Helpful hints

[Admiral Sotuk]

Going to place here items written by ECF member either from the Weekly or sent to he here. should anyone have any helpful hints or items for others in the ECF send and I will post. thanks

[Admiral Sotuk]

LOW ON CREW?

Greetings ECF!

For those of you who do not know me, I am Captain Jenn Nadire of the USS NEBUCHADNEZZER. I know some of you have been having attendance issues on your ships and I just wanted to give you a bit of my history with the ECF. I started on a ship called the Technica. It simmed the same time as the Nezzer and had a great big crew when I started. The then Captain retired and Gabe Holmes took over as TCO for a while. I noticed that the crew started to fall off the face of the universe and couldn't understand why...but then I realized, loyalty. Those loyal to the previous captain weren't sure of simming under a new CO. It happens to everyone, but you can't let it stop your sim!

When I took over Technica, I had two or three people EVERY WEEK, sometimes the three included me, sometimes I actually had FOUR!! But I simmed every week, even if it was an off duty character building sim. THEN I realized I had a buddy list FULL of people online around the same time. I used to invite every single person on my buddy list who was in the ECF to the sim. I asked the crew to invite people too. Even outside friends to sit and watch to see if they were interested. Sometimes people came to guest sim. Some of those guest simmers even made extra characters just to come to the Technica. Some of the outside friends joined the ECF and made characters too. It took a few months, but slowly I started to see five, six, even seven people come to the Technia.

When I got my own command on the Nezzer I had seven or eight people. In that first year of my command I did not miss one sim. NOT ONE! Granted not everyone can be at every sim, due to IRL circumstances, but I tried my hardest to make sure I was there and ran a sim for the crew, even if it only went for 45 mins. We simmed. The one thing I learned back then was to keep the sims simple. When you have a small crew, doing long arch sims, or continued plots can hurt when the people you need for the sim don't come that week. So keep it simple, self contained, one sim only story lines.

At one point in the Nezzer career we had well over 14 people come to sim every week. Right now, we average 7-9 people, but there are still times when only 3 people showed up.

One other way to help get your people involved is to use the Forum, send out a personal CO reminder to your crew that you are simming, create your own newsletter, invite your crew to help make sub-plots for the sim, but above all, sim! SIM! SIM! Some of the best and most fun sims I've run only had 4 or 5 people in it. These are great for character building and fleshing out new characters to learn their personalities or build it up.

I've asked Vadar to unblock all the names on the ECF email string so everyone can add the simmers to their buddy list. If you're down people, invite some friends, you never know what will happen.

If anyone would like to chat about it, or brainstorm ideas or ask me a question, please email me. I'd be more than happy to help out!!!

Cappy Jenn
[e-mail]