Attendance: how would you do it?

Hi,

I was curious to what everyone’s opinion is on the attendance policy. For games like ArmA or DND it makes sense, since it’s a fairly large cooperative event where everyone has to synchronise and come together on time. For these games either a large amount of players is necessary and/or getting everyone to free up time for a lengthy game.

How would ik work differently for ‘drop-in’ games, e.g. League of Legends? There, the appeal of a community in finding a full team to play ranked flex with, or a people of people you can play duo’s with. I can understand it’s starting to become unappealing for some players to be restricted to what the greater battalion wants, rather than what their ‘team’ wants.

How would you handle attendance/ and or activity in a gaming community? I’m curious to widen my own horizons. 

Been talking with FOrtes about this a lot when thinking about how to make a minecraft division actually work.

It would be cool if we could have multiple ways of calculating attendance, I like the classic way of everyone in teamspeak and doing some scrims (like in LoL or Dota), but would also feel like that if we have a game like minecraft that it would be beneficial to build a plugin for the game that tracks the time that people play together and submits it to our member data.

If we have 5 members that play on our minecraft server all day but can't make it to the events, I still feel like we want to keep them rather than ditch them just because they can't join at day X.

At least in my experience, the attendance policy has been pretty broad to allow for creative leaders to fill the attendance requirements for members so as best based on the needs of said members and their game.

For instance, for a while in WT division, we had one weekly battalion wide meeting, for NA, and then members were allowed to choose their own events as needed and report them, be it a tournament, a training, some friends platooning etc.

The current policy really allows for some creativity, based on how commanders wish to run their units. When I read the participation policy, I take away that a member must be in events for 2 hours or more a week, and that there must be a battalion briefing at least once a week. I think that is pretty basic to achieve, and the rest is left open.

It’s not per de only policy, but how would you apply other methods of attendance? E.g. like Marv said a tracker on the server, or just reporting on the website? Would it maybe be nice if the new website would have a sign-up event instead of an excusal system like we have now?

2 hours is 2 hours, that’s reasonable.

The policy in question is 2.1 Section 4: Participation

there are three paragraphs in this that are relevant:

"Each event type must benefit TAW in at least one category of improving player skill, building team morale, fostering enjoyable competition, improving TAW’s reputation in the eyes of the gaming community, providing needed resources to TAW, or recruiting new members."

"All TAW battalions are required to hold a weekly briefing with the goal of fostering a sense of community and team. This briefing should be used for announcements, updates, promotions, recognition, and other items beneficial to the unit."

"Each Division Command will establish the specific acceptable event types for their division."

At minimum, what constitutes a mandatory is a briefing on "announcements, updates, promotions, recognition, and other items beneficial to the unit." this is what we have been doing since the founding of DND and RP prior to the name change. 

Now, this is something that isn't a requirement but i've always seen the mandatory event as the core moment for a unit to play together and create a larger scene of community. its the one moment in the week where everyone gets to play together. And this is what I've seen most people prioritize in a mandatory as well. its a way to encourage team play.

now, its for this reason that DND does mandatories as they do. when someone plays a tabletop role play game, its an event. you take 2 hours of prep for the event and 4 to play it every week while its practically impossible to have a mandatory where we all play the game. as such, when we have our mandatory, its literally just a 5 minute talk about what we are required to talk about and mandatory over. you cant expect people who just want to play their game to come every week to a 5 minute meeting for information they don't necessarily care about. we're a gaming community, not an office building.

so for us, the 4 hour long games with 2 hour prep is a far better way to encourage team play and a building of the community. so when we have our mandatory and you've been in a game, that will count as you being at a mandatory, just like how you set someone as attended for if they are late to the meeting but just in time for the gaming part. Our long weekly games are in effect an extension to our mandatories as a way to encourage playing with others.

I would honestly expand on the report attendance feature. You could have the DC set a "minimum time" type of requirement where you should be playing with other TAW people at least 3 hours a week or something, with a minimum of 2 in one sitting. I would personally make the website or a discord bot start a "session" via some form of input/command, then the website can check that you are in fact in either teamspeak (or in the future discord) and as long as at least 1 more TAW member is present, it records activitt. End of session you sort of sign out/stop session and it goes to attendance.

In my opinion we shouldn't be using # of events to see who's active and who isn't, but rather # of hours. Yes, some people have more free time than others, but if they dedicate it to the community, then they deserve recognition. I find it silly that we record attendance for 2-3 hours of activitt a week, and then on paper a guy that only played with TAW for 3 hours will look the same as a guy that stuck around and played with taw for 10 hours. People's time spent for TAW = loyalty to the community. This is what needs to be rewarded.

I like the idea of "just" tracking time playing together with TAW members, but would also still press for an "all hands" event at least every 2-4 weeks. Surely depends on the division if it is possible (like with DND) but in general I think it is important to come together as a community and maybe meet people outside of your own usual day-to-day perimeter.

Having in-house scrims is a way different feeling of playing together than running ranked together, so while I would encourage more flexible attendance options, I think a mandatory that is not weekly would still be beneficial for everyone

this isnt that difficult at all, talk to CoC. Set the parameters on whats allowed and whats not and there you go

Taz is right. Its been my experience that if you talk to your chain of command special cases for tracking attendance can be made.

Your mentioned DnD as you example but that division uses a different model than the most of TAW. Basically you show up for your game and that is how you get attendance. They don't use the one/two events system that most games do. 

I could write a 2000 or more word document on how we could and should track attendance better but I will just keep my thoughts short here. We are more flexible that most think. Policy is not a set of rules but of guidelines and they can sometimes bent to make some division work better, but we still need to do more if we want more genre's of games to work in TAW.

I think current policy keeps things vague enough to encompass any kind of "event" to uphold attendance requirements. As said before, send requests up the CoC for a special set up to fit a game and it's community better. In the end, for times of activity outside of a scheduled event membership always have adhoc events to report participation. Potentially in the future we could log those extra events automatically.

zenmire:

Policy is not a set of rules but of guidelines and they can sometimes bent to make some division work better, but we still need to do more if we want more genre's of games to work in TAW.

Unfortunately not many people agree... There is a split of people who see policy as concrete hard rules with no bends and those, like you, that see it as a guide. We mix our procedures and general membership "handling" on the same policy list which leads people to conflate the two. Maybe the solution is to split up our policy to keep operating procedure and membership guidelines sperate? ... A discussion for another day. haha

I've never been a big fan of having two different mindsets but your right Caaran. Depending on who your coc is you might be able to do one thing that another coc wouldn't never allow. We should strive to make Taw more uniform regarding this, but even that is something most can't agree on. :)

Having members join for a casual gameplay in TeamSpeak and then reporting an ADHOC / EVENT could help, then having BAT COM approve said events with the intention of helping out the mandatory average, with that you would be able to maintain a good strong community even if for real life events they could not show up to the specific Division events.

In this way, we are allowing them to be part of a community if they are active members even if they can not show up to the Mandatory Events.