I will say, announcement garble is like the only thing that makes not holding comms as a negative. Because before garble, the downside was groundside marines couldn’t use their radio. But they still all get every nececcry information being broadcasted by the XO/CO every 4-5 minutes with “QUEEN HERE” “ALPHA GO WEST” “ DELTA GO KILL THAT LURKER” or whatever. Communications weren’t actually lost, but it was just slightly inconvenienced.
Like did anyone on the front actully miss out much from comms missing? OBs are always called via phone, CAS dosn’t work in the terrain half the time same as mortar, squads and squadleaders still got specific messages from SOs and the XO/CO with perfect clarity. Why even bother, unless you are some lone fragger in the backline who couldn’t message “HELP” after getting ganked?
Your assumption that losing comms being a ‘minor’ inconvenience hangs on a hyper competent, ideal CIC. That kind of dream CIC rarely ever happens and in the majority of cases CIC is completely incompetent and fails at many basic tasks, like announcing wipes or KIAs.
In the majority of cases, losing comms sucked big time because SLs and groundside marines were literally relaying 90% of information back and forth while CIC tried to figure out how to look at the tacmap.
If you’re rallying your teammates, you don’t rely on CIC. You use your comms channel. If you’re relaying any information to anyone outside your FOV, you use your comms channel. People groundside have a far better understanding of the planetside situation, relying on CIC announcements is like relying on a blind grandma to guide you through a traffic intersection.
OBs and such can be called in using radio packs… you can technically call anyone with a radio to relay information… yet if you go in any round, half the people don’t even touch their phones, and a sizable chunk of people who would’ve called an OB just end up not bothering. Player issue? Sure, but it doesn’t mean players will get better by adding garbling. Player skill and competence has stayed stagnant since day 1, and any hopeful thinking that ‘this PR will make players get better at the game’ is total baloney.
I’d hardly say losing comms was a minor inconvenience. In some cases, sure. It depends massively on how competent your CIC is, and most of the time CIC is bald or understaffed as fuck. Add in comms garbling and now a bald CIC becomes a non-existent CIC.
Yeah, as Basil said, not really. Announcements (used to) let you relay information to marines, but without comms marines have a lot harder time relay information to you and to each other, which is also pretty important and makes losing comms a huge downside. Calling contacts, flanks, queen’s location, commanding your squad, all becomes a lot harder. You can’t call for help, or scream “DYING HYDRO” to make sure you’ll get recovered. You can’t ask if your battle buddy is still alive. The list is really long.
Not to mention that if you lose comms, xenos are likely to put a pylon there, which just directly lowers your chances to win the game.
I didn’t know there’s was a way to do that. Does CIC get any kind of feedback on the messages being garbled? I don’t play in CIC so I’m ignorant of what all actually happens in there.
They don’t which is one of the issues mentioned above. The only way they know it’s unreadable is if someone calls them. People have stated above that they either get spammed by 10 RTO’s screaming to unfuck comms or they get dead silence.
We also just had a round where the CO’s ui messed up and he couldn’t ungarble comms as every other cic officer had deployed. They had to get the GP to run up and decrypt it. That’s not an issue with the system itself persay but it’s an relevant anecdote.
CIC is already an insane amount of “lock in” to manage the data coming in, especially with ASS (I like the idea but from what I saw overwatching is even more of a nightmare) and having to pause and break flow to do the decrypt minigame is a real hinderance that no one asked for.
Be cool if the Normandy was a relay. And each pack was itself a relay so you could have folks spaced out to maintain a link.
When I was a deputy our radios did that. The car would pick up our handhelds and relay it to the comm towers at the firestations spread out through the county. They had more power so you could actually reach dispatch out in the backwoods.
Maybe push the decrypt minigame down to the ground instead? I almost think the field team (JTAC, Comtec) would have more fun than the already stretched thin CIC.
Honestly I am just tired of garble. It’s not just annoying to read, it’s annoying to just see as well. I noticed that I pay less and less attention to announcements, just not even looking at them. I caught myself a few times not looking at actually clean announcements, because I subconsciously expect ********************************* instead of something useful.
Man, even as xeno when a Queen tried to highlight something like *this* it instantly triggered me.
yeah I’ve just checked out at this point. I don’t bother looking at announcements, squad messages or SL messages. Insubordination isn’t even a thing anymore because no one can fucking understand CIC.
I remember being the sole marine planetside and they would spam me with messages constantly, I literally couldn’t read a single fucking one.
I agree that while soulful, it’s also so shitty to play with.
I think maybe as a compromise, only have garbled command messages if xenos control a comm site (which could be overridden temporarily with a decode from CIC)
If you PING and you get **** instead of PONG you know it’s fucked, and can tell how fucked it is from how garbled the PONG is. This requires you to be checking the decryption consoles anyway, of course.
I don’t play XO much anymore but I hate garble because of how easy it is to lose comms, especially on lowpop.
Power out? One runner hit it a few times? Burrower smashed it open? Sorry, the next 30 minutes of your life will be spent hoping beyond hope someone on the planet with an RTO pack hasn’t been capped and can send someone to that position. Usually you want to avoid this with a squad babysitting comms but that’s also godawful and sometimes it’s going to go down regardless and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Sure, decryption only takes 30 seconds if you know what you’re doing. But there’s literally zero feedback to it. I’d feel a lot better if I got a “hey dipshit your message was just asterisks” when I sent it instead of hoping one guy down below is going to call me and let me know its garbled to fuck (which only happens after like 3+ messages on average).
Any sort of feedback topside fixes this issue. That’s all it takes. Just a “this message sucked and you should fix it” that the person sending the announcement could see to have any sort of feedback instead of typing nothingness into the void for 12 minutes while groundside gets flanked and eaten alive.