4. Lessons learned, some proposed solutions - for the FC team, WHC and uni-wide.
- Mandatory full AA tracking for all staff roles with any in game asset access.
One of the more obvious points. Not going to definitively deter corp theft but is done as a standard in other alliances and gives better asset oversight. It is not perfect, but much better than no tracking.
- SFCs and directors should mandatorily have at least alpha toons in WHC.
One major problem was senior people being out with the wormhole when entrances to it were closed. One solution to it would be for the senior team – including SFCs and directors – to have alpha alts in the three stagings, or at least in WHC since it is the only area that can be effectively closed off. They would not be able to fly complex ships, but the more salient impact is having the people there, able to lead and support fleets, and deal with strategic assets. We were lucky for Archemide to be present with his main in WHC. I was lucky to have such a toon in WHC as well, which I was able to use during the operation to man the Fortizar. We were able to bring White’s toons into the hole through hole control because they were in a different alliance and the people holding hole control were unfamiliar with them. Unfortunately, White could only help with capital asset destruction, since he was needed on a large fleet in his main alliance and was not present during the WHC final battle himself. However, senior people being able to be on grid, deal with the assets, and direct the fleets would have given us many more options.
- Roles and asset access.
Essentially the lesson here is that, beyond the obvious, character tracking in AA, and to get rid of old characters with roles. Not everybody, even in the SFC team, needs access to everything. White touched on it rather well here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_c0 ... jajo8efjtx
- A ‘fleet support group’ of sorts should be created.
I don’t know the exact shape of that, but it would be useful to have a group of people who do ancillary roles for fleets like - have cynos they can light, have capital toons, are happy to do Fleet Instructor roles, have locator agents, etc. That would have helped us massively in terms of finding capital pilots for WHC way quicker. It is something that has been a feature in other alliances I have been in and seems like a missed opportunity for us.
- WHC defence strategy will have to look differently.
At the time of writing, White together with the WHC CCs is working on new doctrines and fits for future WHC defence. The strategies will also have to be rethought. White touched on it in his document in this section:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_c0 ... xsbp2wap4b
There will always be disagreement about the ideal balance between accessibility and ability to function as a full member of a community, but there is nothing wrong with having an area that asks for a relatively modest commitment as well as requirements for entry.
The blanket ‘FC team takes care of the defence’ that had been implicitly put in place has to be reversed at least partly. Details have been started to be thrashed out to a degree, but the next chosen staging will have to be taken into account for things to be finalised. For the rest, do follow the link and read the section indicated.
- Defence assets
In hindsight, it is obvious that complete centralisation of defence assets was a bad idea. Some form of corp stocks will likely have to be a factor, as you will probably always need to give away some ships, since as always not everyone will have everything needed at all times, etc. But it is also clear that we might need to go back to a form of the old WHC way of members having Home Defence ships in their personal assets as well. They will likely be more expensive ships than Feroxes, but you need more substantial frames to be able to contest opposition in smaller numbers.
If memory serves, the old HD doctrine was a form of Heavy Armour and was gradually abandoned when the meta changed. However, we know that our chosen ‘strength in numbers’ Ferox strategy does not work either.
Last time anything remotely similar happened in WHC was 2020. Hard Knocks anchored an Astra in WHC and started hitting our structures. That time however was not a ‘real’ eviction as the main intent was to force a fight. It was decided that we should treat it as a real eviction and give it everything we have, since the FC team of the day had little doubt that it would have turned into one if WHC was not defended vigorously.
The opfor of the day did not concentrate on hole control very much and therefore WHC members managed to regain it and get a substantial number of unistas in shuttles and haulers in without being contested. The Ferox fleet did work at the time precisely because of the aforementioned fact. White, the then FC team manager, also brought a fleet of 80 or so HACs from Waffles, his then main alliance.
The same strategy did not work this time since this was a bona fide eviction attempt and opfor engaged in hole control very well. Which means the defence would have been shaky even if the fleet had not been stolen as mentioned by Arps in the DoW podcast.
- Wormhole assets.
According to some sources, somewhere between 1 and 1.5 trillion had dropped from Innuendo structures when they got killed. Since the staging Fortizar had been flipped around 6 months before the eviction, this suggests that members with large amounts of assets might have simply moved them between structures being flipped. There might have been more corporation assets there that would have been healthy to hold as well, though we are told their value did not not make a significant part of the overall value dropped. While clearly not a problem any more, we do not have a solution for this as of yet for the future.
- Basic wormhole group functions like structure flips should fully or partly be returned to a WHC led operation.
WHC structure flips (anchor a new one, give people time to take their assets over, unanchor the old one) are done to prevent having large ‘loot piñatas’ in wormhole space, and therefore become an attractive eviction target. Let’s leave aside the fact that it clearly has not worked for now. They used to be a WHC purview and the only time where a WHC staging Fortizar had been flipped successfully. Over time, it became an FC team function and after Sparklez left was simply taken on by logistics without even informing the FC team in advance. That is a whole other story of mismanagement and bad decisions. A quick example of such mismanagement was put forward by one of the previous WHC community coordinators. There was a small incident where a WHC structure was reinforced and the community went into hole control to protect the structure being contested when the reinforcement timer elapsed. The community coordinators procured some rolling ships to have access to them in a hurry without having to wait for the FC team to intervene. They were told by Sparklez and Jack that such assets had to go to the FC team instead and anything defence related was now the purview of the FC team.
Then some time later, according to Laura Karpinski who took over FC team management from Sparklez - when Laura took over as manager they met with Jack on mumble to discuss a couple of things. She asked if they could get a plan together for structure flips in WHC which at the time were supposed to be a joint operation between logistics and the FC team. Jack told Laura that it was 'none of her business' and logistics department was now fully responsible for this. He said that they would let the FC team know if a defence fleet was deemed necessary.
Clearly, that approach did not work. Regardless of the bad relationship with the FC team, the WHC community itself was systematically deprived of the means to operate independently. To make matters worse, the functions taken over, were then enacted very incompetently. For example, the Fortizars were accidentally unanchored before their planned time not once, but twice leaving the community coordinators to scramble to clean it up afterwards. There also seem to be many unanswered questions in the community about the fact that Lazerhawks stole the second Fortizar core very quickly after it happened. While it could be explained by actions of a group that is very competent at what they do, this also shows that the trust of the community had been lost.
This is relevant to WHC defence in two ways:
Taking away the ownership of fundamental wormhole group functions from the community takes away the ownership from the community of their own welfare. And then doing those fundamental functions very badly takes away the trust of the membership that even basic standards of competence will be upheld. You then lose the ability to retain competent members as they will very quickly look elsewhere (as they are doing already), and also the moral authority to ask members to do almost anything, including keeping relatively expensive HD ships in their hangars.
The FC team – or a logistics department for that matter - is a changeable group with people coming and going, and the quality of fundamental functions of a community should not depend on the particular constellation of competencies in departments that may not have many ties to the community.
Whether it is done in part or in full can depend on the specifics organisation directors want to enact, but so far, the experience shows that anything other than this approach has failed dramatically.
- The FC team needs to be more than a middle-management group in the organisation.
In short, at the very least, there needs to be a combat director. Over the course of the existence of the FC team, it was a hostage of the whims and moods of whatever leadership was above it. Starting from not even being told about structure anchors in hostile space in advance, to being unable to even order frigate sized ships of a relatively low value without leadership sign-off, to being pretty much in the dark about any strategic planning in terms of stagings, whether in NSC or WHC.
Firstly, the FC team director currently and for the past several tenures has been the CEO. It is not ideal, since Eve Uni is a sprawling organisation with the CEO being responsible for a large number of other areas in the organisation and therefore having a comparatively small amount of bandwidth to dedicate to running the military arm. It does not matter whether the CEO of the day is a good strategist and is an FC themselves, or not. They are simply drawn into too many directions at once and there should be a director level member of the Eve University military arm who is able to make many more of the decisions quickly.
Secondly, although Eve University is not a military organisation, the simple fact is that the largest upheavals in the Eve University community in recent memory have come from problems of military nature. Having an equal voice at the table that plans are made and information is known would be the beginning of a solution in terms of not having a McDonalds type ‘cook-according-to-recipe-when-asked’ type of FC team. FCs are some of the more skilled positions in the game, and that should be harnessed when making decisions.
We will always struggle to recruit and hold on to highly competent FCs if the FC team as a department are not given an equal seat at the table in the organisation. The military arm needs to know what is happening, not just have the bits of information that the directors feel like sharing at the time. It does not work with the type of personality that often holds the position of an FC, especially a strategic level FC, since their mandate is normally to achieve things, not engage in 50 rounds of discussions about minute things. You could say that it is proper that decisions are challenged. And some decisions are challenged even when a director is making them. But there are some that should really be just a matter of deciding and moving onto more important things. This is something that has not worked very well with even the best-meaning directors/CEOs. They may be ‘good with listening to experts’. But we simply will not be able to hold on to really competent people if we don’t give them the ability to execute their mandate.
It does not work at arm’s length, however much the people making the decisions ‘have good judgement to listen to people who know more than they do’. Many decision makers self-assess this ability as being much higher than it actually is. I cannot be bothered with finding actual research papers on this while writing a document for a computer game, but at least in the healthcare scene there definitely is a body of evidence pointing towards it.
And finally, there is a larger point to be made – you don't just need a military director. You need
more directors. And more active ones. The decisions in general should be made by people with a good and current working knowledge of the game. Quoting White from his document: ‘You should not be letting people make decisions that fundamentally change how the uni works, or blocking ideas that have good merit, without the proper context to be able to make those decisions. Which if this is someone who doesn't engage with the community on comms, undock for fleets, have good connections to other organisations, you simply cannot have.’ (
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_c0 ... yg84iyyvon)
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