janspader - Commanding Officer Application

[eMiiX]

Celestine to this day still one of my favorite XO's, They are great at relaying information, They are well aware and can even get solo CIC on their back, Taking responsibility of any failure and ensuring their men have a choice or are safe to leave if the time comes. I played many rounds with her, and also against her, I don't have many complains against, In fact the opposite, She is great defensive XO, and she manage to hold and properly organize marines to an outstanding level, while other XO's would fail to relay orders that fast and organize marines at this levels, holding for hours untill getting a nuke multiple rounds despite the hive pushing and constantly harassing even with low numbers and managing to recover to high numbers.

The only minor things i could remark, is sometimes a lack of RP when i tried to interact or get her involved in any RP scenario or issue ingame, she will simply relay it on radio, or have it dealt with the respective deparment or MP's and not take the time to hear the issue most of the times, or attend in person, but i also kinda understand it, either by lack of staff, or busy with the operation, Yet i wish they took a bit more personal involvement when those moments occur, Wich i hope she does if she gets the WL.

The other point i would like to address, and she knows this well, is giving a bit more trust on your men and officers. I had no issues 99% of the time with her in command, But there was that 1% where your man were heavily injured or orders and supplies got denied and argued for 3 minutes straight, While people groundside is asking for them, The CO himself is still fighting, even if the finger is hovering over the evac call, The moment you evac, you loose. That round ended up lasting more hours than it should with the supplies and hold, even if we lost later on, But the investment and effort from everyone was carried till the end. Just be less negative on that 1% of games, Try your best always, Regardless the situation or who's the enemy. If some supplies get lost groundside, well, fuck it, we tried our best.

Also saw some people comment on her getting into departments, specially REQ, and grabbing gear without saying too much, i feel like i could have unintentionally accustomed her while i was spamming RO role, Constantly allowing her round and round after round to grab the gear, while i'm dealing with the line or early round preparations so it all flows nicely, and i don't also loose much time while dealing with a massive line and preparation alone. But i would agree she also needs to give out more orders, or get people involved into doing the works, as a captain, instead of coming to REQ and helping to man the line, or doing other tasks. Order and appoint people, you are the captain, and as last resort, do it yourself if its really needed.

I believe there is no doubt she will be a great CO if she gets accepted +1

[c4xmaniac]

I made the promise to wait a while before commenting on apps, and I’ve let this one set for a little over a week now along with playing a few rounds with you. I think I’ve gotten a feel enough to make a proper post. Again, I’d like to remind you and everyone reading this application that I could quite easily just never post my thoughts or opinions and keep everything internal, but the application process is about improving applicants so that they CAN be accepted in the future, and so I’m going to comment my thoughts so that hopefully your next application will be improved.

With that being said, lets get into the application itself.

Your story and story answers are good, so good that it directs me to the first major problem I have with you getting CO, but I will save that for the next section. Your pardon and BE answer are generic and serviceable, but after hundreds of CO apps over the years, its basically impossible to make interesting answers. Overall the application itself is well put together, and up to the standard we’re looking for, if not a decent ways above it.
The first problem I have as I alluded to above is your character, you have interesting lore. A woman born to a british émigré in the US, spending time in multiple countries during a cold war. There’s a lot that can come from this, but none of this is shown in game. You don’t really role play, I don’t mean that as in you can’t, but you just don’t. When given RP scenarios from staff, you ignore them – when placed forcefully into rp scenarios by other players (a la mutinies) you don’t interact with them. I think that you and I have a very different opinion on what the CO WL is. The CO WL, to me, is first and foremost an RP role with mechanics taking a backseat. It appears to be the opposite for you. In your answer to Tyrus, you make your reasons for getting CO almost entirely mechanical. Your lack of willingness to roleplay combined with your own words about why you wish to get CO is a major red flag.

Much has already been said about your tendencies to go into auto-pilot, so I won’t comment on it much more than saying its very much so still a thing, and I think it’s a problem. What I think has been touched on less, is your refusal to delegate tasks. As an XO, you should be delegating tasks to your men, doubly so as the CO. However, you do not delegate. You manually load the OB, and have/will order the MT loading the OB out of the powerloader to load it yourself. You will go to medbay to grab a full medical kit, despite being in CIC all round with no reason to have it, you have medical personnel onboard, you don’t need it. You will go to req and kick out CTs manning it, or drag boxes around and load them despite having a full requisitions team. You are either the aCO or 2nd in command, you should not be manually doing everything.

Finally, I simply do not believe at this time you’re ready at this time to become a CO. There are too many glaring issues, and a lot of them are because of your extensive hours rather than in spite of them. You’re very routinized and its going to take some doing to get out of it. I’m also questionable about how much I’d trust you with a BE at the moment, considering how you respond to losing.
TL;DR -1

[Sitrep]

I will preface this by saying I played a multitude of rounds in the past, and a few days ago before properly writing this up. I combined and looked through some of my old footage from when I recorded CM often and gave me a good look at your old and new style of commanding.

1. Your style and general attitude around commanding has not changed much, other than slightly extending the words you add to command announcements and limiting your use of ,ABCD there’s no noticeable change. I will say that it feels like you do try to win as much as you can and it has somewhat improved marines winning under your command. This could be a byproduct of your hours or you could be winning more rounds.

2. When presented with options to roleplay, you often stay silent and prefer a shoot-first ask questions later mindset. I don’t believe this is fitting of a marine officer, nor does it match into your story. However, your story is awesome. It feels like dialogue you’d actually see in a movie or video game. You went as far as adding in how you usually send out command orders, in all caps. However, that’s all I can see transfer over in-game. I don’t often see you holding your tongue about things so the constant nodding within the story is off-putting to me. You are also not the type to transmit clear and concise motivational speeches. As far as I’ve learned from chats on the discord with you and others that you run DnD styled CM sessions on your own discord, someone with the ability to craft stories and host them is surely a better roleplayer than the average CM player and that’s where my disappointment in your lack of story involvement comes from.

I’m going to be playing as many rounds as I can this month to see if anything has changed since my post, until then, I’m going to be providing my -1 to the application.

[Firecharge123]

I'm going to add something to my comment on this application that I think are amplifying what I said previously and must be stated. . .

In an earlier round today, I was dispatched as a provost to arrest the CO of the round for other reasons I will not specify. As the Provost Team leader, I had attempted contact with Celest, the current XO of the round, in game, multiple times and it took literally SHOVING them to get their attention. After approx. 10 minutes of standing in CIC and leaving to speak with the CMP and coming back for them to fully acknowledge my existence on the ship. I was attempting to notify them of the arrest of the CO and possibly RP with them while I waited for the CO to return shipside. I was ignored by them and even commented about it in game ICly that the XO is ignoring me. I made no quiet entrance with even a ARES announcement about it, and directly contacting them. From what I can tell, they were completely oblivious to my existence until they realized fully that I was attempting to contact them with physical actions. After I got their attention, they shrugged me off and continued to lead the operation, which was not going so well, and did not attempt any roleplay with me or my team whatsoever until after I stated I was arresting the CO- which again they just shrugged me off and continued with the operation.

Later on during the arrest, marines incited a riot and were attempting to claim back the CO. Celest made an extremely poor choice and made an announcement to get ON MY SHIP and leave with me while they were still attempting to kill, maim and stab me. After attempting to gain information from them via an admin PM, they stated specifically that they did it not to incite damage to the provost team, but to evacuate 'the 10 marines that could not hold lifeboats' and to make them leave on my ship as it is more convenient. Why evacuate on the ship full of people they are trying to kill, when you don't have enough men to hold and you have multiple escape plans including another dropship, about 25 escape pods, 2 lifeboats and a will to live? The one they choose is they ship that caused great pain for High command. Even if not on purpose, the announcement was inciting marines to continue to assault the high command vessel, this is clearly shortsighted behavior.

I feel in this situation, it elaborates on what I stated before. No roleplay, and additionally they have 0 common sense of last minute decisions. If it doesn't follow a copy paste TDM format, it is yet another problem for them to ignore or not give good advice on. I also see that it is really dumb that the captain of the ship would ignore the provosts, high command, are on the ship. This is extremely LRP and if anything is negative roleplay. This is further emphasizing that I do not think Celest is a good fit for the CO whitelist. My -1 remains the same.

[MrDadMan]

I love Shay as much as the next friend here, but even as someone with such good ties with you, I must forward my thoughts

I think you're a great commander, but I don't believe you deserve the promotion. Any time myself or my close friends in staff try to do events for you, you've demonstrated capabilities that are subpar. I have no confidence in your ability to roleplay

While you can demonstrate leadership where needed, your creativity has dulled and your roleplay has worsened. I love you in the community, truly. You're an amazing person to be around and joke with. But after you refused to listen to the council's advice and after seeing the way you spoke about one of them behind their back, I can't trust you in a position that holds the most responsibility to the round nor can I support you when you won't support yourself -1

[QuickLoad]

Pretty capable player and can vouch for their RP competency as well as their lengthy experience in command. I have played many rounds with them as my XO and I can reliably delegate them to do any task. They've also steadily been improving in terms of character, immersion and consistency. Watched them lead a round and played a round with them on 552 just the other day. I was able to have them coordinate a backline response team to any incursions or repairs necessary in terms of fob, comms, etc. They were always ontop of things and not ONCE did I have to micromanage or check in with them. Do try to get your deploy times up on other maps though!!

[naut]

So you've certainly shown improvement since your last application in most of the aspects addressed last time and people have vouched for you on the. Improvement is good.

Let me preface this by saying that once again "playtime" or "grinding hours" will not be valid reasons we go over in our reasoning below.

Unfortunately, we still don't believe it to be enough improvement at this time for the whitelist. There are generalized concerns about lack of delegation and leadership ability. As a leader you are expected to delegate and trust something will get done. Trying to attend to everything by yourself inhibits your ability to command and lead overall. This was a consistent problem that we've observed on several occasions.

Second, major actions on the ship that needed your attention were often left unattended in the case of Provost trying to get your attention, or serious interpersonal issues between staff directly under your control. The operation comes first; that doesn't mean everything else should be neglected even if you're solo CIC or worse, you're solo CIC because you have deployed all your staff to the ground.


The final nail in the coffin for the decision to deny the application was credible reports of strong OOC toxicity towards multiple COs backed by witnesses. At the end of the day, we're all here to play a game together and it's pretty disheartening to hear reports of you threatening to join staff and target people or purposefully doing worse in some rounds just to spite a CO you did not like at all. Similar to last time, we suggest a break and stepping back from the game. CM isn't serious enough that emotions should build to such a point as targeting other players, OOCly or otherwise.
There's a difference between complaining about incompetent command in OOC and threatening to ban someone just for slipping up in a round.


This wasn't an easy decision to make, and probably a controversial one. You have a lot of people supporting you who say you've improved with your command abilities and roleplay and addressed the grievances we've had from your last application. That much is true. But these things above in particular really stood out to us in a way that made the Council uncomfortable with the prospect of approving your promotion and, unfortunately, it outweighed the good sides this time.


This application is denied. You may apply again in 30 days.