The person piloting the SL is themselves an ineffective SL. There is no standardized training regimen to bring people up to a minimum expectation of their job responsibilities or capabilities. What we end up with is a circus of people learning the role through trial and error, putting everyone in the role at different points in their learning journey (it is NEVER over). You get the entire spectrum of possible SLs from buzz cut psychos to people whose only factual descriptors are limited to being a living and breathing human being.
It takes time, a certain masochistic motivation, the development of communication skills and game sense applicable only in CM to eventually churn out someone who some might call a competent leader. But they not only have to learn all of these things over however many hours of living, dying, and repeating; they then have to be able to apply what they’ve learned and communicate that effectively with anywhere between 2~30 people.
Most of the people beneath them are themselves not actually marines. They’re people who have logged onto CM with any number of motivations–mostly falling under “just to have fun”. They’ll do what is mostly immediately in their interest; Finding the nearest xeno and clicking on them until one or the other falls over horizontal. They are, like their SL, untrained to any minimum standard and are only beholden to obedience as much as they feel like.
As those SLs become more competent I’ve noticed that they slowly go up the chain of command. SLs become SOs, who go on to become XOs and COs. Those competent SLs remove themselves from the ground and allow that slot to be taken up by some fresh fool and the cycle will repeat itself. All of that game sense that lets people intuit what xenos might be plotting is now gated behind a comms array that may or may not be functional for one reason or another.
The overwatch interfaces are clunky and not engaging to interact with. They take up a not-insignificant amount of screen real estate and I have dedicate my 2nd monitor to having that functionality available to me while still being able to see what is actually going on. For those that don’t, their perspective of an already limited field of view from marine cameras constrains their ability to observe things happening in the round to near-pinhole vision.
Much like everything else with CM, SO start as untrained volunteers. They have no familiarity with their tools, their responsibilities, or their capabilities. They go through a similarly slow and painful process anyone else might of learning a new role through trial and error. Maybe pick up a few tips and tricks from observing or being subordinate to an SO whose been through some of that process.
With a starting point of nothing, you get people who are waiting around to be told how to be useful instead of proactively making themselves useful. There are precious few moments where someone can stop to start walking people through their job responsibilities because every match is a life and death scenario. There are no scheduled exercises pre-deployment to get people up to speed with what they need to be doing and how to be doing it. People slot in, aren’t engaged with surface level SO gameplay, and then peace out to do something where they feel like they’re playing the game.
Ideally communicating information that would be pertinent to all marines present on the ground. If your announcement has the right words, and people shipside know the map, even your shipside support staff can get an idea of what is going on on the planet.
But the ideal world is a dream.
Anything that needs to be done is like pulling teeth. You have to apply constant pressure to marines groundside to slowly influence what they are doing. The same announcement 5 times trying to get people to stop fighting at the choke and feeding xenos caps, to pull back a single landmark to allow xenos to push out and be destroyed. The push and pull that minimizes your risk of giving captures while maximizing your chance at killing the enemy.
If something requires the attention that a small tasked force would be able to do, without impacting the stability of the frontline, you have to use an announcement until someone finally says, “Fuck it, I guess I’ll do it.”
Directly tasking someone, even using their name to address them directly over the radio, often fails to generate any momentum to recover something like a team of dead marines in the backline.
That’s implying your comms are even on to begin with so that people can understand it. Then you have to filter through the radiopacks looking for someone who isn’t captured, dead, deaf, or ignoring their radio. If you do successfully connect with someone motivated to do what you are asking, they will face the same problem of needing to nag marines to generate momentum to finally get something done.
I tolerate it at best. It’s less enjoyable and more like a tax on my psyche that I put myself through when I feel like shoving splinters under my fingernails. It’s constrictive and not nearly as engaging as leading from the front. Shipside has its moments, and I have a rare mood where I don’t feel like leaving the bubble, but gameplay on the ground is consistently enjoyable and chaotic between shooting the shit with PFCs and get jumped by a lurker.
This remark from the most recent whitelist-announcement regarding CO’s deploying was something that I wanted to touch on.
I would love to be able to consistently trust that my subordinates are capable people and competent in their job’s responsibilities and tools.
The reality is that there is no minimum standard that people are trained up to. I can’t blanketly trust everyone under my command to be competent at their jobs and taking a proactive role in the round.
The most common example of delegation failing is trying to get an OB designated anywhere. I very often find myself having to beg down the squad roster from most to least senior trying to get anyone to give me coordinates. Squad Leaders give me nothing so I turn to FTLs. FTLs give me nothing so I turn to Specialists like the Scout and Sniper. Specialists give me nothing and I have to beg on every channel to every PFC with a rangefinder to give me something so we can press forward. I still very often get nothing and have to give command to my XO, spend 5~10 minutes gearing and deploying; and I show up personally to laze an OB in a situation that had not changed in the entire time it took me to get there.
This can be for any number of reasons. People just don’t know how, they don’t have the confidence to attempt an OB, or they’re just plain ignoring me assuming that someone else will do it (even after I try addressing people by name.
COs end up doing everything because they’re the only people who are willing, able, and know how to do everything. When something falls through because no one is doing it, a CO fills in because those things need to be done.
tldr: deny more CO apps