Need Better Fleet Management & Communication Ability

[LF] Athos

While ST:Timelines has Fleets, the fleet management options and communications within the Fleet leave much to be desired.

Issue - Chat: The chat (Fleet Chat, Fleet Officer Chat, Squad Chat, & Player to Player Chat) is 100% unreliable and nearly useless. Sometimes the chat doesn't load (appears blank); other times if you've been in game, it doesn't load new messages. Player to player messages are often not even delivered, and disappear randomly. You can only see so many messages back, so if you type a message and did not check back, there may be so many messages that you cannot see all of the new traffic since your last message. It is a nightmare if you are wanting reliable communications.

Suggested Solution - Chat: Fleet Admirals and Fleet Officers (Squad Leaders) need to be able to send notifications just like the system admins do. These messages can still be a one-way only communication, meaning that once read and acknowledged, they disappear. This will allow Fleet Admirals and their Officers to communicate with their Fleets and Squadrons.

Issue - Squadron Management from Fleet level: Fleets are capped at 50 members; Squadrons are capped at 5 members which allows for 10 squads per fleet. My Fleet maintains an active roster meaning that if members do not meet the activity standards, they are booted. Sometimes this means that the squadron leader has either left or gets kicked which leaves that squad in a mess. Fleet management (i.e. the Fleet Admiral) has no ability to appoint squad leaders or disband defunct squadrons. We are going through the process of appointing new Squad leaders which means that the new leaders have to create new squads and members must join those squads. That sounds all fine and good IF the member gets our communication about moving (see Issue 1) but in all likelihood means that we must kick a couple of members that do not leave their old squad to join the new squad.

Suggested Solution - Squad Mgmt: Give the Fleet Admiral the ability to assign Squadron Leaders and to disband squads.

[10F]risky Dingo

Great suggestions Athos. Unfortunately, those very things have been suggested time and time again, and been ignored. The game is 5+ years old and those suggestions are almost as old as the game. I don't know if WRG (formally DB) will ever actually fix any of it. All I can do is *highly* recommend that you get your fleet onto discord. Until WRG fixes this very real problem, discord (or a 3rd party chat like it) is the only option you have.

Hope that helps.

[LF] Athos

Thanks for the response Lore's data of Data lore; it's good to know that many, many players have the same concern. I've been playing 5+ years, almost from the get-go, but haven't cared to be on the forums until recently, so I haven't seen the major topics of the past. Hopefully with new management comes new ideas and open minds. All we can do is continue to highlight the issues that are important to us which your response has helped to do. We can only hope that WRG sees this and takes note.

Unfortunately Discord (or similar) only sort-of addresses one of the issues noted above. It helps with only if everyone signs up which is not guaranteed. Lotus Fleet has it's own website with reliable PMs that we use between Officers so that's a bit of a fix, but again, requires all to sign up for said other site.

Wildstar19

as the other guy said, fixing the chat and fleet maintenance are probably the 2 most requested and complained about things in this game. Others being not enough "to do" on a daily basis; not enough missions; not enough to do with your crew; too many different types of currency I've been playing since almost the beginning of the game. The ppl running the game care really about one thing: making money. If the request doesn't help them make money, it's ignored. Fixing the chat won't make them money, so they're not going to put money into it. It's sad, but that's the bottom line.

-{Punisher}-[BAD]

I also have asked for this very thing. It would help the game out so much because we would have an easier time doing stuff, thus we have time to have more fun. More fun = More people playing, more people playing = more money.

I don't get why staff doesn't see it that way.

[IPA] Markas

I have been the admiral of my fleet for 4 years now and have surrendered to "the way it is." I will reiterate the Discord suggestion above. Communication is the number one issue enforced in my fleet. All members must be on Discord. All members must check it at least once a day to see if there are any DMs from an officer or if they are tagged in a message. It doesn't take much time and the entire fleet agreed to those guidelines.

While I would welcome fleet tools and admiral tools, in absence of those, communication is key. We rarely have any of those other issues anymore.

~peregrine~

Darth Skippy wrote: »

as the other guy said, fixing the chat and fleet maintenance are probably the 2 most requested and complained about things in this game. Others being not enough "to do" on a daily basis; not enough missions; not enough to do with your crew; too many different types of currency I've been playing since almost the beginning of the game. The ppl running the game care really about one thing: making money. If the request doesn't help them make money, it's ignored. Fixing the chat won't make them money, so they're not going to put money into it. It's sad, but that's the bottom line.

I agree with @Darth Skippy , which is weird, but whatever. Well said, sir.

“It is what it is” is not good enough. They have known for years & ignored us. Enough.

Slick

Our fleet has Discord but I hate it with a passion and few members even bother with it. Anyway, our primary outside communication source is Messenger. We use it extensively but no one is required to have it since a small number of people will not partake in anything Facebook related, or be willing to connect with people they hardly know in reality. The plus side for Messenger is with open chatheads you can use it simultaneously while playing Timelines with very little interuption.