The premise is rather simple, and the outcome I believe would be most beneficial for just about anyone who plays CM with any kind of frequency at all.
The current (expected contact) roleplay standard does nothing but awkwardly weigh the playerbase down, providing no meaningful RP foundation yet still being restrictive enough to be constantly and gratuitously broken and ignored by pretty much everyone. Even with it being borderline unenforceable, in the rare instances of staff actually enforcing it, this has resulted in huge community backlash every time. One instance of this are the constant threads about discussing roleplay on these forums.
Most about everyone acts like an idiot and only really speaks up to spout memes. Requisition and medbay chem lines are a festering ground of toxicity and powertripping. Briefing is an atrocious nightmare of extremely low rp, if you as a CO do anything more than just copy paste squad orders, the briefing turns into a special needs kids' daycare, except everyone has guns and someone invariably ends up getting killed. 95% of staff officers never do their job properly, though admittedly that's more of a gameplay design issue than a roleplay issue, though some SOs try to allevate it by doing turbo LRP bullshit in CIC. Executive Officers and Commanding Officers are needlessly pressured to "enhance the round" by forcefully coming up with quirky battleplan ideas and annoying character gimmicks, which does little than cause grief, annoyance and usually ingame harm to everyone else. The rest of the marines often respond in kind by looking for any possible excuse to murderbone the CIC via mutinying, something which is never done properly. Corporate Liaisons write literal dogshit faxes (or write something arguably decent and passable, but at a time where no smod or admin is online), then either fall asleep from boredom and get jobbanned for going SSD as CL without ahelping, or self antag out of boredom and get jobbanned from CL for it. Predators... I'm not even going to touch that, it's beyond tragic.
With the absolute state of CM, Expected Contact rp is less than hopeless. Nobody cares for or respects it, everyone shits on it, inadvertently or otherwise. We need to do away with it, and replace it with Confirmed Contact with a very simple premise: the enemy is there, get your gear, join up with your squad and go kill them. All Expected Contact does is create an incredibly awkward atmosphere aboard the almayer pre first drop. Do you have any idea how bothersome and tiring it is to hear XX-121 CONTACTS CONFIRMED for the 5th bajillionth time in the row? If you play the game at all, I suppose you do.
This is what roleplay needs to be boiled down into, "shut the fuck up and go shoot the enemy". With this, alongside some other changes I'd like to see, such as:
- Removing Military Police and the brig area entirely
- Expanding squad reqs and reworking both normal and squad reqs in a way they're no longer req staff/SL and spec dependent, i.e. everyone can just come in and get stuff.
- Removing access requirement from medbay storage OR make a separate public medical equipment storage which would primarily be meant for, you guessed it, deploying marines.
- Possibly reworking Staff Officers, but not sure how, it would for sure be a significant undertaking.
We'd greatly contribute to making the game way less unbearable to play for the marines. It's not going to magically fix CM, but it would ease the ailment of a dying game.