Garbled CIC announcements are soulful but terrible to play with

General Discussion
21

Half the SLs don’t take radiopacks, the other half got capped in the first push, and the remaining half are going to hear you and not relay a single word to their squad lmao.

On a serious note, I think the garble needs to be toned down. Even announcing immediately after decrypting leaves a good portion of the announcement scrambled, and if you wait the 30s for a second announcement without decrypting, it will be unintelligible. I also think CIC needs a way to see the announcement’s scramble so they can tell how bad it is, especially in longer announcements wherein you have no idea which parts got lost and which didn’t.

It generally just feels like we’ve chosen “realism” over fun, which I’m generally not a fan of. CIC, even when understaffed, should generally be able to communicate with the marines, even when comms is down.

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22

Said +10 marines each garbled announcemet.

Said CO to XO and his two SO’s every single time they want to announce anything with comms down.

At this point add “Command Secretary” role to just receive and make calls.

Is it really expected from every single radiopack user to call CIC every time command announcement is completly unreadable? Is it official CM staff statement?

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23

I’m not staff. Also maybe if you’re so fucking concerned about comms being down you should get marines to go fix them instead of pushing out garbled announcements reading “QUEEN SCREECH!” Half of y’all motherfuckers don’t even announce anything remotely useful anyways. Why do you think the majority of marines ignore comms regardless of if they’re garbled?

“CIC should be able to communicate when the communications relay is down” is what you just typed, by the way. So again, maybe y’all should prioritize getting comms back up instead of spamming announcements. Or, better yet, stop babying all the SLs by doing their jobs for them.

Announcements shouldn’t be getting used to say “QUEEN SCREECH! CHAAAARGE!” We need to stop spamming out announcements off cooldown and instead only announce when we actually have something useful to say. The majority of players ignore announcements precisely because 90% of the time they contain NO USEFUL INFORMATION!

Also we’re all operating with the belief that all of our SLs are useless and won’t relay orders to their squad? Have we considered for a second it’s because we announce every order we want marines to follow to the entire fucking Company? Have we considered picking up one of the phones and calling an SL to tell them what to do instead of blasting “ALPHA, DELTA, GO HYDRO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!” over announcements? Have we considered calling them by their name on their comms channel or on command comms to tell a squad what to do instead of blasting “CHARLIE GO GET COMMS BACK UP NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!” over announcements? Have we considered that the current state of SL is so fucking atrocious because we’ve tried our absolute best to take all their agency away from them?

This isn’t a new problem. But through enacting changes like this that should necessitate actual teamwork we’re attempting to combat the trend of concentrating literally all responsibility in, essentially, just the CO. This may come as a surprise to y’all coming from the CO Senator, but COs are doing WAY TOO MUCH. COs, and by extension XOs, should be delegating responsibility to OTHERS. Staff Officers should be able to keep their squad updated and give their SLs tasks without having to go “Major, Captain, is it ok if I nicely request my SL get some of their marines to comms?” Squad Leaders should be making decisions about flanks and whether or not their squad needs to fallback independently of a CO/XO announcement blaring “ALL MARINES FOB RETREAT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!”

Command is meant to function as a support role, as in providing support to the marines on the ground. Squad Leaders are meant to be groundside commanders and are by their very nature supposed to be giving their squads orders. Instead we’re treating it as if every single decision that ever needs to be made has to come from the CIC and, more explicitly, the CO/XO. Alpha and Delta SLs should be entirely capable of ordering their marines to a certain location, and CIC should only step in if that it the wrong fucking decision. Seriously, we need to stop treating everyone with kid gloves and expect them to actually use a little bit of grey matter if they’re in a leadership role.

4 Likes
24

Shrimply remove non-shipside announcements.

They don’t even make sense, why would you have separate comms frequencies if a Major can just skip three steps on the chain of command and blast orders into the ears of every single marine under their command? At least a ship-wide announcement is reasonable.

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25

Why do you think the majority of marines ignore comms regardless of if they’re garbled?

I agree, but the garble made this issue worse, not better.

“CIC should be able to communicate when the communications relay is down” is what you just typed, by the way. So again, maybe y’all should prioritize getting comms back up instead of spamming announcements.

Yes, I do think that CIC should be able to communicate, because it makes the game fun. And while limitations to that are fine, I think the garble is an overcorrection. A more reasonable amount of interference that is constant and doesn’t require encryption, or a longer announcement cooldown would all be better implementations of this idea.

Or, better yet, stop babying all the SLs by doing their jobs for them.

I can’t make SLs want to play their role. At the end of the day, if they wanna be PFC+, they’re gonna be PFC+.

Announcements shouldn’t be getting used to say “QUEEN SCREECH! CHAAAARGE!” We need to stop spamming out announcements off cooldown and instead only announce when we actually have something useful to say. The majority of players ignore announcements precisely because 90% of the time they contain NO USEFUL INFORMATION!

Agreed, but we’re moving further away from this, not closer. SOs can now make announcements, meaning we now get 6 marine-wide announcements every 30 seconds and the additional squads mean that each squad leader now communicates with fewer marines. Additionally, with the garble, the more time the XO/CO spends decrypting, the less time they have to actually call SLs and give support. They’re pushed towards the path of least resistance.

Seriously, we need to stop treating everyone with kid gloves and expect them to actually use a little bit of grey matter if they’re in a leadership role.

Again, I agree. But there are dozens of possible changes that would actually make a meaningful difference to this; the garble has patently not helped. Increasing the announcement timer, removing squad-specific comms from the XO/CO, and giving the SL a radiopack would all improve this issue. CIC being totally fucking useless when comms goes down is just silly, and reduces the game into a single-player shooter.

Shrimply remove non-shipside announcements.

Honestly, I’d rather that than the current implementation.

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26

Could be solved in a PR - if they make an announcement that could be improved with decryption, send a chat message, something like “Error: This announcement was only partially sent, decryption required for mitigation.”

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27

The garbling doesn’t seem to add anything beneficial to anyone. I understand why it should be garbled, but I’d almost think it’d be better if it limited the garbling to if you’re inside of a cave or inside of a structure.

Station maps might need something different because it’s all inside a structure.

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28

Chill dude, it is not “Whitelist” category on the forum.

Majority of marines ignore comms regardless if they are garbled, or not, so just making them garbled surerly will somehow fix it, right?

I’m also not concerned about comms being down, I’m concerned about announcements sometimes being completly illegible. Maybe if marines got crystal clear announcement to try to retake comms, they would, instead of 10+ marines calling CIC at the same time.

How is announcement gibberish fixing that? The big problem apparently is meaningless announcement about nothing interesting, so making and keeping some of those announcements unreadble does what exactly to help?

They get a lot of power, they get a lot of responsability.

What, or who is preventing that from happening? Every single CO is projecting an aura of fear for entire CIC staff so they ask them about everything and are afraid to have a little bit of agency on their own? Or maybe they get screamed at if they do?
Anyway, how some announcements being harder to read helps with that?
I’m not well versed in CIC side of things, but as a “boots on the grounds” marine I can see that plenty SLs already are pretty independant in what they do. In the past some were so independant in fact that they got rules changed to have to somewhat obey Command a bit from the start.

Garbled announcements helps with that how?

The less clear information marines get, the more they act uncoordinated and selfish. It is obvious.

Admit it, garbled announcements further harmed marine coordination, teamwork, usefull information in those announcements etc.

I would also like official CO senator statement that 10+ marines are supposed to call CIC every time comms are down and Command sends a garbled announcement, while CIC also has to call every single alive radiopack marine at the same time too.

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29

You’re not going to magically make people play better by cringing their ability to communicate even more. I dont like this argument that ‘players are being coddled too much and thats why they’re not doing their job, if we force them to get better or die it will solve our problems’, becauee it just makes no sense. If you make commanding marines and getting orders a complete pain in the ass, people are just going to disengage fron the system entirely.

You already see this with comm garbles, CIC could literally just decrypt, yet no one does it. Out of every round Ive played, 90%+ of CIC players simply do not engage with the garble mechanic and continue spamming their uncomprehensible announcements. There’s always some radiopacks planetside, yet its extremely rare for people to call CIC to say “hey dumbass, we cant hear you, wtf did you say?”.

People are not engaging with comms garbling in a meaningful way, thus it is effectively a nerf that cripples CIC-planetside comms.

If you introduce a PROBLEM which can be solved through an annoying and tedious process that is so unfun and disengaging for the majority of the playerbase to bother with, then that’s the designer’s fault, not the user’s.

I dislike how many defending arguments for annoyingly obtuse mechanics like comms garbling boils down to “sorry man its a player issue the mechanic is awesome, maybe players should just do the tedious and annoying thing?”. It makes no sense whatsoever, and just feels so out of touch. I guarantee you the overwhelming majority of players who ACTIVELY play dislike conms garbling.

Its a damn TDM RP game people play for fun, if they arent having fun with a featute then it means that feature is still half-baked and needs more time in the oven.

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30

Most of the point in this thread are just people either being lazy or having a skill issue tbh.

Decryption can easily be done in advance 1 min before comms go out. People just refuse to use their heads. It takes tops 30 seconds to decrypt.

Current cic issues, atleast for me, its really hard to make SLs follow orders. I don’t know if its pure skill issue or just that they think they know beter or community issue.

Other than that, i would suggest adding a ground SO role (something like field doctor), that would have the job of fob operator, groundside logistics team and move the decryption to him. This could solve the issue of people who dont want to do decryption.

I don’t know about other people, but for me personally one SO is enough to manage cic by myself. I can do it solo but with A.S.S. I doubt i can handle all 6 squads.

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31

Isn’t this what Bravo SL should be doing? I’m not knocking the idea but most of the things listed are things that Bravo SL should be coordinating isn’t it?

Adding a groundside SO would just be another person for Bravo’s to ignore as they rush to frontline.

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32

the only people who think screech announcements aren’t useful are neverfraggers and FOB cadehuggers

morale is a thing you know and thats why dropship alarm sound should get removed too like garbled announcements

its a community issue and a development issue. Marines need to tryhard so they do it the most optimal way. You cant really blame people for going NRP when “following” the norms would make you lose. The captain shouldnt be even giving direct orders but they do it cause thats the most optimal way to get things through.

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What is decryption and how do you do it?

Maybe that’s not explained anywhere that makes sense and it’s not something easy to figure out while wrestling greased up deaf guy runners in the backline.

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34

When comms goes down, announcements and squad messages become more garbled and unreadable over time. Decryption is a small mini-game done in the CIC that ungarbles these announcements for a short period of time. If comms is not restored then it will start to garble again requiring decryption once more.

Problem is it only appears garbled to groundside so CIC often don’t realise that their messages are completly unreadable unless someone calls them on an RTO pack to let them know.

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35

Removing announcements and wanting to larp WW2 switch board operators in SS13 is one of the most un fun things I’ve heard. We have to remember this is SS13-CM, some ideas are great on paper and suck in game. (I would fucking love to larp the shit out of a commander coordinating an entire planetary invasion with just phones, but the idea just doesn’t work) there are limitations to how fast you can pass orders even with the hivemind.

The realities are SLs are mute 90% of the time. I really wish it was different but it isn’t

The games pace has picked up considerably in the past years, with rounds now only lasting 1-2 hours max. An average round ends is lucky to pass an hour (with prep time included) A front can wipe in seconds now

Cutting announcements is not a good idea: let me try to coordinate 100+ chickens 12 at a ti-and they all wiped (which has been happening a LOT with announcement garbles if you need hard proof)

We already went down this whole pipline just in 2021 where comms were cut back to only command comms and two squads (from watermelon dev). The result was CIC was un fun and it was quickly reverted after community push back. Maybe we need to calm down with the game sweeping changes and focus on fixing what we have in that’s already not working

PS: No this isn’t a total doomer post that’s “REEEEE NO DON’T REMOVE ANNOUCMENTS”. I’d be very open to having announcements removed if CIC and RTO packs are revamped. Like making it an actual gameplay loop for the XO pass orders to SOs and so forth, but this has to be done with an actual plan. Not a half baked change

image
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(This is what CIC could look like with each desk having it’s own dedicated player to pass information and could possibly be the coolest thing if done correctly)

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36

Great, in an usual CM round with RTO calling CIC:
”Comms garbled, let’s call CIC” said 10+ people with RTO.

8+ of them calling with no answer or phone line busy, 2+ luckily enough to have their phone connected. Takes 1 min at least to realize what happens.

Meanwhile their loose marines charging or running wild outside of their PoV. Takes them another min least to herding people around them.

If CIC announced things in 1-2 mins in advance, sure marines can react in time, yet most of CIC only reacted after things happened. Isn’t the point of announcement is on time reaction? If it takes that much time and effort for a reaction, just remove announcement at that point. “USE THE PHONE INSTEAD”. GOOD IDEA.

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37

Here’s an idea: Instead of RTO packs working like a telephone would, why don’t they work like, you know, a radio? You pick it up, you select the frequency or channel you want to talk on, and you start talking. You could then nerf it by introducing some slight garbling of comms that’s relative to each player (i.e. the FTLs groundside and the GP overhead can talk to each other clearly, but for the DP back at the Almayer, it sounds a little bit garbled). You could also nerf it by taking away the name of the player talking and leaving it up to a few random letters and numbers assigned to each pack (this way you have to identify yourself on the net).

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38

Chen once again speaking truth.

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Me when I get everyone to go on the same channel so we have effective constant inter-squad general comms

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40

2026 we’re cooking with gas

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