I started playing CM in 2019 and I’ve noticed there are now much fewer fun and creative COs with unique gimmicks. I wish there were more Windhealer, Bill Carson, and that one Japanese CO to spice up the sometimes rounds. So what happened, Are there just stricter RP rules or am I being nostalgic for stuff that still happens occasionally? and what is your opinion on Gimmicky COs
I don’t know where they went but I’ll be honest.
- Carson was a 1 trick pony of who just gave suicidal orders and gas lit the marines into thinking it was the opposite
- Windhealers gimmick of ‘squad names but native american’ was grating and felt out of place for the universe
Don’t get me started on the CCP PLA transfer guy (who should’ve been UPP).
Though, last I checked Windhealer is still around. I’ve not seen Carson since 2019.
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Colonel… I’ve been preparing for months… where are you 
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The council themselves have openly stated that the era of quirky CO is more or less over.
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The CO playerbase have all been replaced with MP mains and staffs (skinwalkers), so feel free to hire a UAV and kill them by proxy.
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The CO’s do get a little bit quirky at night…
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more than a little ;)))))))
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Jiro was forbidden by staff to use the Japanese accent, Windhealer was removed because of a discord perma (but lets be real, people have been gunning for his WL for a while), and Carson lost the WL a very long time ago due to inactivity.
The funny thing is these three people are the primary cause of why you don’t have super unique and fun COs anymore, all the silly stuff they did caused rules to be put in place that forbid doing what they used to do. Like mass BEing via OB for cowardice, mandating certain equipment is taken, and so on.
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Steelpoint is blasphemous traitor who’s deluded himself into believing Carson wasn’t actually a gigabrain fucking genius on par with Napoleon as a CO, ban he
In all honesty, they happen still, but very very rarely compared to before. Last quirky CO round I had was a few months back where the CO ordered us all to hide in the tall grass and pretend to be snakes, and then we all stood up and jumped the poor xenos who tried to join us in the grass. Funny as fuck, and relatively harmless. It certainly made all the marines basically worship the ground he stepped on, until he was decapitated almost instantly.
Honestly, I think the quirky rounds are great. Not every round obviously, but every once in a while it’s nice to just do something weird or retarded (This does not mean Bob Cross or River Cherry should get CO).
Personally I think that most people really did enjoy and appreciate them, but now rounds have kind of gotten… monotonous?
The homogenization of COs by the council may have ‘increased RP standards’, but that doesn’t really correlate with increased enjoyment for me, personally.
Imo, most COs are like synths in that most aren’t very memorable and if you took away the names, I wouldn’t be able to tell the vast majority apart.
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The grass dude was Jiro and he doesn’t really play after staffed shit on him for doing his Japanese gimmick he’s done for 7 years.
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I agree yeah, increasing RP standards may be interesting, but imo, CM always feels better when it’s got that larger then life leader to bring marines together… I think what should matter more then rp standards that only restrict rp, is rp that makes rounds more interesting, unique, and entertaining. Funny RP is not bad RP, even if it makes the character seem unrealistic.
Especially since, it feels like cm needs some humor in the rounds to help ease the tension and pace the game… That can be core to a great round vs a mediocre or bad one. I can say i’ve had a LOT more fun with Windhealer CO, Juro CO, Lauffer CO, etc, then rounds with a lot of the COs who don’t have gimmicks or noticeable character quirks. It feels like that heightens the impact of the character greatly.
And in the end, riflemen just want a hero who they know and look up to. Anything to close the distance between riflemen and command is good for the game. The characters aren’t poorly thought out anyway. They serve a purpose, since character quirks are memorable and easily transferrable information.
The quality of the whitelist improves with these characters, that close the distance between riflemen and command. So long as they keep in character, even if it is a gimmick or quirk, doesn’t mean it isn’t good rp or that it isn’t valuable to the server at large. Things feel stale when you’ve seen them too many times, which may happen quicker, but these characters aren’t done often enough that it warrants a full exception.
But its better to feel stale then for no one to remember your character. It’s fine to feel stale when you improve rounds by being memorable. Even overdone tropes have their purpose and meaning, and can be used to full affect. Recognizability can be a huge factor of a commander’s appeal to their troops.
A whitelist like the CO whitelist should serve value for the server. They do this by making rounds better for marines overall. In my opinion, that is quality that the CO whitelist should focus on. It’s important to refuse characters that don’t fit in universe or don’t fit as a commander, but this is the Falling Falcons, gimmick or quirk characters make the most sense. Very few people would be a commanding officer (let alone an officer) on the Almayer.
Plus, it’s more movielike. Alien is all about the trope characters.
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i love buzzwords
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A gimmick or quirk is all well and good, until you’ve had to replay the same thing for weeks and months in a row.
If everyone commander has a gimmick then when do you get to play a normal round? Its a hard line to balance and I’d rather we don’t balance it at all instead of going back to the era of meme commanders.
If I play only one round a day, I’d rather not be stuck in another round where the commander does something “fun”.
Yeah but now almost every CO is normal and barely distinguishable from each other 
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Ill take windhealer gimmick over the next copy paste co
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Even in the golden days of gimmicky COs, they were hardly the majority. Sure, windhealer might’ve gotten stale a bit- But I would’ve stilled preferred him over any copy-paste CO.
I honestly do believe the CO council made an error in believing the gimmicks were too often and crazy to the point they needed regulation- Even without regulation, the majority of rounds were still run by the faceless, nameless, occasionally neon-pink floor length braided COs.
The game felt “more CM” back then, and in the end I think that role play standards should be bent to suit the enjoyment of the playerbase, rather than the other way around.
We may be playing CM to LARP as ungas, but first and foremost we play for fun.
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I don’t want “normal rounds”
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A lot of things happened, but long and short of it is they got ousted by a buncha 1 week COs neverplay Staff who rushed the WL and then turned it into a MP+ role.
As a consequence for putting the focus on knowing and understanding ML and rule lawyering its led to a lot of COs who dont understand the mechanics, strategy and marine mentality and so you now have a bunch of strangers giving out the same copy paste orders and ultimately have no sway on marines (Apart from those new super cool OOC server rule changes) to get them to follow orders.
And as far as “RP” goes when will CM staff get it in their heads that the majority of memorable moments/players/occurences comes from the goofy shitshow side of CM and not the dorky milsim side.
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I guess as the one that always gets mentioned i’ll give my takeaway, honestly not sure. I’m not aware if council has made some rule against it, though council also has not communicated back or replied once to me on what they wanted to see from me to get my WL back on a new application (other CO’s who were discord banned got their WL re-enabled within minutes of re joining the discord, so I know this isn’t a general thing). I wouldn’t mind going for my CO WL again even under a completely different character, but i’m not going to bother grinding hours and writing up an application if theirs some unspoken blacklist in effect that no one wants to tell me about (though higher ranking staff have assured me that would not be allowed), I have reached out about 5 times now with no reply so who knows. I was not expecting to get my CO back after a 9 month hiatus and ban, but a little bit of communication from the staff whose primary role is just that would have been nice after I reached out so many times.
I think people very often just saw me as the “he says RED TRIBE and XENDIGOS” and put me at just that, but I like to think I had atleast my own unique spin on the game beyond face value RP aesthetics. I would try to do different plans and deployment routes (even if I probably ran the Big Red North Caves to death), organising the marines to build a cadeline across all of LV624 was a proud moment. The tribal shtick for windhealer was just a fun theme I liked playing around with, but I’d try to emulate my favorite CO’s in trying to direct a round that was a little bit outside the groundhog day meta. Stuff like Carson manouevers, dual drops, weird FoB locations, paratrooper drops, side objectives like rescuing Mr Wiggles, creating volunteer special squads like the MG squad, all the sort of stuff that didn’t always work to “win the round” but created interesting dynamics for players they might not have experienced before and gave a cool story afterwards.
Juro dealt with the same pigeonholing, of just being put down as the “guy who speaks in a racist accent”, was it a bit racist? Probably, but theirs also actual racists with genuine racist beliefs in the community all over the place, either way its not my say to judge on that end. But I will say that Juro put more effort into his commanding than the majority of his peers, he would draw up maps before drop, he would do SL briefings and full marine briefings, and people would get excited to play in his rounds. Then he would drop some crazy pincer-drop operation where he would personally lead a banzai charge and try to flank the hive from two sides, resulting in a one sided massacre for either side at a coin flip.
I was never really sure why their had to be this weird ego-rivalry between “serious HRPers” and goofy CO’s, if anything it added variety and made each stand out from eachover. Their was plenty of great CO’s who roleplayed as serious commanders, Heinz, Frans, Pierce, Rem (forgot his femstatic name) etc, and on the other side of the coin you had the big ones of Carson, Juro, Dinkle and myself.
If anything I think the problem in the CO WL was the CO’s who rolled and didn’t command, at all, the types that would just RP with MP’s all day, writing faxes to HC and barely giving a briefing beyond “everyone rush hydro, XO is in charge”. Ground COing was heavily policed and that was fair enough, but the sorta CO who just sat at his desk all round playing a pure RP job as a glorified CL was never once seen as a problem. COing should be about COing, you are the single biggest director of the round and the marine experience, and you should use that responsibility to bring something fun and memorable to it.
Maybe I am just old and jaded now, but I always felt that was what made a good CO, was not whether they were “realistic” or if they won rounds or not, but if they were memorable. The culture has shifted away from that and being more towards winning the round at all costs, this means most CO’s will just do what is meta or refuse to really command at all. Alot of CO’s had this attitude of “why bother even giving orders, marines dont listen anyway!”, I always hated that tbh, this cynical attitude that gave an easy excuse to not even try being a commander. If you put in the effort, if your fun to play with, if you build up rapport and make something memorable to talk about, then it turns out marines do in fact listen to you and the CO role really opens up for you into being what its meant to be beyond just being an announcement wrangler and OB button pusher.
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I miss goofy CO’s, and I was always mad when i heard about some funny shit they did that i missed out on, I wish we had them back. I genuinely could not tell you a thing about the popular generic CO’s but I can tell you windhealer had his own sport, Juro wanted his own sword, and Carson always stole his own personal escape pod.
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