Corporation and Alliance tool overhaul (CSM)
Contents
Stats
- Raised by: Dierdra Vaal
- Submission Date: 2009/06/21
- Issue ID: TBA
Preface
As massive multiplayer game, communities form the heart of Eve. In New Eden, these communities are most commonly based around corporations, with the corporations sometimes organised into alliances. Large corporations often involve quite a lot of management effort, giving rise to the comment that "being a director is like having a second job that you have to pay for".
However, the current tools available to manage corporates are severely lacking, and are especially detrimental to corporate management. Certain settings force corporate management to make a choice between allowing security vulnerabilities or forcing a lot of extra effort on a select few individuals.
This proposal suggest a lot of extra features and changes to existing settings that should allow for better corporate management and make it be less error prone.
Problems and suggestions
More granular roles and permissions
A roles are big part of allowing members to function within a corp. These roles are often bundled in 'Titles' for clarity (shows on a player's info) and ease of use. For example, the 'POS Monkey' title may come with the roles 'Starbase Fuel Technician', 'Starbase Defense Operator' and 'Config Starbase Equipment'. While titles make roles a bit easier to manage, it is still far from perfect.
For example, while roles can be granted by anyone with 'Grantable roles', titles can only be granted by a director. In large corporations, you may want your Logistics Manager be able to grant the 'POS Monkey' title to his underlings without making him a full director (with all the wallet, hangar and corporate access that comes with that). Additionally, having a role to grant others titles is not enough, as you'd want to specify which titles a person can grant. It is not desireable that the Logistics Manager who gives people the 'POS Monkey' title can also hand out 'Hangar Manager' titles (which come with a different set of roles and access rights).
A role that is missing is one that allows a player to set corp/alliance to corp/alliance standings (diplomacy). Currently only directors can do this, meaning the directors have to spend time setting standings or a corporation's diplomatic staff have to have director level access. It is desired that there is a role to allow players to set diplomatic standings without requiring director level access.
Another part that requires a lot of refining is POS access rights. These are currently too generalized and as such pose a serious security risk. For example, in order for a pilot to use Rent Factory/Research Slot, they also need to have the role Factory Manager. Factory Manager allows them to cancel or deliver jobs that are not their own. Instead, it is desired that pilots can be individually assigned roles to allow them to install, cancel and deliver only their own jobs - without given them any access to other jobs. This gets further complicated (or even impossible) when examining pilots from different corps within the same alliance trying to use labs on a POS.
Wallet access can be specified per wallet division, but it is impossible to grant seperate 'take from' and 'give to' rights per person, per wallet division. This compromises security when pilots wish to sell items on behalf of the corp, as it requires them to have 'take' access from the wallet as well.
While definately a complicated problem, the current way roles and titles are handled is not sufficient for large corporations and alliances. Additionally, many roles are not granular enough to allow for a secure division of labour, power and responsibility.
Evemail as corporate logging facility
Currently Evemail is used to log corporate events such as players applying, players leaving, POSes under attack, POSes out of fuel, corporate votes, etc. This causes the evemail inboxes of directors of large corporations to overflow with these (often irrelevant) notifications. This also prevents directors - people for whom communication is extremely important - from using their evemail for its intended purpose.
It is recommended that the logging of corporate events is done in a different fashion, one which does not flood evemail inboxes.
Two solutions have been suggested:
- Log to a seperate user interface component (most likely part of the corporation interface). This would be combined with adjustable access roles for members regarding this interface component. Most likely the most versatile solution as it should allow for sorting and filtering and keep historic logs.
- Instead of having player application/player leaving mails, station bills, corporate vote notifications, etc all come from the the player or corporation in question, group mails from the same category under a common sender, similar to DED sending POS related mails and CONCORD sending mails regardings wars and delete characters. For example, all mails regarding people applying or leaving could be sent by My Corp's HR Department. This solution is not as versatile as solution 1 but may be a lot easier to implement. It would signifcantly reduce inbox clutter and make it easier to mass delete irrelevant evemails.
Alliance assets
Currently, corporations in Eve can have a corporate wallet (used to fund a corporations needs) and corporate hangars that can be shared amongst members of that corporation. However, with the introduction of alliances in Eve, alliance hangars and wallets have become desireable. At the moment alliance wallets are sometimes simulated by creating a 'holding corp' as executor corp of the alliance which only has a few members - usually alts of directors of the real corps within the alliance. This can be cumbersome.
Additionally, the lack of alliance hangars can be a problem when trying to share assets between members of different corps within an alliance. A mining op where haulers from corporation A desire to haul ore from an Orca from corporation B is an example where this would be desired.
It is suggested to introduce alliance hangars and an alliance wallet, similar to the current corporate hangar and wallet, with its own set of access rights/roles. The alliance wallet could be used to automatically pay alliance bills if the funds are sufficient.
Corporate/Alliance mail
The character limit on evemails extends to corporate and alliances mails. This forces some corporations to post multi-part mails when conveying long messages to their members, which does not increase readability and further clutters corporate and alliance mailboxes.
It is suggested that the character limit on alliance and corporate mail is increased.
Corporation interface
The corporation interface is the main tool to manage a corporation, its roles and titles, its members and diplomacy. However, the user interface itself leaves a lot to be desired:
- Member list - loads all pilots by default instead of only those online (checkbox unchecked by default). This causes the game to freeze for several seconds for large corporations
- Applications list - works only on a per-one basis, meaning only one application can be denied/accepted/sent mail to at a time. This makes maintaining the list a lot of work.
- Automatic evemail replies to applicants on events such as apply, accept and deny would be extremely useful
- Role management and title management interfaces are cluttered and error prone
- Etcetera
It is suggested these user interface shortcomings receive an upgrade aimed at increasing the usability of the components.
Assessment
Pros
- Less burn out through corporate management
- Less security risks for corporations
- More efficient corporate management
- Happy directors everywhere
Cons
- None
Relevant Forum Threads
- http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1050953
- http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1059463
- http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1088711
- http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=784349
- http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1060195