Job boards & Crew recruitment?

[FluffyVonRage]

Problem: You're putting together a crew for a job, but you're not sure who would be interested, who has experience, and whether you'd be better off just joining up with a pre-existing crew, already doing the same thing.

Solution: Some kind of TEST Job & Crew recruitment board? In theory, this would be a new forum board, with a post per member, listing your interests, ships, availability times and what kind of experience you're looking for out of your play sessions, such as role play, DrunkSquad etc. Tagging within the original post would also be pretty handy.

This could also work the other way around, with a post being put up for a specific job, listing the objectives, type of experience, and how many people you're looking for.

Obviously expecting spectrum, or even mobiglass in game to provide something similar by the time 3.0 is released, but it could be worth putting something together now/soon so we've got a rudimentary idea of who we're likely to end up flying with, and as such getting to know them :)

 

[Printimus]

Not a bad idea, but who is gonna wade through all the posts?
You?
I think spectrum will have some really good features down the line. This might be one of them.

 

[FluffyVonRage]

In theory, if each post is tagged properly, you'd be able to search the forum for the keywords - such as exploration, piracy etc. Alternately, maybe some kind of registry page, like a facebook-of-players. As you said though, fairly sure Spectrum will have it covered before we'd even need to consider working on it.

 

[Arrangingstars]

I do think it's a great idea, but as you said Spectrum will likely have it covered. The only real concerns I would have is firstly, getting this area on the forum put together and hardly anyone using it. And also, like Printimus mentioned, wading through posts or having to search keywords becomes a bit laborious. Finally, on forums it can be hard to get to know a person you're intending to potentially spend most of your in-game time with, as crewmates. You would likely want to use Discord or Spectrum to voice/text back and forth at a quicker pace to figure out if you will even be able to stand that person 3-12hrs a day lol.

At this point, I would expect around 90% of our members at least, to need their crew filled. Also, with no hardcore crew gameplay yet, it's really all about just getting to know other members and making friends. So, I'd like to think of it all happening more naturally, but I'm sure someday we'll have a job board here on the forums - it's probably just going to be further down the line.

 

[Thalstan]

way too early yet to tell. It could be really easy in game, it might be horrible in game and require something out of game or some third party provider will sort out. That said, I really hope they have it nice and in game...I have no desire to go back to ICQ chats to talk to guild (org) mates I want to group up with...that went out the window with UO.

 

[maynard]

As we are a bunch of casual gamers, I am not sure how much structure we need to build for this.

Real life happens, making in-game commitments a problem.

When multi-crew goes live we will see if we need more than spur-of-the-moment Discord postings to man our ships.

 

[Stevetank]

Tony already mentioned the job beacon that we can deploy. He also said that we could limit it to our org, so it will be easy to grab a TEST crew for just about anything. We'll also have spectrum or discord to pull together a quick group or create a posting for a future date.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

I had wondered many months ago about creating a tracking system, whereby members of a privateering group could earn credits by serving as crew members for others, and apply those credits when they want to lead on a ship and need crew. I think there may be a workable system there, that would encourage people to work together. You could also earn credits by scouting, providing your ships for ops, etc.

The thing I was considering also automatically divided up spoils. Each crew or boarding party member would earn a share, and the captain several shares, whomever provided the ship would get a share, and whomever provided the intel for an op would get a share every time someone flew ops on the target they had scouted.

Once it is all into a spreadsheet it should make life very easy, and gaming time more effective, and it would publish stats on the numbers and kinds of operations players had already been involved in, so ops planning would be much simpler. If for example, you know you have a pool of a dozen Master Sargents, experienced in leading NPCs during boarding actions, and you can glance at a spreadsheet to see what sorts of hours each has played in the past, you could reasonably plan ops and hope to see X crew and Y Sargents available in a time slot you hoped to game.

IMHO, tools like this can make all of TEST effective and stand head and shoulders above the competition, even with beers in hand.

 

[FluffyVonRage]

I'm waiting with baited breath to see how CIG implement something like this, and as ever, if there's a demand for it I'm sure more than a few people would be up for the level of organisation that Shadow is describing. The name of the game is always going to be adaptability and accommodation though, so hopefully the CIG version is going to function much like an in corp group finder. While it'd be cool to see something much more like a 'jobs board' from ye-Olde-RPG, I can imagine this becoming a little cumbersome for a large Corp.

All in all, I'm thinking now that I'll wait and see before throwing together some kind of registrations page through google sheets and keeping massive databases full of pilots for potential squad leaders/captains to paw through on the hunt for the ultimate crew :P

I can't imagine anything I can dredge together will be better than the CIG implementation, but I'm really hoping that they're aware there could well be demand for it :D

 

[Bruttle]

I like the idea and I think it can really turn out to be something good. There are some caveats and additions though. Before I get into that, lets have story time.

Back in the day, I used to play WoW (I know, I am ashamed of it too). The server I was on had a website that some fans put together. It's still up actually, www.leftoversraiding.org. What the website did, was set up a members only community that could sign up for raids regardless of what guild they were in. People that were designated as "raid leads" could post a raid on the calendar and members could sign up for it. The raid lead could just pick who they wanted from the long list of sign-ups and off they went. It was extremely active and popular back then. So there was usually a long line trying to get into these raids. Most of that server was on there signing up throughout the week.

Now the site kept track of who all attended. They also had a way for raid leads to look at, and add to, a player's history on the site. They could look at the players previously attended raids and read any notes written by other leads evaluating that players performance (good or bad). As a result, members of that site would develop a reputation that was actually worth something. Back then, I played a tank and was pretty decent at it. When I first started on that site, I only got into maybe 5% of the raids I signed up for. By the end of my stay there, I had a good enough reputation that I was the one picking the raids instead of the raid leads picking me.

[/storytime]

Now having something like this for SC, would bring additional issues to the table. You would definitely need to have accountability and the ability to create a reputation for yourself as a player among your peers. However, you would also need to post up an event while at the same time keeping it secret. Piracy and espionage are going to be real things in SC. So while it would be beneficial to have a way to recruit from the masses, you would also need to keep details secret from everyone but those you are choosing for the trip. Otherwise, your planned trip on a Hull E will get raided by a second group that the player "420yolomcswagginsballerwaifupimpfucboixxx69roflcoptergetgudscrub" organized at the same time because he saw your event on the calendar.

All in all, I love the idea. There are a ton of players and affiliates in this org. Trying to organize anything through chat or discord with that many people would be hell. Having a central sign up calendar would make things much easier. It has to have rules and player feedback though or it will be a disaster.

 

[FluffyVonRage]

I like the idea and I think it can really turn out to be something good. There are some caveats and additions though. Before I get into that, lets have story time.

Back in the day, I used to play WoW (I know, I am ashamed of it too). The server I was on had a website that some fans put together. It's still up actually, www.leftoversraiding.org. What the website did, was set up a members only community that could sign up for raids regardless of what guild they were in. People that were designated as "raid leads" could post a raid on the calendar and members could sign up for it. The raid lead could just pick who they wanted from the long list of sign-ups and off they went. It was extremely active and popular back then. So there was usually a long line trying to get into these raids. Most of that server was on there signing up throughout the week.

Now the site kept track of who all attended. They also had a way for raid leads to look at, and add to, a player's history on the site. They could look at the players previously attended raids and read any notes written by other leads evaluating that players performance (good or bad). As a result, members of that site would develop a reputation that was actually worth something. Back then, I played a tank and was pretty decent at it. When I first started on that site, I only got into maybe 5% of the raids I signed up for. By the end of my stay there, I had a good enough reputation that I was the one picking the raids instead of the raid leads picking me.

[/storytime]

Now having something like this for SC, would bring additional issues to the table. You would definitely need to have accountability and the ability to create a reputation for yourself as a player among your peers. However, you would also need to post up an event while at the same time keeping it secret. Piracy and espionage are going to be real things in SC. So while it would be beneficial to have a way to recruit from the masses, you would also need to keep details secret from everyone but those you are choosing for the trip. Otherwise, your planned trip on a Hull E will get raided by a second group that the player "420yolomcswagginsballerwaifupimpfucboixxx69roflcoptergetgudscrub" organized at the same time because he saw your event on the calendar.

All in all, I love the idea. There are a ton of players and affiliates in this org. Trying to organize anything through chat or discord with that many people would be hell. Having a central sign up calendar would make things much easier. It has to have rules and player feedback though or it will be a disaster.

This would be very much what I imagined - in regards to the OpSec issues, maybe just post a rally point, start time, and expedition objective? All food for thought :) #TheoryCraft Intensifies :D

 

[Shadow Reaper]

Great ideas here, and some decent storytelling. One thing I am not very clear on, Bruttle; is does this sign up you linked above draw distinctions about various skill sets? Usually a raid is okay just by virtue of sufficient numbers, but in SC ops, where the number of ships and players is limited in any particular instance, (16 ships and 50 players was the last target I heard, and hoping to go to 32 ships); we will need to be careful to form balanced crews. Electronic warfare, scan and stealth ops are going to become coveted skill sets just because they will take serious effort. Finding a way to rate gunnery skills would be great, in both fighter and turret. There is no reason to put a player in a turret if he can't hit any better than an NPC. If you are raiding Vanduul, or The Outsiders, or even pirates, you don't want to include a larger group than you need, and wise Captains will limit crew sizes. On epic raids where you are going for the Vanduul Kingship, you don't want a single crew member untested.

BTW, because of the sheer size of TEST, we could pay to have these kinds of very specialized, very powerful tools created for us. Freelancer.com, Fiverr, etc. all seem to work. There is a fair analysis of the available sites in Peter Diamandis' excellent book, Bold.

 

[Plagueis]

I don't want random gamers that aren't TEST filling crew positions. I rather have AI than that, and why I voted for having this system in place here.

 

[Xist]

Since everyone wants to hire people, and nobody wants to be hired, I'll just get NPCs to crew the ship. ;)

If that's impossible, I'm not worried. I can probably manage to point even the cap ships toward the sun on my own... I hope.

 

[Plagueis]

Since everyone wants to hire people, and nobody wants to be hired, I'll just get NPCs to crew the ship. ;)

If that's impossible, I'm not worried. I can probably manage to point even the cap ships toward the sun on my own... I hope.

I'm for sure getting NPC's for the stupid turrets. Since for some reason in the future we are resorting back to 1940's manned turrets.

 

[Bruttle]

One thing I am not very clear on, Bruttle; is does this sign up you linked above draw distinctions about various skill sets?

Yes, I forgot to add that in. When you signed up, you signed up for specific roles. You could sign up for multiple roles, but that was part of the process when you put your name down. In the post raid documentation, it was listed (if I recall correctly) what raid you attended and what role you played. The person that organized the raid could also comment if they wanted. It was clear either way what role you performed.

There was a vetting process as well if you wanted to post raids. Every person with the ability to post an event was vetted by the site administrators. That way the site wasn't flooded with nonsense. The site also required membership, but that part was open to the public. So you needed clearance to post an event, but anyone with a free account could sign up.

Policing the site was easy and passive. People wanted to use the service because it facilitated successful events. Then, due to the feedback portion, people actually cared about their reputation on the site. So if you wanted the benefits, you needed to follow the rules. It was a rare occasion that action was necessary. It was so integral to consistent success, people policed themselves.

 

[FluffyVonRage]

The site also required membership, but that part was open to the public. So you needed clearance to post an event, but anyone with a free account could sign up.

Policing the site was easy and passive. People wanted to use the service because it facilitated successful events. Then, due to the feedback portion, people actually cared about their reputation on the site. So if you wanted the benefits, you needed to follow the rules. It was a rare occasion that action was necessary. It was so integral to consistent success, people policed themselves.

Sounds like a pretty clear concept all in all - could even open it up via Invite codes to proven unaffiliated pilots.

 

[FZD]

Eh, I think it's a nice idea, but spectrum will probably do it.
Ofc, I doubt spectrum will do it flawlessly, and we could have our own crewing application set up. Not a forum post tho, that would probably be about as good as what Spectrum does. But like a real tool. With an SQL database and a nice front-end, ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶r̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶ ̶̶̶d̶̶̶r̶̶̶u̶̶̶n̶̶̶k̶̶̶e̶̶̶n̶̶̶... suitable for our needs. Y'know, go above and beyond what's good, and deliver perfection. I'd be up to mock something up.

 

[Dragonslaya54]

I think its a wonderful idea! This way TEST will never have a lonesome ride in the verse ever again!

 

[Montoya]

Looking at an example of an existing game where you need a fleet, Eve online:

You go into live chat, you type in "Looking for 10 crew for a Polaris suicide squad, X up."

10 people X up in chat and off you go.