Posted by Head Moderator on behalf of SDE:

Internally, SDE and TeamNF have a defined hierarchical structure with sub-divided responsibilities for various aspects of the customer support/management interface. This has generally been identified externally as well; however, following a recent restructure on the changeover of the formal NFNA Head it has been decided to adopt a far more matrix managed interface facing outwards to the community. Previous experience of a community facing structure with a defined hierarchy has demonstrated a natural desire for community members to want everything addressed from the top down, whereas the vast majority of issues can and should be handled at lower levels by the person most appropriate to answer them, without having to constantly escalate everything. This has proven particularly relevant at the GM level with players trying to play Moderator/GM 'bingo' trying to get a different answer to one already provided that they may not agree with. This creates immense amounts of nugatory work that detracts on the support available to others and inevitably results in the same answer as the first response anyway. Given the varied time zones we all operate in it has at times also created confusion about who is working on an issue. Consequently, a much flatter top level with overall shared responsibility will be utilised.

There will now be a simple 2 level structure for community members to interact with. Whilst TeamNF will retain its command chain structure as shown on the team page, the only externally discernable structure above this is that of the GMs, which should be viewed as a single team operating on the same level and speaking with a single voice. Internal to SDE/TeamNF the GMs will continue to provide guidance and direction to the collective TeamNF (FMs, Monitors and Moderators), normally through the Head Moderator. In turn the members of TeamNF are empowered by the Head Moderator to act in accordance with the direction provided and the various responsibilities associated with their rank/position levels. Importantly, the Head Moderator is also empowered to act and speak on behalf of the GMs, keeping them informed where necessary and seeking any additional guidance as may be appropriate. The Head Moderator is also the senior point of escalation for issues with TeamNF. Ideally though, community members should seek dispute resolution at the lowest possible level in the first instance, routing through Veteran Moderators to Server Commanders and Server Heads before seeking arbitration from the Head Moderator. The GMs will also forward any TeamNF issues that attempt to bypass this process to the Head Moderator.

There have been several very good suggestions recently about the wider use of Facebook/Twitter and more GM engagement. Unfortunately the current size of the team versus the workload placed on them does not facilitate this very well beyond what has been achieved to date, which was further hampered by the loss of another GM just before Christmas 2011, hence the lack of recent updates. When direct contact to GMs has been made available in the past it has only served to exacerbate the bypassing issue previously mentioned, but has also proven to be a huge drain on resource even with well-intentioned members just wanting to say hello. That in turn impacts significantly on the availability of support to those that really need it. In addition, the running of other third-party sites creates a division of attention challenge for community members (yet more sites to check) and relies too heavily on constant updates to keep them relevant and viable as an information portal. Therefore, on balance for the immediate future we really do prefer to keep as much of our interface as we can on the regular Navyfield site. That said, we do recognise we should also work on improving the existing interface and we genuinely do welcome suggestions in that regard. We can then continue to press the Web team to deliver improvements. Beyond that the Head Moderator will be engaging with the Fleet Leaders on ideas for low maintenance, but more effective use of social networking media to get our messages out to a wider community and to help keep our loyal players better informed. Whilst not an immediate fix and possibly not to a massive scale, we will strive to improve this area.

Fleet Leaders are an important element of the community structure and use of the Fleet Leader forum area has demonstrated tangible benefits in terms of focused debate and feedback. The Head Moderator regularly highlights issues from this area to the GMs and uses it to provide feedback where possible/appropriate. We will aim to make more use of this focus and we strongly encourage all community members to make more use of their fleet executives to raise and address community-wide issues or game problems that do not naturally fit elsewhere in the support system. Members not attached to a fleet should address issues to a member of TeamNF who can then bring them to the attention of the appropriate person or post the issue on behalf of the member.

You will hopefully have chance to read the recent updates and the work plan for this year, and we hope you are as excited as we are about what we aim to deliver in 2012. We have the following updates for you on some of this work:

1) Italy. Italy will be patched to the test server in February; hopefully the first couple of weeks. We really want to drive forward with the testing to get it complete quickly so everyone can benefit from the new material as soon as practicable. Our target is to conclude testing and balancing by early March so that Italy can be patched to the main servers in Mid-March. To achieve that we would ask for as much support from Fleet Leaders, Current Testers and indeed new testers to help move that forward. As always Mailman will work to coordinate the effort and bring together everyone's thoughts on balance to ensure the new nation slots in to game for everyone to enjoy.

2) Official Fleet Wars. The SDE Official Fleet Wars will commence in April. They will run separately on each Server and the top 3 teams on each Server will be awarded olives as prizes. We are currently preparing an Event CV (ECV) for release, so we will select 10 participants from the Fleet Wars at random and award ECVs as surprise prizes. More details on the construct and rules will be published in the coming weeks, but expect the battles to be mainly 15 vs 15 with each team having to have at least 2 Italian ships present. Larger fleets will be able to participate with 2 teams and smaller fleets can join forces to provide teams if necessary.

3) Server merge. We know a number of players, particularly on Kaiser, have been calling for a further server merge, but there really is no intention to do this at this point for the following reasons:

a) Server capacity: Players are saying Kaiser server is dead. At times this can appear correct but we know from population counts and activity monitoring that if we merge the servers there will be log in problems to the single server. Quite simply there are more players than can actively participate on one server, particularly if there is an event running. We do not want to create a situation of first come first served and lots of players missing out.

b) New patches are aimed at increasing populations again: Our developers are currently working on significant new patches such as full win7 compatibility and Italy. We believe this will bring in more players and it would not be wise to close a server now if we subsequently need to reopen it later. We understand some of the frustrations on Kaiser at the moment and we are looking at ways to boost activity, indee