Officer Armor has toggleable Trackers

Development Ideaguys
1

I wish for a way to track Officers leading the marine force.

More often than not they’re:
1 Faster because they’re making the decisions of where to move.
2 Faster because they’re unwounded still.
3 Faster because sometimes they dont even have armor.

And sometimes people disperse because they lost DIRECT LINE OF SIGHT of the Officer.

It would be extremely important in some last ditches push to the hive with direct leadership of SO and above.

Since we have ways to track our SL, whoever the SL is, also ways to track our FTLs, I thought we could now have an armor that can toggle tracking so the whole marine force can track the Officer.

tl;dr Officer armor with track toggle for marines.

3 Likes
2

inb4 marines use this during a mutiny

3 Likes
3

Make it groundside only. Boom.

1 Like
4

That would unnecessarily limit it’s use, just have ARES automatically disable them in the event of a mutiny.
(Meant to reply to Penpusher, oops)

2 Likes
5

Speaking of tracking, it’d be nice if non-squad marines could choose to track other marines if they are wearing armour (such as IO tracking a SL or CO/XO).

3 Likes
6

The Armor user should get an Icon/Verb that toggles if he is trackable or not.
Even during a mutiny, if the XO or CO is using trackable armor shipside, then thats a skill issue.

1 Like
7

I’m reviving this back again.

  • Have the Senior and Staff Radio Headset have a toggleable tracker. or
  • Have their armor have it. So it’s only alvailable to be used when groundside or while red alert or above. or
  • Have only officers and SLs/aSLs be able to toggle to SO/XO/CO with the toggle on.

Recently I’ve seen a lot more of COs/XOs deploying because of new(ish) rules regarding those roles being able to deploy. This has become even more of an issue because many times some of these things happen. (Deployed Officer/DO: SO/XO/CO with the intent of leading marines.)

Deployed Officer goes off on his own and gets ambushed/killed.
Deployed Officer walks too fast because of the three reasons in the OP. Marines lose sight of DO and start to scatter instead of rallying.
Deployed Officer is on the Almayer during hijack and there is no way of knowing where he is without comms, phones or line of sight.

Which is not a problem with SLs whatsoever, but the marines can’t afford to lose Officers, and specially Captain and above officers.

Why don’t they have trackers?

8

Isn’t that because marine force could be potentailly too organised (murderball) according to staff/community/council of beetroot/whatever?

9

That’s fine. There’s really no problem with this and it’s easy to circumvent by just not wearing armor or implementing a way to toggle the tracker.

It’s fun and funny and you can deal with it if you’re smart. No need to nerf something before it’s even been shown to actually be a bad thing that needs fixing.

10 
+1, IO buff
11

This convo gets revived like “add back the apc”

If you need to be hand held like a xeno cause you don’t want to read announcements or read radio chatter you’re kinda of taking away what makes playing marine hard but fun.

; exist to find out where you’re supposed to be going

Not to mention the tac map has had some crazy improvements recently

12

APC blocking xenos and the way it was used was broken. Good riddance.

I don’t know what you’re talking about xenos beign handheld because they don’t want to read announcements when the WHOLE xeno experience is reading chat.

No one has tacmap. Only the holder of the tablet has and most of the time it’s the CO. We’ve come full circle.

13

Arrow vs reading is my argument

If I wanted to get more nit picky you shouldn’t be on the officers you should be on your SL.

14

Would be pretty strong if everyone was able to track the CO just like they would with an SL. I agree, I think this change would diminish the RP potential. As CO currently needs to announce/radio chatter their location and where they are rallying. This presents as a challenge for marines to overcome.

1 Like
15

That’s a dumb challenge.

By the way this can already be circumvented if you put the major into one of the squads.
Marines just doesnt use it. Maybe I should XO and try this once.

Put Captain in echo.
Put all surviving marines except limited slots in echo.
???
Hive core down, Profit.

16

Skill Issue. If an Officer is running off on their own and getting ambushed by Xenos then they shouldn’t have deployed in the first place. It’d be incentivizing bad behavior to give Command players an EZ Tracker so that they can wordlessly run off in a direction, but now with added support!

Skill Issue. If you’re not sticking with the marines as an Officer you’re doing a bad job. You’re there to lead them, they’re not there to follow you. Do your job and actually lead rather than expecting them to magically know where you are.

Get organized with the people around you and take comms back? Go out looking for the CO/XO/SO with other marines if you don’t know where they are? I don’t see how adding an EZ Tracker works as anything other than a crutch for marine players who don’t want to actually communicate with their team.

Murderballs aren’t organized nor are they fun, creative, or anything even remotely resembling good for the game. It is, instead, a complete lack of organization where marine players simply go “Oh, they’re walking this way so I’ll also walk this way.” You can forget about Squad Leaders having their marines pursue important tasks like restoring comms or the sensor tower. You can forget about organizing a flank to break a stalemate at any number of chokepoints. You can entirely forget about marines following any order other than “PRESS W AND MOVE FORWARD!”

When the entire marine force bunches up in a single location, people completely neglect to follow orders that aren’t spammed at them in all caps from their SL, SO, XO, and CO simultaneously. To say that a murderball is “too organised” is a fundamental misunderstanding of what organization is.

Do not do this. This is stupid. The Commanding Officer isn’t a squad marine and there is never any point in time where they should be in a squad.

At this point we should remove all squads but 1 and just load all the marines into that, right? That way nobody ever has to actually communicate and can instead follow the 1 guy who the tracker points at, right? If we did that we could just remove CIC because there is no need for communication anymore, right?

Adding more trackers does nothing but de-incentivize communication and actual good gameplay. It instead tells players that they no longer need to listen to comms, no longer need to pay attention to orders, and no longer need to dedicate conscious thought to actually playing the game. You could simply change the tracker to the deployed SO, XO, or CO and ignore your own SL for the duration of the operation, essentially making having a squad moot in the first place.

I have and will continue to urge people to actually ask questions in their Squad Channels to get the information that a tracker would provide. If you do not know where an SO, XO, or CO is, you are capable of typing the sentence “Hey, where is X person right now?” It, unsurprisingly, took less than 5 seconds to do.

2 Likes
17

Correct take.

18

It was this kind of answer I was looking for when I asked “Why don’t they have trackers”

I agree with most of this after reading your reasoning but now I have to ask:

Why SLs have the trackers then?

19

“Apes together strong” is exactly what the most primitive way of organisation can be, primitve, but still. Just because you don’t have to use complicated words, orders and signs doesn’t mean it isn’t organised.
Ant colony is organised, can’t disagree with that, right? Well, instead of ant pheromones directing other ants to follow the one who found food/enemy/something we have SL trackers and sight who direct marines to a point.

Murderball is a peak of organisation in a game with random people and no voice chat that can be achieved on regular basis.

I don’t have opinion if it is either good, or bad for the game, but saying that it isn’t organised is simply not true in my opinion.

Murderball breaking is when it becomes disorganised. It is chaos, but it is an organised chaos with roles dynamicaly changing in a blink of an eye. On the 7 tile battlefield such need for a new role appears and disappears in a blink of an eye, you won’t even have time to hit the “say” button and write a single word before it is gone.

Each murderball even have a proper structure and high morale. PFCs as the tip of a spear that constantly sharpens itself with more and more marines replacing wounded and dead. Wounded and dead go down to the shaft where medics and replacements are. The rest is sprinkled with engies, SLs, Specs, Smartgunners and CAS/OB/Mortar spotters.

All those “important” tasks mentioned like restoring comms, sensor tower, or a flank are just a murderball on a smaller scale.
Marines have their head hit with a brick called “STICK TOGETHER WHY YOU ALONE” every round, but when too many stick together they get scolded yet again, you stick together too much, why you in such a big group?

I personally been in and observed a lot of so called “flanks to break stalemate” where one squad detaches from the murderball to pull out the super hiper big brain flank, only to get decimated on the way there, because they lack numbers and were surrounded (what do you expect to happen when you do that?). The same mechanic as with split drops. I know that every CO goon dreams of pulling out a big brain move to claim that their clever strategy won the game, so they get mad at any autonomous marine behaviour dictated by their experience in the field.

20

Co “goon”

Bro your mad goofy

COs having a tracker would make these “non death ball plans” easier to do but what do I know. I’m just a goon

2 Likes