Alright, so I figured I need to write this down somewhere so here goes (and feedback is welcome):
1. I'm going to to be making a push to cut down the number of warrant officers in the Star Army now that the war is over. To do this, this means that I'll be looking for warrant officer characters and seeing if I can reclassify them as regular officers. There may be an update to the accelerated officer training program to facilitate this. There are not many Star Army occupations which should even have warrant officers
at all. For example, there are not supposed to be any warrant officer cooks, period, which brings me to the next point...
2. There are a lot of characters who are warrant officers who have been promoted erroneously from enlisted ranks due to confusion on how ranks work in the military. This is an issue when the occupation is supposed to be enlisted only. We're going to be trying to fix these on a case by case basis, with a preference for converting them to officers when it makes sense.
3. Since Star Army has been around a long time, a lot of characters are inactive and their players have left, so we can't consult their players about changes to the character's rank. Our stance on this is basically:
Players control their characters, but they don't get to control what decisions Hanako or the Star Army Personnel Command makes about their careers. Characters don't decide when they got promoted, transferred, assigned, etc. In other words, Star Army orders are up to the Star Army and we're going to issue orders whether or not the players are around.
a. If the players are around I'm going to talk to them about their preferences, the character's options, and then issue orders accordingly.
b. If the player is
not around I'm still going to issue orders and update the character - the characters will be placed some relatively quiet place where they can exist until the player returns, this may now include moving them to the reserves.
Unless we see something indicating otherwise we'll keep them in the Star Army until they reach 21 years of service at which point they'll be retired. If the character bio specifically says they plan to get out of the Star Army at a certain time we'll go with that. Remember terms of enlistment are usually 3 years each.
c. Characters who have been abandoned for a while can be fixed up and adopted or used as NPCs to give them some life, unless the bio says not to. This includes giving them a few promotions and career events to fill in the gaps in their histories as needed. I've actually adopted a few characters myself just for the purpose of fixing them up and using them as familiar faces in various locations in the setting.
d. If the player left over a year ago, got banned, or is not expected to return, and has also said the character is both NOT adoptable and NOT usable as an NPC then the character is basically no longer usable by anyone here, so I will issue orders
discharging them from the Star Army so they're not on our roster anymore.
4. As the years go by, the NPCs will slowly rise in ranks as well and you will see me giving orders to NPCs. Some NPCs, especially low-ranking ones, can be claimed by players as pre-generated player characters. The lowest ranking NPCs will be replaced by a new wave of fresh NPCs each year.
5. Characters without assignments will all be assigned SOMEWHERE as soon as possible.
6. Characters without orders threads will be provided orders threads as soon as possible.
7. Characters without data in struct will be updated to be on struct as soon as possible as they're discovered.
8. All of the Starship Operators we gave orders to in January in accordance with (IAW) the Accelerated Officer Program (AOP) should be officers now. I'm going to go through the starship operations list again and doing a second wave of orders to clean up any stragglers, which there definitely are some:
9. Please made sure your "Date of Rank" (DOR) on character sheets reflects the last year of promotion so we can identify characters that haven't been promoted in a while and could use a rank bump.
10. In cases where there's multiple MOS numbers listed on an occupation page we're going to try to split those up at some point so each MOS has a specific page. For example, some Cargo and Supply characters have been converted to the more-specific Unit Supply Specialist.
