naut - Commander Application

[teafortwo]

Good responses. Some ideas:

• Giving marines a vague plan isn't great but it isn't a critical error. Marine movements have a momentum and like to follow the path of most resistance--they'll be led to the fight anyways.
• Failing to secure a corridor of evac forces you into an all-or-nothing strategy. Better to hedge your bets by securing it. I'd say you accurately assessed this.
• Giving squads some level of autonomy is good. Blind autonomy no. Moreover, information should continually be relayed. This facet of command is rarely the critical reason why an op was lost but is usually a major contributor.
• One of the most difficult decisions and leadership challenges faced in command is deciding whether to push or hold behind cades, and determining how you can get your marines to actually follow through. This is the fundamental skill and determines if your CO is good or bad.
• Being blind to chokepoints and flanks is a a critical error. You accurately assessed this.

I hope I catch you in a game so I can see you first-hand, but I doubt it'd change my opinion. +1

[ScreamingIdiot]

Good app, good support, good answers. This is a +1 from me.

[50RemAndCounting]

Aight. While I'm neither a CO councillor nor a whitelisted CO myself, therefore making my feedback not important at all here, plus that most of the things I'm about to say are of dubious importance to attaining the WL, I have played a LOT of rounds with you as XO, playing as:

• Squad Marine
• Squad Leader
• Staff Officer
• Synthetic
• Department heads and some other, less important roles.

and you leaving a very hefty impression on me and my games, I feel more than obliged to write up my feedback here.

I'm going to be as blunt as possible and I apologize if anything written here insults or otherwise inconveniences you, but my intention is not to start shit but to simply provide my feedback as I believe it is sorely needed. Simply put, I find your attentiveness, reaction times and general ingame attitude to be seriously problematic. For brevity's sake I'll cut to the chase and illustrate this on some examples that I've witnessed firsthand from my said previous rounds with you as XO:

• One round, as a Delta squad marine IIRC, you've put out an announement which many marines found equal parts confusing and aggravating. A wounded Delta marine was patching themselves up in FOB together with another medic. Three or four fresh marines had just landed and were preparing to move out and join the rest of us at the front lines. Suddenly, an announcement came, saying something along the lines of "delta why the fuck are you all at the FOB? Did you and charlie switch places with Bravo? Stop being cowards and fight!". A simple tac map check or a quarter-minute runthrough of the Delta squad's OW console would have shown this to be completely false, as your announcement was quickly disproven by a lot of angry yelling on delta comms, at least. I'm sure Charlie, elements of which were with us at the front too, protested this as well but I only had delta comms access at the time.
• Another round, as a squad leader, we were stuck in Filtration Caves entrance chokepoint and boilers wasted no time in bombarding us. I decided to seize the initiative and split my squad into two fireteams. One would stay at filt and hold the choke with Delta as initially ordered, while I would lead the other FT in a flank through Lambda caves to at the very least distract the xenos to allow my alpha FT and delta to make a move before the casualties started mounting up too much from boiler gas.
  
  After asking for permission from you (you were the aCO despite a CO being present) and bellowing orders to my squad to reform into a FT - to which I knew you were listening into - and receiving absolutely no response from you whatsoever, I decided to go ahead with it anyways when you suddenly woke up and yelled WHERE DO YOU THINK YOURE GOING HELP PUSH. This sparked a serious argument which eventually lead to CO relieving you of operational command after my numerous complaints, but this reaction of yours delayed my plan for an unreasonably long amount of time, at the point of which, and owing to only 4 people out of my 20 strong squad actually listening to me - my plan was no longer viable and we got ABCed to death in shame. One reason in particular was your insistence to play this out like some WW1 midwit officer, then acting surprised and judgemental (talking down to marines in situations like these is a huge no from me also, something you do a lot) when we melted away from boiler fire. We do not - and I cannot stress this enough - WE DO NOT need another cookie cutter leader whose vocabulary consists of "briefing" and "push". While I was incredibly happy the round's CO - Adam Berkshire - listened to and acknowledged my complaints and concerns to the point where he removed you from operational command, me mutinying against you was constantly on my mind throughout the rest of the round.
• A third round, on LV I believe, when I was an SO, an issue that was very present in the former two examples I've mentioned flared up heavily here - you don't seem to be actually leading most of the op. You were sitting in the CIC bubble motionlessly, and repeated bits and pieces of tactical information that became outdated 5 minutes ago like a broken record. What even is the point of saying over random squad comms that queen is in south central barrens when that was reported squads-wide and acknowledged several minutes ago, by the time of which the queen already collected the reaper's due and slipped away, not to return. I see you doing stuff like this constantly and it only generates confusion and agitation - and let me tell you, you've been a great dchat salt generator. I mean this in no bad way whatsoever, this is merely a statement I'm making after dozens of rounds of observation.
• In general, I find your character's attitude to be seriously off-putting, and in case you haven't noticed, (at least some) people tend to avoid interacting with you whenever possible.

Again, I write all of this with the intention of providing constructive feedback, seeing as I've played many, many rounds with you as XO and observing your actions as XO impact many of these rounds significantly. And I simply cannot in good faith support this application. And once again, even if though none of this means squat, my advice would be to grind SO a lot more, tone down on calling marines "maggots" and such out of the blue, then apply again.

-1

[naut]

Again, I write all of this with the intention of providing constructive feedback, seeing as I've played many, many rounds with you as XO and observing your actions as XO impact many of these rounds significantly. And I simply cannot in good faith support this application. And once again, even if though none of this means squat, my advice would be to grind SO a lot more, tone down on calling marines "maggots" and such out of the blue, then apply again.
-1

I can and I do ultimately respect the level of detail you’ve gone to analyze and determine my shortcomings as XO in the past. I’ve particularly tried my best to learn from the “trench warfare” incident on Solaris and have attempted strategies recently to avoid such stalemates from happening again.

I’ve noticed, too, my behavior those rounds is less than optimal, being perfectly honest. I’ve tried toning down on condescending remarks and focused on the operation at hand a lot more than before. Additionally, I’ve been relying more on direct first-sight information from OW instead of overly relying on the tactical map and squad comms, which was frequently outdated as I was trying to work off of it. I try to be more active on overwatch duty now, and, on rounds where one staff officer is missing, attempting to take full OW duty as the XO can prove very useful in opening one’s eyes as to what’s truly going on down below, as well as helping with whatever tunnel vision may start to build.

Namely, my typing style in grouping plenty of different announcements together was one I found to be one big cause of my information becoming outdated very quickly — I’ve since used announcements to issue statements quickly and prioritize orders, with sightings reported over squad communications that haven’t already been informed whenever possible instead. Acquiring the tacmap — which sometimes was immediately outdated in itself — proceeded to also be a major cause of my delays in acquiring the information.

There are times as XO in which I admittedly become disoriented due to either a lack of discernible activity from squads as well as me often being occupied with real-life stuff and coming back to an entirely different scene after a few minutes. I might remain silent to try and analyze what’s going on and, while silence from my end is definitely not desirable, I believe it’s better than trying to spew more misinformation than what’s already going on.

I’ve been playing XO a lot and attempting to learn from COs (as well as the shortcomings of other XOs) and the like to better myself at tactics and myself. These rounds you have talked about on Solaris and LV might be recent, but they’re not recent enough anymore to be entirely representative of what I’ve attempted to do in the present to remedy the issues you've mentioned.
And I’ll just say straight away that I might not be able to fix all of the issues in due time, and that I do have my flaws as a commander and while I do try to mitigate them, I may still be blind to some without external observations.

Nevertheless, while harsh, I appreciate the criticism you’ve given me, taking care to highlight the small details in the errors I’ve made and have given me further insight as to what to improve on. I’ve been a lot more analytical and a lot less critical myself of marines as of late and I want to stress that I’m willing to receive similar criticism in the future about anything I play. I can assure you I try to remedy it whenever possible — I might just need an extra pair of eyes looking out for me every once in a while.

[Me_Bigsnail]

Right we've played some rounds together, I was full aware of this app so I gave you most of CIC (excluding my occasional rulings on flanks and the like) prescence.

The app itself is solid, and people like Enyonggg know you are competent, on my side of the story I found your leadership decent. Naturally I dont expect XOs to do most of the announcements, but do step up the game when the fancy rank comes along

Regarding rem statements, they are normally (a bully) good folk, make sure you have good communication, that is the base for good leadership, simply put I gotta give this a

+1

[FortyPercent]

I watched you a few times when you were playing as XO (from the shadows as CL), and I've gotta say you do need to work on your communication with the squads and your situational awareness, particularly during high pop rounds. But that aside, you are doing a pretty great job at the things you need to be doing, the app is good and so were the answers. And while Rem up there might be opposed to your sometimes antagonist tone, I think it's all good fun. Ain't no rule saying you gotta coddle the feelings of the cannon-fodder.

+1

[ChengChan]

I don't have a problem with you and good luck. +1

[naut]

thanks for the feedback guys ^.^

[Doctor Compy]

I don't recall anything awful nor anything to be a secret xeno main.

Decently competent throughout the operation though I do wish you used the OW a bit more as when I play SL they are far more valuable then an XO in the command bubble shouting orders.

+1 from me and I look forward to seeing you as CO.

[Jamesthebond]

Ive seen you a few times as XO and SEA but realizing your mistakes and being honest about them based on that + 1 for me