I’m talking about some other CO. As I wrote, I don’t care if someone’s in-game 1st language is not English.
I have only ever expressed distaste for meme Commanders.
No comment.
Actually I rescind the no comment, Its really nice to see you guys stick up for Windhealer. Like that is a genuinely nice thing to see. I fuck with that heavy and he is a player who brought alot of life to the whitelist and absolute chaos to my dms. If I had to go back and do it over again. I wouldn’t change anything. Thats how much the player impacted me.
Big ups to my boy Dreven.
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i take offense to that, I’m an overzealous white person after all and I wouldnt do that shit
Every CO now turns into a mesh of one. There’s no definitive features about any of them. They don’t do anything very unique that’s about their character. Sorry to dissapoint some CO players but the current ones are very forgettable and I sometimes confuse them with eachother.
The Whitelist should focus more on uniqueness and more on what each CO does differently than the other rather than military hero number 238 or wounded vet 135.
If everyone commander has a gimmick then when do you get to play a normal round?
A ‘normal’ round is not going to be fun or have roleplay, it will either be a marine win or a xeno win with COs barking down orders with the tablet on the frontlines or in the CIC bubble, unless an event’s taking place… sorry to say but people play video games to have fun, I don’t find the usual deploy, hydro push, retreat/push caves, hijack/win with zero flavor fun or exciting.
I remember Windhealer used to get me riled up with the “Xendigos” and charging right in the thick of it while inspiring every marine close to him to literally give their life for their Major. I’ve rarely seen people truly and willingly charge right into battle and sacrifice themselves for anyone else, especially nowadays.
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Some of the best games of our time are based on both sides doing the same thing over and over with little change. The fact of the matter is no game is going to hold your attention for hundreds or thousands of hours, eventually something has to yield and that’s usually the player.
This is not some grand destruction conspiracy of CM-SS13 losing its unique edge and becoming dull or the change to CO roleplay rules has ruined the experience, the truth I suspect is just individual players losing interest in the game over time, which is natural.
I lost interest in the game after playing it nonstop from 2015 to 2019, and took a break from then right till the start of 2023.
Personally, I think we have a tinge of nostalgia fogging our vision here, or that the grass is greener on the other side.
In the past, for every ‘memorable’ CO with a gimmick that had a fun round we participated in, we without doubt had far more gimmick rounds that ended with frustration and boredom when you were forced to throw the game or waste time doing something unfun.
When people call out certain CO’s, I don’t recall their fun rounds, I recall the times we threw rounds and lost in sub-1 hour for a gimmick, or when they baited a mutiny, or otherwise screwed over a round.
I don’t want to chase that 1 golden round only to suffer under the banality of a dozen shit rounds to reach it.
I do respect the opinions of everyone here, and I do concur there is likely truth to the many statements made in opposition to my position, I’m not trying to say anyone against my opinion is wrong, only that I am expressing my opinion that I think the current state of affairs is a good one, in the grand scheme of things.
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Far more gimmick rounds that ended in frustration?
says who? thats a substantial assumption
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true, even if many rounds were lost because of the gimmick, most of it is still fun to play
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Gimmicks are a good thing.
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I feel proud to say that I have never once had marines attempt mutiny against me (barring times the MP’s have tried to arrest me, and one time I lead a mutiny against my own XO).
Also personally I feel like losing a round in an hour doesn’t make it a terrible round, but I also come from 70/30 days so my mindset about winning or not could be different, I believe that marines are meant to lose groundside and evac is meant to occur, the best victory for me is winning a hijack or after a big fob siege and leading a counter attack with the grizzled survivors of it.
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The beckscapades
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Nasoki Chen, glorified PFC and mediocre CO to cook
Dreven holds a near and dear place for me in CM, he showed me how to be a commander with kahunas, not be boring, interact with everyone that you could, and winning isn’t everything. Solid CO who had people gunning for him to the point I couldn’t interact with him anymore. I had issues develop with Dreven after he made a PTSD joke, but he didn’t make it in bad faith. It was a joke and I just didn’t like it. Still more comptent than half the COs that play today.
Now get ready for some deep CO lore. This is all my opinion, I don’t really care if you agree with it or not. It’s long, explains the why gimmick COs left or were removed, and touches some parts that factor in.
The good
The CO WL used to be a dumpster fire, an absolute mess with punishments all over the place, and a not so great councillor team where half of them were inactive. Nothing was being done to fix it and the CO WL started letting in bad faith MP players that really started to shake the ship. Apps would take forever to get pushed through and only COs opinions were considered instead of the communities. Yet they came out of it with some hard handed policies and replacing those councillors that didn’t do anything to help. Most COs today while boring won’t ruin your rounds (most I’ll get on to that later). Punishments today are standard across the board with COs being a chance to explain themselves, but still being punished as necessary.
The mid.
The CO council is in a strange spot. They’ve taken strides to improve RP at the cost of memorable gimmick COs. It’s made the WL stable with the least amount of drama ever, little to no bickering over dumb shit like Combat COs vs CIC COs. Yet shipside RP is nearly dead due to game changes, and the meat of the round is groundside. Not much to blame on the CO WL there, just how the game changed. There’s also nothing wrong with sitting in CIC, some great COs do it and crush it like my dawg Hienz.
The bad
The council is filled once again with people that don’t play. That wouldn’t be such an issue except our head honcho Sammy is numbero uno in this crime. They go inactive for long periods of time without warning. (This is not to be a peanut or drama post on Sammy, they’re an outstanding person who’ve done great things for the WL, and have spilled countless years of effort into improving it. They have my long lasting respect for someone sticking around so long) Yet I feel it’s time to let Sammy pass on the torch to someone who actually plays the game and bring in energy to take the WL to new levels.
Our WL oversee is even worse in this. I’ll let you figure out who he is cause that’s how inactive he is. It’s the same issue with staff, where inactive people who don’t play the game are allowed to call the shots for a large majority of people that play in an important position. How does this relate to gimmick COs at all? Well they set the rules for them, and someone not even playing setting the rules isn’t great.
A prime example of someone who did this was C4 aka George Franks, he took a break and took it giving up his position so someone else could take it.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with moving on from CM or being burnt out, but don’t hold a position that you’re not putting the effort in like you used to. Take your break, but don’t do it at the expense of others when you’re in a position of power. There’s nothing people can do except have the person do themselves as CM has this issue from staff all the way to the WL.
Many of them have stated the age of gimmick COs is over and have made efforts to make sure. Yet while it’s in a controlled spot, the council is doing little to improve the CO WL. We’re filled with boring COs, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but we’re like stale bread. I’m beating a dead horse here but COs today are just bland with little to no personality cause that’s all they’ve seen.
The CO WL is in a spot where someone with drive can take it to new levels, give old faces a new chance, and make some REAL changes besides editing the CO guidelines every four months.
The Ugly
Bad faith COs and incompetent COs.
The people who killed gimmick COs cause they felt threatened
The CO WL moving foward
BEing people then bragging about how many you do is not something a CO should be doing. Usually the “RP COs” are the faces of shitty BEs. The council has done little to fix this due to most of them not seeing them, yet the community knows. Do your part and report shitty BEs. They’re a tools for extreme situations, not a RP toy. It’s a shitty gimmick and if the council wants CO gimmicks gone, they should remove COs that gimmick is the BE.
COs who add nothing to a round and who only interact with the community through ,abcd should have stayed playing XO. This boring playing of not making a round feel special is just eh.
Gimmick COs were more popular than RP driven COs for an obvious reason. That’s not to say they were perfect. Gimmick COs would usually talk with everyone they could, and make the round feel truly special. RP COs are usually boring, but there are some that do it great. That’s not to say Gimmick COs were fun. Many people praise Bill Carson, and he is a legend that did good. Yet if anyone had to play under him today, there would be an absolute meltdown with the community today. Most people that meat ride him have never actually player under him.
Dreven was targeted cause he had a big ego that other COs didn’t like, “RP” focused COs finally got their way when he was removed.
Recently the argument has come up again “CO applications should play MP”. I’m not going to even bother to explain this as MPs have such a bad reputation. Staff have also been making moves on the WL, but that’s for another post and ramble.
Summary:
Many gimmick COs have simply left as CM has changed and time moves on. What was done to Juro was absolutely criminal as they never played in bad faith. Most newer COs have never interacted with a proper CO gimmick or played under them. It’s hard for them to play something they’ve never seen done right. RP COs now dominate the majority of the WL and there’s nothing wrong with that. The WL is in a spot to be great, but nothing is being done with it.
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I think saying “gimmick COs are the COs that lose the game before 1 hr mark” is not correct.
Yeah we had Bill Carson whose gimmick was playing suboptimally and sending marines to death (as his successor Bob Cross does). But Juro’s and Windhealer’s tactic wasn’t really suboptimal, it was just bold. You cannot really say they were trying to lose. Yeah they didn’t play safe, but they didn’t try to throw either. Next we had Dinkle. My memory is blurry, but I remember his gimmick just as being a bit silly and childish, I don’t remember him playing bad or something. I recall him being pretty competent. Greg’s gimmick was taking RP to extreme, was he also “trying to lose”? I don’t think so. So we’ve already proved that having a gimmick doesn’t mean losing. Yeah, probably intentionally roleplaying as a bad CO/XO is the easiest way to get noticed, but gimmicks were/are not limited to this.
Yeah nostalgia surely plays a big role here, but I don’t think that’s just it. We had a Juro round fairly recently, it went really bad (marines lost quickly) but people in dchat were genuinely happy. We will always have loud minority who just hate fun, who gets annoyed by every minor thing, like getting annoyed by Asian symbols in chat. Do we really should follow these people’s vision of the game?
Also, another point to make, being a normal CO is not bad at all. We have some good COs currently, who are pretty interesting even within current limits. But the thing about gimmicks, CO’s with gimmicks allowed “normal CO” to really stand out from the rest. Being normal was kinda memorable on it’s own. It was kind of a balance that I would like to get back to.
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Absolutely true and a god damn shame.
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What happened?
Juro Played a month ago as CO.
I’ve got no issues with people doing gimmicks like that, but there were several times Juro crossed the line from funny characture into racism, and that’s not what we want. It wasn’t a hard bar to ask him to turn it down and last I checked he was a really good sport about it.
As for other gimmicks like @ihatethisengine said, Good COs 99% of the time play to the gimmick. Whether winning or losing, it’s not about the Round it’s about them as a character. I genuinely belive these characters are a lot more effective at roleplay and creating the “CM Experience” than any of the COs whose mantra is “marine major” and play to the meta.
What we also seem to forget is that all the CO’s mentioned in this thread, loathed (or would loath) to use the current deployment omnipotent CO meta. From Juro to Dreven, to Carson, they played as characters first and weren’t afraid to go off pieste .
@CO Council 
you’ve got a job to do.
Wait Juro got the WL? I thought he played XO.
What makes a good Commander?
I’d say constant communicate puts you in the top percentile.
Tell me about it. I’m a first generation Asian immigrant, so I have lived with many people who didn’t speak English as a first language. I wouldn’t say that the way we speak is just like what Juro did (especially when you consider that the “Asian accent” is going to vary considerably depending on your native language) but it is closer than what many people would imagine.
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A good commander is the one that drips his blood into the soil, one that is a beacon on order amoungst chaos. Someone who holds the banner, the torch of the force. To take action, and for others to blindly follow, out of nothing but pure trust.
That makes a good commander.
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nah a good co is the one that forces alpha to build the fob
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