. We’re very transparent about our membership, activity levels, etc. because we want to make those available so that we can help keep members engaged, have fun being here, and present new opportunities as they arise. Being able to track these things unlike in archaic times past when things were very much simcest central is critical for Bravo Fleet’s development going forward. We’ve been enduring organic growth rather than growth through disgruntled SIMMs leaving other fleets and joining us as BF has done in the past, and feel this is the most sustainable way forward and want to keep it going!
If you’re a cadet, please check out your dossier for your new assignment. You can always submit a transfer to another TF if you’d prefer. If anyone has any questions about the AWOL policy/feature going forward, please do not hesitate to reach out and ask!