New Chief of Fleet Operations - Introduction Email to COs

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New Chief of Fleet Operations - Introduction Email to COs

Post by Williams » Sun Mar 08, 2015 10:52 pm

(I wanted to copy and paste the email I just sent to the COs here on the forum, so that everyone in the fleet can also see it and respond to it if they want to)

Hello all

As you will have seen in Admiral Quinn's announcement, I have been appointed as Chief of Fleet Operations (for all intents and purposes for now; Task Force Commanding Officer) for the fleet and Task Force 11. I've opted to keep my CO characters separate from my Admiralty character, so Tim Williams and Christina Curtis will both continue on as Captains, and the NPC Richard Gates will be assuming the mantle of CFOps.

Now, I have a number of ideas for initiatives I want to pursue during my time as CFOps, and I want to take the opportunity to share some of them with you now. Some of them will work; some perhaps not, but it is only by trying something new that we learn what is best for us.

First of all, I'm going to be utilising the forums more than they have been in the past; I'll be making announcements of new COs and COs that we lose on the forums, as well as holding discussions for how to go forward with the Task Force there as well. Aside from making us more visibly active (since obviously only we can see these emails), I hope that it will also mean that everyone in the fleet - from Admiralty and COs right down to the Ensigns just starting out on their first sim - will be able to participate and put their voices forward.

I'm also going to be using the forums to write up some events in an IC perspective from the view of my CFOps character - it's only going to be a few things; reading reports, any guest JPs you ask me to participate in to help you set up a sim or receive new orders for a mission, and so on. My hope with this is that I can use it to make the rest of the fleet aware of what is going on with the sims in the fleet - as Rear Admiral Gates responds to reports coming into him, or has his meetings with the captains of starships under his command, readers from an OOC perspective should get a better idea of what is happening on more than just their own sim. I'm also hoping that this will promote a bit more interconnectivity between missions on sims - perhaps the USS Randomname runs a mission on an incursion into Federation space by the Tholians, and the CO of the USS Someship sees the CFOps reading the report of that incident, and chooses to reference it in their own mission posts, or perhaps follow up on the events and go to help the planets that the Tholians tried to occupy.

Along that theme, I am also hoping to try and start up a Task Force story arc. Now I want to stress that any story arc I do start-up will be entirely voluntary, and will not consist of organised joint missions (which in my mind tend to usually do more harm to sims than good, unless the two sims are running at pretty much identical activity levels). My idea for how to organise this borrows somewhat from what I have seen over in Bravo Fleet in recent years; there will be an overall plot, or state-of-play type outline that everyone will be able to use to play off if they want to be involved. Any missions that you want to be included in the official storyline for the Task Force, you send my way and I'll take a quick look at the outline. If it fits in and doesn't have any glaring issues (I'll be fairly loose on that), then I'll submit it for the PFA to vote it into the Fleet Canon. If it doesn't though; that doesn't mean you can't do the mission. You can either carry on and have it contained as part of your own sim's canon, or we can tweak it a bit to deal with any issues and still get it inserted into the Fleet canon. I'm also going to be putting up suggested missions that people can pick up and run with if they want to that will directly contribute to the overall arc; generally these will be set out as a set of orders from the CFOps to the ship captain; in some cases I'll set out a number of different broadly-defined outcomes that you can choose from, but in most cases it'll probably be completely up to you how the mission develops and ends.

My hope is that with a centrally organised story arc, we can become more of an organisation that writes stories together to forward the overall story of the fleet, rather than a group of games which largely just write their own stories and keep to themselves. I'm not saying that can't still happen, but I think it will be good for the fleet if we can try to work and write a bit more collaboratively from time to time.

I'll be putting up a thread on the forums soon laying out my ideas for where to go with this story arc, and I'd appreciate it if you could keep your eyes out for it and chip in once it goes up; afterall, it is you guys that this story arc is hopefully going to be involving, so my aim is to try and get one worked up that suits the vast majority of sims.



As for other initiatives I am hoping to start up; I'll be creating a Task Force account on Twitter, Facebook, and Risa (the Star Trek equivalent to Facebook), so if you're interested on following us on any of those mediums, look out for the links to them once they've been created; I'll be posting them up on the forums. I'm also considering starting up a quarterly or bi-annually TF newsletter, to further detail what is happening in each of our games; perhaps holding interviews with select members of your crews for their IC viewpoints and profiles; perhaps having interviews with fleet staff members to get their views on where the fleet needs to go, and things like that. The plans for that aren't fully laid down yet, but I'll be putting up a discussion thread for how to move forward with that when I've got a better idea of where we should head with it.


Anyway, that's enough of a long email from me. I'll be posting this up on the forums as well so that the non-CO members of the fleet can read what I've laid out, and as I said I'll also be starting up a number of discussion topics in the coming days and weeks, so please do make sure to keep your eye out for them.

I do also plan on touching base with each of you over the next week or so individually, and hopefully we can use it as an opportunity for me to find out what you expect out of me, and for me to get any suggestions or complaints you might have about how the fleet is doing right now so that I can try to use those to improve things here. Any suggestions that I can deal with myself I will; any that need going up to the PFA level, I’ll keep anonymous so that nobody will know who the complaint or issue came from (unless of course you choose to make it known).

If you ever have anything that you'd like to talk to me about or ask me about, or if you're looking for a bit of advice for your sim, my door is always open; you can reach me at my new fleet address, cfops[at]pegasusfleet[dot]net

Matt
- - - -
Rear Admiral Richard Gates
Chief of Fleet Operations, Pegasus Fleet
http://www.pegasusfleet.net

Terris
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Re: New Chief of Fleet Operations - Introduction Email to CO

Post by Terris » Tue Mar 10, 2015 1:29 am

Congrats and well deserved.
“Your job is to keep holding on, even when you think you can’t”--Captain Janeway

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