Hello, it seems like fleeting up has to be done manually. For example in one alliance officers contract ships to each fleet member individually as the fleet is forming and sometimes the fleet consists of 150 people.
If you fleet up once per week it does not seem like a big deal. But for groups who fleet up maybe twice a day it becomes a chore and takes up a lot of time and probably has a negative impact on the amount and size of battles in the game. So long story short is there not a better way to fleet up? And if not why? Lets discuss or not.
As you mention it’s very inefficient for an alliance officer to contract ships to every individual fleet member in a fleet of 150 people, especially if there are two such fleets per day.
This is why nobody does that, as far as I know.
I’ve only seen it happen in fleets of less than 10 people when someone has a nice idea and has prepared some ships, but it’s not at all practical to do this at scale. At scale there are much more efficient options.
In my alliance there are ‘doctrines’, fleet compositions with ship fits that you can find in the ingame fitting window or on our wiki so that you can prepare your ships in advance. Then whenever a fleet is called by a fleet commander they specify the fleet doctrine in the announcement and fleet message of the day, so that everyone logs in or deathclones home, joins fleet and grabs a ship from the doctrine. The fleet is ready with zero ‘ship contracting’.
The players keep their ships (unless destroyed), so they’ve got a few doctrines ready in their hangar. The next time this fleet is called they’ll be ready again! And if they lose their ship they get SRP, i.e. some ISK to replace the lost ship. (SRP = ship replacement program).
I’m pretty sure my alliance isn’t unique in this regard, and I expect the other major alliances to do something similar.
In my current alliance the ships belong to the alliance so they have to be handed out before each CTA, but to be fair it didnt take that long on our second CTA today even tho we were about 100ppl
Just have everyone supply their own ship. If it isn’t fitted according to your fleet doctrine, and they end up losing it, then they don’t get reimbursed. Simples…
If the fleet commander calls for example Zealots, the doctrine for that fleet has not only T2 and meta variants of Zealot fits, but also Damnations for links, Guardians for logi and other supportive ships like interdictors.
So when such a fleet is called everyone picks one of those ships that they have and can fly, and board it. The doctrine fits are available on our wiki so people can prepare their hangar in advance to contain at least one ship per doctrine ready to go.
My fleet doctrine is simple. Do you like to mine? Do you lust for Veldspar like a lost, unrequited love? Can you stay at the keyboard for 18 hours straight without blinking? Then you, too, can join me in any ship that is capable of such acts of ore procurement. I’m not SRP’ing sh*t though. If you get caught, that’s on you…
Most corps just have a list of their doctrines and members are expected to provide at least one ship for each mainline fleet doctrine.
The more market and industry oriented members tend to keep a stock of mainline ships on contract in main staging.
There may also be particular required ships.
For example, my wormhole corp has a specific Home Defense fleet doctrine where every member is expected to own at least one mainline HD battleship + appropriate implant set.
Anyone who show up get a ship so the fleet gets big. In return we follow orders and get a salary. The only problem is it takes a while for everyone in fleet to get their ship. But its not a big deal.
You can trade, contract, deliver, you can even open a shared hangar so everyone can pull their ships out if you trust them.
But no matter the way you distribute ships it’s never going to be as fast as telling your members to have ships prepared in advance, so you can skip the whole ‘trade’ phase at the start of fleets.
If you think shipping up takes too long and takes too much effort at the start of every fleet, your group should tell members to have ships prepared.
If you’re prepared the entire fleet can undock within minutes of a ping.
Person A: I like eating bread but it takes too long to bake bread every time I want to eat one slice!
Person B: you can prepare the bread in advance. You can also store the bread, so you can eat many slices without baking for each slice of bread Person C: you can also buy bread in the store
Person A: but we bake bread every time we want to eat a slice, and it takes too long. Can nothing be done about that?
sigh
Go prepare your ships in advance before the fleet starts. Or take a little longer one fleet to hand out the ships so that you’re all ready next times.
How exactly is there a security issue in having each member prep their own ship? Or in doing contact batches.
We use the contact method all the time when working with other groups or independent pilots. It’s extremely easy to do with members of the same corp do to the higher contact limit.