Who?
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James Parker is the MAN!
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AND THEY SAY JAMES PARKER IS BORING
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Shortest James Parker yap session
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Pierce Jackson
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My favorite Serbian CO
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Holy fuck I missed the most based COs ops just because I didn’t had the courage for trying CM-SS13 earlier
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The notable gimmick COs like jiro and others left because of CO council drama. Windhealer had been getting witchhunted by neverplayers since day one and
As a former CO player, I have had this though for a while and I’ll say it, people feel that most COs are bland because being a unique one that is notable to the playerbase requires a level of creativity that many, including myself, lack in order to express your character properly without being ridiculously LRP and/or crossing lines.
Setting up sufficient RP to showcase your character simply doesn’t exist due to the game’s pacing and role responsibility takes first place before RP shenanigans.
The character you are trying to express can only really be apparent to shipsiders and most marines won’t see it. ( If you deploy you’ll just be sucked into combat and have little time for RP).
Which leaves briefing/announcement gimmicks, the low hanging fruit for CO players, which every single CO does and the character expression you can do using it is limited (oh wow u used a thesaurus and substituted a bunch of words cool back to shooting bugs)
It’s also why Carson’s strategy became boring quickly after he left, people quickly latched on to duplicate him that we had 30 carson clone CO players who did stuff with half the effort.
I gotta agree with stricter rules being atleast partially to blame for this too, the tools you had back in my day to express a character were small and nowadays its even smaller. Too many BEs? Line crossed. Cant send MPs down to enforce orders. No one gives a shit about insub marking.
The elephant in the room: Round “inertia” caused by meta strategies
This is a massive problem, even if you issue new,unique orders, a portion of the marines will always do what they always do on a given map, like going to hydro on LV, straight to filt on Solarias, etc in monkeybrain mode ignoring everything. This makes an inertia effect which causes rounds to feel similar and makes it harder for COs. There is a guaranteed 15-20% of the marine force that will do this on any round and you can’t do shit about it as a CO. (double it if its LV or Big Red)
I have experienced rounds where I ordered squads on paths to catch xenos by surprise and do flanks just to find out that the 5-8 players that actually listened are getting capped while the rest of the marine force is trying to push down a 4 tile gap guarded by the entire hive. And from my experience, the only things that can atleast partially control a deathball is spamming all channels & announcing queen location or firing OBs
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A marine brain is a one filled with neuron activation and desire to frag. Announcements sway the herd of cats if you have a good rep as a good CO/XO you can lead a good op sometimes strategies dont work out people know this sometimes its our fault when we lead but sometimes its not like a recent round where we had a lack of medics wondering where they all are instead of frontline then i recall… “Ah yes. Back at FOB they are. Fucking around with 5 T3s while Alpha and Delta are seemingly winning the hive dive.”
Heres something I’ve learned if the marines trust their SL and you give the SL some good orders the SL will do those orders. Generally now due to da rulez in place SLs have to go where command says even with my limited hours as SO and XO just enough to get gold i know this good enough. A good plan requires manpower and skill to carry it out and most plans even if they are just banging their head into a choke will do something… But very little and end up losing because no one is going to push a 4 tile choke just to get capped and kicked out of their spec or SG round cause. Everyone wants to play. Not get perma kicked out of their fun bit and forced to play xeno where they dont know how.
But anyway you got your own thought on it so i won’t question it as you have more experience than me, good sir. 
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Not as far as I’m aware of. Most oldies simply left of their own accord, for their own personal reasons. It’s not all “New Councils and their rulings turned away old players” stuff.
Windhealer had received a dozen and one “extra chances” throughout his time on the Whitelist, both from the CO Council(s) and Staff given all the stuff he did with skirting guidelines and server rules. I think what you call “witchhunting” was just people being upset that he wasn’t getting punished for stuff others would have eaten a ban or de-wl for.
Creativity is not the issue, to be honest. I know most of our whitelistees (current) well enough to know that they 100% have the capacity to write awesome characters and personalities. It’s - as you say yourself - an issue with the game and its pacing, as well as our overarching responsibilities. There’s little time to really ‘blossom’ as a character with CO since the moment you wake up, you have your hands filled with all manner of stuff. The only major downtime of “What do I do now?” that you may have as a CO is between announcing briefing and actually holding said briefing. But the moment one person goes to CIC to request something of you (like changing squads) you automatically have your hands full. Again.
There’s really no way to fix this. The CO is a important leadership figure by design, and because we play the game at the onset of an active combat deployment, you don’t exactly have time to sit around in your office, chatting with the XO and SOs about… anything, really. You have a job to do, and unlike Squaddies who simply have to grab their gear before drop, you have a ton of responsibility to uphold and live up to.
Council is planning to revitalise this, though, by holding more CO-focused or exclusive events, like today’s Chinook one. It’s not perfect, obviously, but a non-combat environment allows COs to get out there and have fun playing the characters they may try to showcase in-game, but rarely have the chance to do so. It can also help newer COs get a better feel for their CO personalities, and develop them better.
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Good take from a CO council member.
For the creativity part, I meant being creative to make yourself a notable character among the playerbase within the limits of the game design & pacing. Not many can pull it off and most of the historical ones relied on gimmicks that are stale at this point or would cross lines
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A lot of the “fun COs” people remember 100% relied on giant gimmicks to make them blatant in their “uniqueness”, yeah. Juro’s character often talked like a 1940s American would have imagined an Asian to sound like, for example, and let’s not mention Windhealer’s whole schtick.
The point is that the debate remains on whether we want more, better RP or “gimmicks”. The server as a whole has yet to really figure this out, but the last time RP guidelines were touched, we were told NCOs were meant to be held to a higher standard than PFCs, and Officers held to a higher standard than NCOs. The CO Whitelist is meant to be HRP and a presentable example to all Marine players not just to “show a cool and memorable gimmick”, but to set and help immerse players into the atmosphere of the world.
It’s hard to be unique when you’re military. Like IRL, duty comes first. You can’t let your personal thoughts and habits slip into everything you’re meant to be doing, especially as an Officer. You can look at this and apply it to CM, both in the RP aspect, and the gameplay aspect. Too many gimmicks and the game just becomes downright awful and stupid because we’re all led by O-4s who behave like chimpanzees.
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“Gimmicks” and better RP are not mutually exclusive. You can have unique traits and still provide good RP. Windhealer, Juro, Dinkle were engaging in RP a lot. Unless you mean “realistic” roleplay, but this is a game, it doesn’t have to be completely realistic. You say duty comes first, I say character comes first. Your job should affect your character, but not dictate.
Current state of WL is completely a policy issue. People are afraid to experiment because they risk losing WL or being shamed by milsim fans, I mean your stance as a councilor perfectly highlights the reason why we don’t have good things.
What’s even the point of current WL? You get WL, but you still aren’t trusted to experiment and bring anything new to the game. Even XO gets more trust (to the point you can almost freely grief) than CO, this really doesn’t make any sense. Personal events on Chinook and interactions with other COs are cool I guess, but I don’t think this is what the role should be about.
When I first joined the game, CO seemed like a god to me. The amount of player control they had was insane. And I look on the CO role now and think “why would anyone really go CO?” It seems like the amount of responsibilities you get outweight any new opportunities, which is actually sad if you think of it. And I think this really shows. Everything interesting I’ve seen lately was coming from XOs, not from COs. Again, just think of it. XO gets way more leeway than a whitelisted role. What’s even the point? Whitelist should give you control, not limit you.
Previously COs could shape the game, now the game shapes the COs.
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How do you roleplay in a game where if you stop for 5 seconds to type out a message a lurker leaps you and drags you off as everyone else fluoride stares? The thing is about CM is that rounds can last anywhere from 30 minutes after deployment to 3 hours after deployment. Every time I try to do a PFC gimmick like grabbing shelves and shit and running my own groundside version of REQ with supplies in an orderly fashion, I find the queen is dead or she’s already 20 feet away from me bashing down the cadeline. So aside from exaggerated gimmicks, how are COs meant to RP in a way that let’s everyone in on the fun? They can’t go down to the planet and sit there RPing with individual people. This isn’t SS13 where they can Ahelp and ask to trade their telecrystals for a fun gimmick item or something. The game just isn’t made for roleplay in that fashion.
99% of the time, the CO is just an announcer over the radio and so that’s their only ability to meaningfully RP and interact with the marines. Unless they want to RP with the rest of the command staff and inevitably throw the round because their attention is split between trying to watch an incoming flank and whatever pointless stuff is going on in CIC. Even then, roleplay has no meaningful bearing on the round because any real consequences that could arise never do for fear of it effecting the power balance and upsetting the xenos. When was the last time a CO exchanged some UPP survivors for a minigun or something? Or even convinced high command to overlook some black market fuckery? You can’t even get an answer to a fax 90% of the time.
And in defense of Juro, I see no reason to single the character as “racist”. Ok, so he has a funny accent and is goofy. That’s a caricature of all foreigners to literally everyone on the planet.
And frankly I would follow this man into combat any day : https://youtu.be/uACGSiN3ZkI?si=S5uYbR7-oUvZDRmo
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I’d have to disagree with RP having “no effect” on the round here- I find that often, CIC is distracted with roleplay and it ends up crushing CIC’s response time and awareness, leading to marines scattering and wiping.
Imo, RP that isn’t solidly intertwined with the TDM aspect of the game is heavily penalised since it ends up fucking over everyone planetside.
CO attending an execution? Woosh, no one notices that the marines have split into fun, bite-sized groups for the xenos to gobble up.
XO distracted by the CL trying to push cryptocurrencies? Uh oh, no one in CIC bothered to inform marines of the mega-flank helpfully notified by the sensor tower.
I mean, yeah- it’s an active combat mission, why the hell would the command staff run off to Willy Wonka’s crack cocaine factory to espouse their perspectives on the fentanyl epidemic instead of leading and keeping their platoon alive?
I don’t think the clash is at all fixable outside of making the non-combat period longer, which is rather game-breaking (and probably unpopular).
I have to agree with @ihatethisengine here in the fact that imo, the CO WL doesn’t bring much to the table in terms of RP. To me, XOs = COs. Only difference being that the CO can throw medals at people, can BE and gets a protagonist gun to smite xenos with when they deploy.
If anything, XOs have more personality since they aren’t constrained by WL expectations and can just RP as the worst possible person you’d want in command.
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@BasilHerb does raise a point that there have been multiple occurrences where CIC has engaged in roleplay to the detriment of the entire operation. A personal example was a semi-recent round where the XO was occupied with dealing with a survivor and a MT, which ended with them failing to notice that the entirety of Charlie and Delta squad were just wiped out and the Marines were in the process of being routed, and CIC had failed to even notify groundside of what was going on let alone where to wthdraw towards, which exacerbated the situation.
Outside of minor textual gimmicks regarding how you speak, it seems there is no real time to roleplay without negatively impacting the round flow from CIC’s perspective. Things move so fast that you genuinely can struggle to take five minutes to step away from CIC without something falling apart.
the CO WL doesn’t bring much to the table in terms of RP. To me, XOs = COs. Only difference being that the CO can throw medals at people, can BE and gets a protagonist gun to smite xenos with when they deploy
A reputation I’ve seen espoused by some players that the CO is more of a frontline combat-oriented XO, for better or for worse, true or not.
If anything, XOs have more personality
Personally, XO’s stand out more so to me since you are more likely to recall the terrible XO who may nonetheless have been funny to observe, whereas a by-the-books CO who does the job well and keeps the marines coordinated is not really unique. They are highly important and very critical for the Marines to do well, but not as memorable.
The same as how a QM packing ammo and keeping the frontline resupplied is a critical role but is not something anyone is going to remember or recall, but they will remember the CT who starts a fist-fight in the FOB cause they are hoarding all the ammo and trying to run a mini-req in the FOB.
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The day i see a CO tell XO to deploy is a day i will be happy. oh wait this has already happen. Heinz told me to deploy once as XO which I admire. Cause colonels and majors shouldn’t be running at the enemy regardless of if their a marine or not.
Check the definition of a personality, guys 
Antagonising the Marines by having Bravo split drop to front, calling evac just for yourself, behaving like a tribal or speaking with a strong accent arent personalities. Just like you cant immediately decipher someone you havent even seen in real life, you cant do that in game.
Hrm also today I think I will hop on Colonial Marines 13 as Commanding Officer, use Normandy pad for transport, put Bravo at front, build a cage in CIC to lock my SOs in and pass out of alcohol OD during briefing, finally enable and disable evac only for myself to escape. That ladies and gentlemen, is what I call shaping the game 
Not even gonna get into this “booh co whitelist bad” because no solution to this supposed “”“”“issue”“”“” has even been proposed, it’s just all PFC cope and nostalgia.
Old era COs were fun and arguably almost lit the whitelist on fire but theyre gone now and aren’t coming back.
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Give more leeway to CO, give more role-playing freedom besides “yet another military guy who does military stuff”. Let them modify SOP more, give more player control. Maybe introduce some system that makes it harder to lose WL for minor stuff, so people would be encouraged to try different things. Again, these people earned WL and what did they get besides protag gun? Why don’t you trust them to bring something new to the game?
Problem is not that they aren’t coming back, of course they aren’t. Problem is new CO like that cannot emerge anymore. And this is, again, a policy issue. If people thought of CO WL as of a great tool to make the game more fun, people would try it, but they don’t.
This happened already way too many times. I see a guy I know as a really interesting PFC rolling for CO, they eventually get the WL and then their CO character just blends. How comes? Why people can be fun and unique as PFC, but cannot as a whitelisted role? Why people can be fun and unique as XO?
I want to say “nothing personal”, but this is personal. People in the council and whoever in charge of WLs are accountable for the direction (in my opinion, wrong direction) the WL is moving towards.
UPD. I want to ask this question again. What even is the CO WL now? I can explain what it used to seem to me: a pass that let you do whatever (to a degree, of course, I don’t want to discuss semantics) you want with your ship and your men. Again, player control. It wasn’t always ideal, of course, but what is it now? You get higher standards and higher standards are “please be a military guy who does military stuff, because realistically you shouldn’t be anything else”, you get people constantly watching your back, you get fear of losing WL over some dumb stuff (never forget), and in exchange you get protag gun and a BE button you better never use. Like people really think that WL should just mean higher standards (in their own interpretation) and not access to higher control. What’s the point then? You don’t need WL to HRP. This honestly applies to all WLs lately, not just to CO.
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idk why but this shit has been stuck in my mind ever since the round happened it’s just so absurdly funny to me for whatever reason. i miss juro!!
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