I get that people will say I am only posting this on account of the pending player report I made against a predator yesterday, and I admit that it definitely influenced me to do it, but this is something that has bugged me for a long, long time, and I'm sure there are folks who can attest to me bitching about it long before yesterday.
So, here's the gist of what I think should happen: Do away with whitelists, and either rework predators completely or remove them from the game.
There are many, many reasons why I think this should be done.
Having to make an application that sets your character in stone so you play the same person every time you play the role isn�t conducive to creativity, and this would create a far greater variety in terms of the characters and stories that people see, not just because the same players could play different characters, but because other players would be playing them too. Although it is allowed for COs to play different characters in the role, this isn't the case for predators or synths and also seems to be pretty rare. I haven't played a round that didn't have a Captain whose name I instantly recognized in a long time.
Because of the whitelist and council policies, admins cannot interfere with whitelisted players, so if they do something that blatantly violates the whitelist guidelines and ruins another player's experience, even with screenshots and ample evidence, that person isn�t allowed to be ahealed and has to wait hours to play again. I also think it's incredibly frustrating that they then have the onus for proving that the player did something bad put entirely on them, despite the fact that admins have much easier access to logs. Yesterday's incident was only the first time that something like this has happened where I remembered to take screenshots, because I'm a stoned idiot half the time, but it was far from the only time I've been fucked with by whitelisted players. In the other cases, I didn't have the means to easily prove what they did, so I couldn't even write a player report.
The way the applications work does not do a great job at weeding out problem players, because the skill of writing a story on one's own is completely different from the skill of collaborating with other people to create a story organically through roleplaying and character development/interaction. In some ways, they are pretty much polar opposites: when you write a story, there are pretty well-established literary techniques that almost everyone follows, even subconsciously, just because it's what they're used to. This includes having a main protagonist that the reader follows throughout the entire story, and in the vast majority of stories, the protagonist gets to live happily ever after. When you roleplay, especially in a competitive environment like CM, it's pretty much the reverse: you react to things that happen, often with very little control over them, and very frequently die before the story ends; in a roleplay with over a hundred people like CM, no one is a protagonist, we're all supporting characters. Encouraging players to view their character as the protagonist by having them write these types of stories centered solely around them engenders a toxic, elitist, "secret club" attitude, not necessarily among every whitelisted player, but certainly among quite a few of them.
I have personally interacted with multiple whitelisted players in the past few months who were roleplaying at a lower standard than the PFCs in my squad, including COs. I am also certain that there are plenty of players who would make fantastic COs or Synths, but simply don't want to make an application, either because they don't want to deal with the effort involved or because they are principled against it for a variety of reasons.
I think having a whitelist sucks, it's lame, and should be gone.