True but you are more likey to get a riot on your hands. but still it will clear up after a bit of doing it.
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When a Xenomorph is insubordinate, you banish them and move on.
When a Marine is insubordinate, you need to arrest them, process them, detain them, grant them an appeal, work through the appeal, grant them possible future appears for the Provost, deal with that plus possibly mods/admins asking questions, then you need to keep a watch over them until they serve a sentence than release them. You also can’t really do this on a frontline or on the planet.
Marines being terrible to coordinate and keep cohesive is by design and intention, its why we have split squad comms, its why you can’t see anything, its why having a updated TacMap was only added a few months ago and it takes forever to update.
I would love it if people stuck to their Squad Leaders and generally remained cohesive, but outside of punitive measures or outright changing the core of how the game works, I don’t see how you’d do it.
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My shitty edit. But yes it really is like battling xeno is like fighting Guerrillas more so than fighting CLF funnily. so guess its lore accurate.
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Apparently ‘checking marines every health tick’ is very resource intensive, according to what the maintainer said. Couldn’t it just be updated such that it checks once every several health ticks instead?
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It’s extremely hard for any human being to pay attention on what’s going on in the screen and pay attention to chat, especially if you have multiple radio channels going off. Command will announce “Alpha stop going north, your orders were to go West - OB is Cluster” and yet 30 seconds will pass by with Alpha still be pushing north with 3 people asking over the radio “WHAT IS THE OB?” These orders were also given in briefing and then announced during the first drop but the information went in one ear and out the other.
It’s extremely rare to have someone on Squad Leader that knows the map layout, will roleplay correctly and follow command orders without bitching, communicate with their squad and attempt to rally them on certain locations via call outs, actually lead the squad where they need to go, call in OB/CAS/Mortar, be prepared to handle engineering tasks and actually stay alive during the early-medium part of a round. Being a good Squad Leader is one of the hardest roles to accomplish on the server and very few people are willing to put in the time and effort to do so.
New players join the server constantly and run off into the darkness because they want to explore and have no idea what’s going on, only to die or get captured. You would think this would be a one time event but no, their exploration was cut short and they’re gonna do it again next round. Too many veteran players have died listening to command/shit orders/followed bad SL, and have gotten to the point where they’ll decide on a case by case basis on if they’ll follow orders or stick with the squad. Entirely depends who’s giving the order and if they think it’s a good idea. Not only more focused on winning more focused on not letting some random lead them to their doom and end their round by the 40 minute mark.
Maybe people don’t wanna hear this but marines are beyond overpowered. Like if you had 2 super computer AIs controlling xenos and marines, the marines would win every single time and it wouldn’t even be close. The bulk of marine balance is within the fact that marines are able to friendly fire and kill one very easily and the fact of the more people you have “trying” to work together, the harder it is to achieve good cohesion. It’s a lot easier to have 30 players working together and achieving the same goal compared to 150 players. Not only that but xeno roleplay is they are slaves of the queen more or less and cannot disobey orders. Almost everyone in the marines can disobey orders IC’ly, with only a few being OOC’ly bound to follow CIC orders. This is all by design.
Insubordination on a deployed marine who isn’t doing what they are told or is actively harming the operation is completely meaningless and does nothing. This is almost impossible to handle correctly from a roleplay point of view and the xenos handle it via OOC means by just straight up banishing the xeno.
People recommending OOC script responses to the IC issue of cohesion like buffing squad orders or “marine pheromones” aint it. This entire “problem” is a straight up skill issue on the marines part. We could all easily put aside our problems/differences and have Joe Dafoe/Chen/Stafford, etc, CO every single round lead the marines to victory but that would be boring as shit after few days. It’s a roleplay server, we need silly/bad XOs leading marines to their complete doom with confusing orders, we need Bob Cross split drops, we need the under 10 hours XO to freeze up at the first sign of trouble and go completely mute.
Squad cohesion isn’t getting worse, it’s exactly the same where it was a thousand rounds ago. Each round in itself will have different levels of cohesion via a myriad of reasons. Sometimes the marines are unstoppable, sometimes a single lurker is all it takes to break everything apart. The only thing I will say is that many amazing Squad Leaders don’t play SL anymore, they’ve either become COs, are enjoying other more relaxing roles or have straight up moved on from the server/play less. Be the change you want to see in the world, start grinding Squad Leader and improve the cohesion yourself IC’ly, not by OOC PRs.
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I mean yes most of can agree that Having better SLs and trying to get better at being SL will do the world of good.
But that’s the thing even the best well known SLs still can’t get any amount of cohesion. i know because i have seen my most beloved SL cash the conga line master get only 2 lads not just running off after the drop.
This has happens not just a few time but almost every time i see him take up alpha SL. The reason for the talk about OOC PRs is because its gotten so bad even some of the best SLs are getting no were.
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It can but that’s just lazy, ideally there should be completely different system with different more efficient logic. Maybe if it only checked for SL (if SL were the only source of pheros) it would be bearable.
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Honestly FTLs do jackshit anyways (people dont use FTs, and when they do, FTLs stay mute and pick their nose)- I bet restricting it to SL/aSL only would be fine.
However, there is a way to make it flawless- If FTLs were renamed back to RTOs, there would be no reason for the radio guy to emit pheremones whatsoever!!! Finally, a good reason to revert the blight of FTLs from CM 
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So what, you’re saying I should just shoot my squad members who run off like I’m some commisar? Pretty sure I’m gunna get SL banned for that.
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I say make following orders from SL and command more binding even to riflemen marines. Try it for like a week or 2 and see how it does, let test some other ideas while at it too.
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This goes back to a problem that, admitedly , Sandvich did point out in a round about way; how do you enforce that though?
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Precisely having a OOC rule will be hard to enforce as well as being too draconian. And if its not OOC rule is going to be even harder to enforce.
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Like I said earlier, at this point we’re almost forced to be Comissars and even then your own men will probably shoot you unless that’s the new rule.
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hot take.
If CIC is fully staffed with four staff officers.
The squads they are overwatching should be the only squads they hear on comms, rather than hearing every single channel.
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not reading this, not following my SL either. PFC Chungus Maximus doesn’t listen to sissy liberal woke commanders #DVRKPFC #MPGA #BIGCHUNGUS #GETSOME #DRAINTHECIC #PVTSWEEP
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Uhhhh…i kind of like that idea but i can see it going really badly.
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I’m a firm believer that encouraging marines to stick to SLs with game mechanics and incentives is a far better solution than making the game a hellish nightmare for admins and CIC by increasing the amount of insubordination charges or increasing punishments IC.
You don’t solve a game mechanic issue by trying to fix the players, you do it by changing said game mechanics.
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Fair, but we also need to look what can be done with in the pre-existing mechanics and rules.
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I am back playing SL a fair bit now,
And lads I am going to be real-
your just shite at RP, if you want squad cohesion be attention grabbing and develop good roleplay skills under stress
you want to be noticed, not another NPC thats just used as a beacon for where the front is
my best advice if your new to SL,
Always keep talking about what is happening and talk about it like you would if you were in that situation.
(not everyone is going to listen, but fuck em your the SL)
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I just don’t know if changing the rules will actually be a good idea. Expanding the “must follow all non-suicidal orders” rule from a handful of people (about 12+ people) each round and expanding it to literally every PFC (increasing the number of people eligible to pretty much the entire server) is a rather big ask for staff.
Using pre-existing game mechanics is well, what we’re already doing. Orders have been a thing, just not implemented very well.
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