[Discussion] Barriers to Joining Fleeting Battles

[Valiens Nantaris]

Group 1+2 [member="William Kerkov"] [member="Fiolette Yvarro"] [member="Tanomas Graf"] [member="Vengeance"] [member="The Librarian"]

Group 1

Group 2 [member="Maris Fero"]

This biggest issue we have to consider is a question - what is the biggest barrier to new members joining fleeting threads?

I have some ideas about this, but I am interested to see if I am correct or not.

Please do not comment on other people's ideas. This is a way for us to survey available ideas without judgement.

On the other hand, please try to provide as much detail as possible.

 

[Aithne Charr]

[member="Valiens Nantaris"]

I think the two largest problems when it comes to first-time fleeters (on our site at least) is that they may not be used to how things work because of very different everyone is in addition to the fact that there is no uniform way to handle fleeting. There is, also unlike dueling, no standard way to go abut things. The on-site general consensus is that fleets when engaging others range between 4000 to 8000 and if you are a new person you might not know that.

Which leads on to the last thing about New members.

They are new, they are not set up in any faction normally so they don't get the reach and abilities that supplied fleeters do which is partially because of the way fleets work for factions. Now, I am in no way suggesting a change to the rules, but because of the way rules are minor factions and lone people are much more out of place when it comes to fleeting as they normally have to rely on stuff from canon and even then can't compete with larger groups. Now groups can call a gentleman's game so to speak and get around this through simulations but that kills any weight behind fleeting.

So ya, unless you get into a comfortable place in a major faction, an unusual thing for new members, its hard to get full experience fleeting.

 

[Kenrath]

[member="Valiens Nantaris"]

In my experience when new people come and even when I first tried to Fleet three questions come up.

1. What can I fly/what ship do I use.

2. What do I do/how do I Fleet.

3. What are all these numbers and what do they mean. This one can be anything from Fleet composition in meters, armament rating or any of the other things that appear in a factory submission with numbers attached.


The first two questions unfortunately have a lot to do with the number of Fleeters in a given Faction, their activity in the faction, their willingness to mentor new members past a "just grab a ship from the list and jump in", and Fleeters hoping from one faction to another to be around other Fleeters for either more stable activity or more people to Fleet with or against in general.

 

[Krayzen Dratos]

For me, one of the things that prevented me from fleeting instantly was the math, etc, because I had seen before people do complex stuff that was really weird to me to justify their attacks breaking through your shielding systems, and and messing up the hull of the ship.

Another thing that didn't work for me was that I only saw at least one active fleeter(Cyrus) in the One Sith in the One Sith, so I didn't really know what to do really, nor did I know how to get help. I also didn't know what to do in terms of tech. For instance, when using molecular shields, how much energy would overload the capacitors so you can't absorb the weapon's energy anymore(if that is how it works at least)? That's another thing that I didn't want to mess up. (I also wanted to add that people also have used tech to justify their attack as well, at least in my old site when I was part of fleeting, and were arguing about poodoo, etc). One thing I also don't get is gun math. I have never understood it at all.


I also couldn't fly starfighters, since they are, in my inexperienced opinion, harder to do than cruisers, etc. I've also seen complex maneuvers. I also know that in fleeting, unlike in ground combat, there is no way of coming back. You lose one ship, and they are gone forever.


That's just me at least.

 

[John Ash]

As someone with limited knowledge of fleeting, I find it to be a bit intimidating. There are many reasons for this, and some of them are just general reasons as to why PvP RP is intimidating.

When you look at any form of PvP RP you run into the issue of generally determining outcomes based on the little details involved. For instance how do you decide if a sword swing should hit or should miss? What action would allow for it to miss and would it make sense that that action can take place? There is also questions of to what degree or what effects should happen if it does hit. These questions are all from a single action by a single person in what is likely a one on one engagement. When you get to fleeting and ground battle RPs, the number of questions needing to be asked increases exponentially. There is also a need for some basic knowledge of tactics and strategies that can be employed as well as if they were employed against you how they would effect you. So the intimidation of it increases even more.

Then you have people willing to do ground battles while fleeting is just too much for people. The reason for this is that we are all fairly familiar with ground battles due to history classes and social media, such as movies or games. But with fleeting, there is less familiarity going into it than ground battles. Yes some forms of social media exist that depict fleeting battles, but they are more niche and lesser known. This lack of general knowledge between these two larger scale forms of NPC based PvP causes people to be gun shy on fleeting when they might not be for ground battles.

Scale is one of the more obvious reasons as to why fleeting is intimidating for people. In ground battles the scale is rather 2 dimensional, by which I mean you can get a good sense of what is happening by simply looking at a map. For fleeting though it requires a more 3 dimensional awareness and looking at it on a map will not help little in actually understanding the situation. This difference is intimidating to someone will no to little experience with fleeting. Fleeting requires a different mentality than people are use to using and often they do not have any way of adjusting to it.

The next issue is another issue of familiarity in technology. Fleeting is more or less something we have zero experience in real life with. We have had no space battles with crafts designed to fight in space. This means we are running mostly off of speculation, and why it often gets glossed over in social mediums. Now the niche for it does exist, but in general it is not really explained to us or shown in detail in mainstream settings. This ties into things I already said before, but I feel it needs to be expressed because it effects several aspects.

So to sum up the reasons why fleeting would turn off an inexperienced fleeter such as myself, it is just intimidating and unfamiliar. It requires knowledge and a mentality that is different from what most have dealt with, while also being a form of PvP RP. The information aspect can be handled by finding sources, but another issue is the lack of obvious mentors. Anyone new to RP or a type of RP needs someone to act as a mentor for them. Chaos has plenty of fleeters, though I can not judge actual skill being inexperienced, but I for one feel there is not much interest from these members in teaching others. Now this may not be case and all of them could be just starving to teach others fleeting, but that is the impression I get. No one is really putting the offer out there and as someone who can't really make up his mind yet on if I even want to try to put in the effort I know it will take to learn, there is no motivation for me to ask for help in learning.

If there was any solution that I would like to see and would help me get into fleeting or figuring out if I want to would be to offer up a short list of links of information I need to know and a spot where people who know how to fleet are offering to help others learn how to. If we had these things then I think we would have more interest fleeting and likely see an increase in the number of people who do fleet.

 

[Diysuperguy33]

[member="Valiens Nantaris"]

I am still a new player, I had the love of fleeting ships (Real life and star wars) so I had the mentaity, want and desire to do so. So with that as my motivation I investigated, as pointed out previously there is a lack of guides and help for new people. [member="Cathul Thuku"] answered my 'first thought' questions on fleeting and sent me this, It helped my something amazing at the basics of ships and such. I don't know if this will help you or even if this is the right place to put it, but I do believe that it would be nice to put something similiar into the guide. Thanks, hope it helps!

Spoiler

In Chaos, you will often hear fleeters talk about "meterage". Usually this refers to the sum of the length of all the capital ships in a player's control. Often, in Chaos, fleeting will feature engagements up to about 5 km in meterage per character: in practice, only invasions and board events feature greater meterages because large-scale fleeting engagements usually make other players cringe - battlecruisers (ships in the 2000-3000m size bracket) usually do not see action beyond these engagements.

Attack craft. They usually do not count towards a player's meterage in an engagement, but you must pay attention to the squadron count (that is, how many of a given attack craft there is in a squadron) and how many squadrons can ships house. Usually smaller than 50m. Four types of attack craft are distinguished:

• Interceptors. They are great to fight off other attack craft but are useless against capital ships. Usually faster but also more fragile than the rest, and often come in squadrons of 12.
• Fighters. They can be used against both attack craft and capital ships, and is the stuff to which all other attack craft is compared. Usually come in squadrons of 12.
• Bombers. They are better used against capital ships than against attack craft because they are slower (yet still faster than capital ships) and more heavily armored, plus they are outfitted with proton bombs vs. proton torpedoes. Usually come in squadrons of 12
• Gunships. They are larger, more heavily armed and armored, but pay for it by having smaller squadron counts (since they come in squadrons of 6, sometimes even 4, as opposed to 12). Usually as fast as bombers.

Squadron counts aren't always the same as their default values: read carefully if you're not using canon designs (as for canon designs, vulture droids, tri-droids, Hyena bombers come in squadrons of 20).

Capital ships. The larger they are, the slower and more cumbersome they get, and there seems to be a tradeoff between mounting large numbers of attack craft vs. large numbers of turbolasers. Dedicated carriers are often vulnerable on their own, ships with weak point-defense are more vulnerable to missiles and attack craft.

I understand if the fleeting system may seem complex, tabletop-like even, but, there are some older ships (usually dated September 15, 2014 and older) for which the speed and maneuverability ratings seem out of sync vs current ships: here the lower the number, the better. Think of it as akin to the radius it takes to perform a given turn, or the time it takes to cross a certain distance.

Rules for ship ownership and creation are found here: http://starwarsrp.ne...ation-template/

Don't worry about hyperdrive ratings in fleeting engagements: they matter only when you do threads about hyperspace flight. But, most importantly, you need to make clear what ships you have, and what attack craft you have. And also one of the tricky parts of fleeting is resolving the damage dealt by the opponents.

 

[Maris Fero]

I should preface my answer by saying that there are a lot of reasons for me to procrastinate on something, and perhaps an inherent laziness on my part is at play in this matter as much as the complications to fleeting itself.

So to me fleeting, like all rp, is an opportunity to write a vivid and pleasing story. In my head I can pictures scenes and imagine the emotive language of the posts ‘He suppressed a proud smile as the rhythmic vibration pulsed through the deck plates; A hundred cannons fired in a growing wave along the length of the ship, a fusillade of harsh light discharging from prow to stern as the mighty warship corkscrewed past the lightly armoured escorts that had deigned to stray to close.”

But when I first looked into it it broke down to barriers of knowledge to jump right in, and a lack of clearly signposted examples of fleeting in action.

For the regular rp on the site all you need to do is click on the rp section of the forum and scan 2-3 topics to see a wide array of styles and practises for general rp. If I, in the guise of a totally noob, wanted to see examples of fleeting, in various forms and styles its just not so simple. I hear “Look at invasions or dominions” a lot, but in truth those are vast and sprawling threads where there is little chance of accurately following a simple fleeting example.

There are not regularly available examples of one write and one writer fleet fight threads ( I hesitate to say 1vs1 as I prefer to believe that writing conflict is collaborative rather than truly competitive). I think links to a few example threads that are easier to follow than a vast fleeting clusterbrawl (like an invasion) would be a real help.

Then we get onto numbers, stats, and my distaste for arms races. I look at any topic on fleeting and its always got some sort of value attached to it, 4000 - 8000 or something similar. I’ve come to understand that this is ship length and meant to be a way to balance the playing field. Ignoring for a moment my own distaste at having to balance the playing field any more than a brief ooc discussion in a collaborative writing setting, I understand that when fleeting suddenly includes 8-12 players something needs to be done to set some sort of boundaries.

So I have 8000 km of ships to take, well so far I have 0 factory submissions, and 0 ships of my own. Here’s a selection of the first questions that come to my mind.

I find myself in awkward position of not knowing which of the hundreds of factory submissions I can or should choose from? Or am I supposed to create my own line of ships? Am I supposed to justify my own purchase of ships as a character/faction? Where do I get the authority to have a fleet at all for my faction? If I choose to blow some of my ships up in an rp, or lose the bulk of the fleet to a disaster, how do I go about recovering it?

Then we go one layer deeper and to the stats of the ships themselves, with ratings for armour and guns and types of guns. I want to be writing about how awesome and flashy and terrible and bleak the space battle is, I find myself struggling to get invested in the raw numbers of the ships, the subsystems, the numerous links to components sourced and used from previous factory submissions. I’ve seen suggested somewhere the idea of drastically reducing the numbers aspect of ship design, and bringing it to a series of strengths and weaknesses, like we write our characters. To me this seems like a sensible idea but I imagine there are perfectly good reasons as to why the majority has taken to the full stats approach to ship creation.
Anyway that’s just some of my thoughts. At some point I will write my fleeting threads and I shall lose some incredible battles and it will be awesome.

[member="Valiens Nantaris"]

 

[Cathul Thuku]

[member="Krayzen Dratos"] I would probably find dogfighting to be a little less complicated than fleeting if you take that advice: watch a few Rogue Squadron videos on YouTube at the beginning of the learning curve (preferrably with sequences relevant for what you want to describe) and write some posts based on that.

[member="John Ash"] I also remember that [member="Draco Vereen"] once told me that ground combat was a garbled mess because it was much more tempting to hand-wave reinforcements and that hard limits are recommended, if not outright required. And that ground command can become messy at the very large scales some engagements can get. I can't quite remember off-hand which ones were the worst of those though.

In both ground and fleeting, you still need to deal with a significant number of NPCs, which makes it a headache for a ground commander not unlike that of fleeting (I hear the NPCer term sometimes applied to the characters that took command on the ground) even though the concepts of range on ground battlefields, resolution of damage and casualties is much more intuitive in ground combat. Also both ground command and fleeting need some tactical thinking that requires attention to detail to do it properly.

Several writers I know would rather leave troop composition and their tactical use as background noise in ground combat; sure they accept that, sometimes, you can get a good storyline out of a battlefield, just that engagements that are resolvable primarily with direct PvP will not necessarily capture most of what goes on IC when it comes to warfare. You probably remember the Omega ground combat OOC thread...

 

[John Ash]

[member="Cathul Thuku"]

Please read what [member="Valiens Nantaris"] had said in the opening post of this discussion. He doesn't want us commenting on what others said because this is to act as close to a blind survey as they can do without WAAAAAAAAY too many pms going around.

The next thing is that you completely missed my point. Any RP can get messy, and PvP RP is worse about it than regular RP. Your point is not really relevant and you are taking Draco's comments out of context. Unless you were in the Omega ground battle, you would not get what he was referring to about the handwaving of troops. It can happen just as easily in fleeting as it does in ground as well. The hard limit and composition thing is common in fleeting and also works for ground, but only if the parties involved agree to it going in. It is not that ground is worse about any of it, but rather that the practice of limiting force size is more common in fleeting than in ground battles. There is no real reason for it outside of people just not wanting to do it for ground.

So please read the opening post.

 

[Valiens Nantaris]

[member="Cathul Thuku"] and all

Please do not comment on other people's ideas. This is a way for us to survey available ideas without judgement.

 

[Laira Darkhold]

I was tagged in this for some reason, but since I'm looking at it.

The Factory. Starring down all those numbers and links as you read other people fleet, its hard to wrap your head around until someone walks you through it. Even with the simplified armament rating, there are still bunches of numbers to familiarize yourself with, understand, and compare. Most Fleeters prefer to make their own stuff, at least the Old School ones. Ayden, Valiens, Larraq, Popo, Cyrus. All these guys made half a dozen or more ships and almost exclusively use their own subs which often are built for synergy that a new person lacks.

Second would be scope. There are so few small time fleeting threads for entry level folks to ease into. Its hard enough to get the numbers down pat, now you have to do so in an enormous amount.

 

[Tellos]

I agree it's tough to jsut get started let alone grow into fleeting. I As a navy man love fleets. But it is hard when it feels much like just gettinging in is made seemingly purposefully impossible. Also unlike duels I find people will ignore you're ship jsut to ignore it and focus on the one ship they wanna rp with. While I am sure this is technically allowed it does ruin it in engagements when a big aspects of such battles is now taken away. Basically making it dueling ships. I also agree with above that I feel simplification might be better. Sure nice to have the biggest nastiest ship around but at some point it get silly and I didint leave the Navy and it's own budgetary gymnastics just to do it again.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

Sure nice to have the biggest nastiest ship around

Sure is.

 

[Tellos]

[member="Cyrus Tregessar"] until I blow it up with an X wing piloted by a force user.