“Why are all the SLs incompetent?” “Why does nobody know how to lead a squad?” “Why do we keep getting baldies in leadership roles?”
It’s because every competent SL eventually applies for CO whitelist and stops playing SL.
Squad Leader is a dead-end role. There’s no progression beyond it except moving up to command staff. And the CO whitelist application requires SL hours as a prerequisite. So what happens?
New player learns the game as rifleman
Gets good, decides to try leadership
Plays SL for a few months, gets competent
Realizes they enjoy leadership and want more responsibility
Grinds out the required hours for CO app
Gets whitelisted (or gets denied and grinds more hours)
Stops playing SL entirely because they can now play CO
This creates a permanent experience drain where the moment someone gets good at Squad Leader, they have every incentive to stop playing it. Why would you keep playing SL when you could be CO? The result is a constant rotation of inexperienced Squad Leaders getting thrown into a role that requires experience, failing, learning slowly, finally getting competent, then immediately leaving for the CO whitelist pipeline.
It’s not that players are bad. It’s that the game’s progression system is designed to extract good SLs and promote them out of the role.
Your rifleman won’t listen to you unless you give them special attention and make them zoom out of the combat.
CIC often will be too busy with other stuff to talk with you, mainly watching the situation and preparing to make callouts.
Radio telephone packs helped a lot with comunication issues, but mainly our radios get drowned by misc. Chatter and combat logs.
Different to that the CO is special enough that any and all Rifleman will at least notice it. And their orders can show up in a big fuck-off red announcement.
Plus, when you eventually get a good grasp on the roster some of the people who play roles very competently and acquainted to you stop playing.
You can lead the most effective squad that listens to orders and has initiative, but it’s a consistency thing more than a individual SL thing.
It’s not only the whitelist thing, for I knew many SL’s who just flat out stopped playing the game as SL and went around to play other roles.
Its kinda stressful and it comes without any perks to incentivise you to give more orders than “Oh, the frontline is here.“ or “Oh, we need to get comms up.“ and people will often ignore your orders because there are no real consequences to it, since there are also no benefits for it either.
Very intrigued by veteran SL as mentioned elsewhere in the thread. I play a lot of SL and my main draw towards it is the ability to better shape the outcome of the round with precision OBs, tactics, and of course access to freely spam my MOU.
Just have to accept the fact that only around 25% of your squad will follow you on average, the ones that do follow are usually the playmakers anyways. The rest don’t want to listen or even win, they want to charge directly into the obvious hellchoke, die instantly, salt in dchat and alt tab.
1-2 SLs coordinating with command can make a huge difference, would love to see it more. A shinier icon unironically might make the difference in player psychology to convince them to play more tactical. Game sucks when command gives an order to avoid an obvious unforced error, and nothing happens because none of the SLs make any attempt to make it happen groundside.
Now we can have frontline COs without the hassle of having actual frontline COs or the soul crushing responsibility that prevents people from ever using their CO WL in the first place
What do I do when I have the option to choose between Doe ‘Instacap’ Jafoe or Dai ‘Cuck’ Kuckyworth… who do I follow???
Alright now hear me out, clearly the natural next step is to make it accessible to people with 30,000 hours in SL too so we can have more reasonably achievable playtime rewards…
If you saw the roster of players with standout SL playtimes you’d throw up in your mouth. It is being given to COs because COs can be policed by the council, and I do not want to burden staff with policing the regulars who will toe the line and create more issues than this hopes to solve.
This is cool in concept, but another whitelisted role means 99% of players won’t get a chance to see it. Unless I’m mistaken and this isn’t a white-list thing. Personally I think whitelists aren’t really a good thing for the game, should be based on playtimes or something else rather. Gives people a chance to actually earn the role, rather then be given it based on their ability to write out an application.
If this was a more RP-focused role I’d understand the white-list, or a role like CO, where you have a lot of power, but this is just SL + is it not?
Another thing, does this actually replace the current SL? Would we be having two Alpha SL’s or just one? If it’s two then it kind of diminishes the original SL role too.
Don’t get me wrong, the sprites and gear seems really cool, I just dislike the idea of things being restricted to white-lists for the most part, people should be able to experience cool new stuff without having to jump through hoops to get it.
It’s not another whitelisted role. It’s based on the CO WL. If someone with the SL WL picks SL they automatically get it. (I imagine there will be an option to disable this in case a CO want’s to play a “regular” SL for whatever reason)
It would occupy the SL slot. You would not have two Alpha SL’s. Apart from the protag pistols, the squad icon and the armour there is no difference
Instead of making SLs become support you just made them more look like a fragger so they do less of their actual job.
These CO whitelisties will just run in the fuck down and get dragged to brazil.
And it kinda sucks that SL players would have to fight for the role with whitelist members too.
Just give to SL mains with plat medal if what you want to achieve is people to “listen” to their SLs. The more important looking they are the more they’ll listen.
