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The Anti-Social Fleet
prophecythirteen
Member Posts: 130 Arc User
I am here today asking for any tips, advice and wisdom from your experience of running a fleet.
I've created an alright fleet, you know cool, laid back and helpful people but lately it feels like we're the anti-social fleet and we should just change our name to that and hoard cookies in the basement. It's really hard to keep people in the game. I mean there are two of us recruiting and once in a while we get an awesome social person who thinks we're fantastic and loves the game and we run stfs and missions and get them geared up with fleet weapons and help them tweak their build and they get better at the game then two days later they stop coming on.
I know the larger fleets offer incentives like raffles for the latest ship but I'm pretty much Atlas and all this is on my back. I don't have the resources to continually build up my fleet and offer flashy prizes to keep people keen. I also kind of suck at making energy credits or at least holding onto them since Starbase projects cost like 1.5-2million credits to fill. Our Starbase is the last to be completed and we're at 170k of 250k and I thought for a long time "Oh having a T5 Starbase will be a good hook to get people in here" but lol every fleet has a T5 Starbase so that's not important.
How do you run a fleet? like seriously I am so inept =-(. We have a hand-full of great people who once in a blue moon come together and rock socks but on a day to day it's like a ghost town. It's very discouraging.
Sorry to bring you down, here is a bunny.
() ()
(>.<)
(v_v)o
I've created an alright fleet, you know cool, laid back and helpful people but lately it feels like we're the anti-social fleet and we should just change our name to that and hoard cookies in the basement. It's really hard to keep people in the game. I mean there are two of us recruiting and once in a while we get an awesome social person who thinks we're fantastic and loves the game and we run stfs and missions and get them geared up with fleet weapons and help them tweak their build and they get better at the game then two days later they stop coming on.
I know the larger fleets offer incentives like raffles for the latest ship but I'm pretty much Atlas and all this is on my back. I don't have the resources to continually build up my fleet and offer flashy prizes to keep people keen. I also kind of suck at making energy credits or at least holding onto them since Starbase projects cost like 1.5-2million credits to fill. Our Starbase is the last to be completed and we're at 170k of 250k and I thought for a long time "Oh having a T5 Starbase will be a good hook to get people in here" but lol every fleet has a T5 Starbase so that's not important.
How do you run a fleet? like seriously I am so inept =-(. We have a hand-full of great people who once in a blue moon come together and rock socks but on a day to day it's like a ghost town. It's very discouraging.
Sorry to bring you down, here is a bunny.
() ()
(>.<)
(v_v)o
0
Comments
Honestly though, I am not sure how other people see the fleet mechanics; I don't see my fleet only as a place to obtain the best gears in game, but also a place to socialize with other players on a regular basis, discussing anything in or outside of game, and not just limited to like "how to grind XXXXX in the game fast" or "how do I get 200K DPS?".
Sorry for my bad English.
Your English is great. =-) See, we used to do that, make the recruit earn the right to buy from fleet stores but then all these other fleets started offering instant store access to all new recruits in their recruiting messages in Zone chat so we had to adapt to stay competitive and relevant. =-(
You can either cherry-pick members who want to socialize, or accept that most players just want to join a fleet for holding access.
I once ran an event that asked members to use the updated ship costume editor to simply create a cool, colorful ship to get prizes. I offered a lockbox key as a prize just for participating (literally just taking a posting a screenshot to our forums), and prizes around 30 million in value for the top 3 winners. I was disappointed that only 8 people entered. Even with what amounted to free money, it's pretty much easier to herd cats than it is to run an event in STO.
I'm modestly space rich, but no where near space rich enough to run events like some fleets, lockbox/lobi/promo ships galore is beyond me lol. I'd say just go with it, be happy anyone logs in at all lol.
Wait, other fleets do that now?
We don't. The Deltas have a first-promotion-rule like quite a lot of others, at a limit of 25.000. Ever since I set that limit I am yet to find anybody complaining about it. And, well, anything is possible here.
We got a lot of long-time players spread across a few fleets (I myself have been playing steadily for about 4 years now), and having that core social group helps out. From my point of view: if it wasn't for having a fleet with some good people, I'd be the kind of player who would log on every now and then for the new content, and then log out again. But I know that when I log in, I have that core social group with the other people there ready to have some chat with, pew pew a bit with, laugh with, stuff like that. What really helped there was having a TS3 server: when people hear each other's voices they can have much better fun has been an observation, and indeed the TeamSpeak people so to say are the core social group.
The point I tried to make here: get a very stable core social group. Say at least 5 people, whom you can rely on to be online. That is the incentive you need to keep your social members to log in: the knowledge and certainty that when they log in, they will get to hang out with some great people.
Join the Deltas today!
I've tried signing up for several "casual" fleets, but in every single case when I messaged the people online who the game tells me can give invites not a single person responded.
So, if you're looking for someone who will be logging in regularly to play at least through the summer but isn't committed to much, then sign me up. I can't promise to have great dps, but I can promise to be friendly and contribute to the fleet if I can.
It's an archaic limitation these days. For example is one MMORPG I tried recently where guild membership applies to all characters of that account. STO could use that, tweaked for faction purposes of course.
From what I've seen, the most continuously successful fleets extend beyond STO. Either they extend their community across other games, or their community otherwise expands outside of the game in some way.
Our fleet formed because we were trying to bring in members of another community we belonged to. We were only partly successful in that, which is one reason why our fleet remains relatively small and not very active.
The other thing a successful fleet does is to promote active cooperation and interaction. Only fleets run by whales can afford to provide incentives all of the time and when the incentives dry up, so does the fleet if they don't have any other reason to keep their members playing STO. The living death of STO PvP caused a number of fleet casualties because without an evolving and supported PvP system those fleets ceased to have any reason to stay alive.
Since you can't go the whale route, OP, you're going to need to dream up means of community engagement that keep people interested in staying connected. Since I kind of suck at that, too, I can't really help you figure out what that might be. I'll be interested to read what others have done.