The m3 Corp has a policy of ensuring pilots remain active in the corp with a rewards and penalty system. If you get enough stars for participating in fleets or fulfilling contracts you are granted a reward and conversely if you fail to participate in scheduled ops or impromptu call to arms you get strikes. Too many strikes and you face possible ejection.
Being a guy not online a lot I was forced to miss a scheduled roaming gang last night (Thursdays are usually bad and last night was triple whammy as I went to give blood and Twin A was up late) so I wanted to make up for it. I checked corp contracts and saw one for 37 Mechanical Engineering Datacores and I thought "here is my chance to get a star!". Sigh, mmo players are always slaves to the 'ding'.
I went and got the datacores and brought them to the station. I brought up the contract and happily clicked Accept.
Wait. What?
I've got 74 Datacores now and my wallet is 10 million ISK lighter. Oops.
In my excitement at the potential of getting a credit for corp involvement I failed to notice that the contract was giving datacores in exchange for ISK. Odd I thought but it was a good price so I wasn't too distraught.
However in seconds the director who created that contract contacted me and informed me that contract was meant for the corporation itself, not any corp pilot. I think he set it up wrong and thus was very surprised when I accepted it instead of him accepting it on behalf of the corp. I quickly sent the datacores back to him in exchange for my ISK and cursed my luck; I had -1 star (i.e. a strike) and 37 datacores I didn't need.
Better luck next time.
* * * * *
In other news, Kirith is still chiseling away at Caldari Carrier IV which should be finished middle of next week, and Derranna completed Astrometrics V last night so she can use all of the scan probes and can train Jump Portal Generation should she ever get into a Black Ops or Titan. Heh.
She's now working on Signal Acquisition IV to increase he scanning time, and soon will beaver away on Astrometric Pinpointing and Triangulation for increased scan accuracy and strength respectively. Oh and she will get a couple levels of Archeology like I had planned a while ago but forgot to learn the skill for.
All of that will take about 16 days so what will she do after that? Well with Derranna its always a crap shoot until I actually train something but I'm thinking right now some module upgrading would be prudent. Get her so she can use micro warp drives for example, or some improved shield skills.
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Any system that punishes lack of involvement explicitly is inherently unhealthy. By explicitly punishing people who don't attend events (which are set up by the leadership of the group, and thus set to cater to THEIR schedules) you place players is a situation where they are forced between making a stupid RL decision or else suffering in-game penalties.
ReplyDeleteReward attendance, and leave non-participation as a 0. Deadbeat members are easy enough to notice and deal with without a system like the trainwreck you're describing.
Most of the penalties only apply if you are online during the operation. I mistakenly left that out. And scheduled operations are like once a week with multi day notices.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the system is a "trainwreck" in the context of the eve environment. I think its far superior compared to other corporations I have been in as long as the chance to earn stars in other forms than scheduled ops is present.
Something worth pointing out to a non-Eve MMO player, Eve is very territorial by design. Corporate cohesion is essential to any efforts to claim and protect space and if you have 50 members but 50% of them never help out in corporate endeavours, you end up feeling like a large corp that can't do anything better than a much much small corp can do. This *really* hurts moral of the pilots that do step up and can lead to a "failure cascade". Smaller corps with less resources can feel less moral loss from smaller ops if they get higher relative levels of participation.
ReplyDeleteThus a goal of any corporation in Eve (and alliance for that matter) is ensuring as much as possible that all pilots are pulling in the same direction with good participation to not only claim and protect territory effectively, but also to promote unity and high morale.
The Stars and Strikes system is fairly effective (because its easy to define and understand and thus plan for) and non-draconian compared to other Eve corporations where threats of firings and verbal abuse on voice comms is a more typical approach. :/
I understand totally the need to have people in the game and actively playing, one of the things that has haunted me is whether I am playing enough, or too much. None the less sometimes these types of measures have to be done.
ReplyDeleteThere's corps that verbally abuse members? I can't imagine that they stay long, it's a game, not worth taking flak for. It would be nice if my corp kept public track of those who contributed and how much, and rewarded those who do.
ReplyDeletethe final stands reward system was pretty cool. it was based on kill board stats, ie isk damage, isk retrieved from stolen loot, and percentage particiipation.
ReplyDeletebasically you got an isk reward for participating in pvp, and depending on how much you do you can earn your isk from just doing that.,..
Not related to your post: I'll be back next week, come hell or high water. I'll evemail you ingame, but I wanted to give you the heads up.
ReplyDelete