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Thread: On the upcoming CO/XO merge and its effect on current shipside RP

  1. #1
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    On the upcoming CO/XO merge and its effect on current shipside RP

    The upcoming techweb update brings about many changes. The removal of DEFCON and IO as a role, the new telephone operator squad role and of course the techweb system itself which will introduce some big changes to the overall tactics and flow of the round. And i must confess that i am very excited for all of these. There is however one change that completely changed my view of this update. From the title you probably already guessed what i'm talking about. One of the changes the techweb update will bring is the merging of CO and XO to a single role that will be the one in direct control of the techweb system. While this may sound insignificant it will in my opinion have a very negative effect on overall enjoyment of the shipside part of the game. I am writing this post to explain why i believe this to be the case and hopefuly convice more people to bring this issue up and by extention make the developers and staff reconsider their stance on the issue and allow both XO and CO to remain as they are.

    For those who don't know what i'm talking about it was said on the last townhall that the role of commanding officer and executive officer will be merging into a single commander role. This means that at roundstard either the XO or the CO will wake up and the other slot will become unavailable. The COs will still keep their powers and benefits (BE, arrest protection, etc..) and will remain locked behind a whitelist. However you will never see CO and XO at the same time which brings me to the core of the issue i have with this upcoming change.

    While i understand the game design decision behind this as well as the benefits of having a single commander lead the ground forces this change will inevitably lead to the commander being forced to stay in the CIC without ever being able to leave for longer period of time. What that means is you will no longer be able to have the CO or XO lead the troops on the ground while the other is free to attend other duties. That means you as XO can no longer oversee things happening on the ship such as making sure MPs follow the right procedure, taking over requisition when RO is SSD/missing or lead the hunt for a loose xeno that got aboard. But what will suffer most from this change is the roleplay aspect of XO/CO.

    Having only one commander that has to lead the operation alone means that there will be nobody from senior command who can focus on whats happening shipside be it talking with survivors/faction representatives or more importantly organizing fun RP events. Yes, CL is the one who is supposed to be doing that but it can be very hard for the CL or any other RP only role to do that on their own. First of all with the adition of agents the CL is prety much guaranteed to spend a lot of time dealing with MPs being instantly suspected of agent activity (along with mess SGT and MTs) which does not make organizing anything exactly easy. What i'm trying to say is that if you as a player want to organize any kind of event or any activity outside the normal departmental duties you need someone with executive power. You need someone to keep the MPs from arresting everyone attending said event for the slightest SOP breach. You need someone with enough access and authority to announce the event is happening and alowing the crew to take a break from their duties and attend the event while at the same time making sure it will not affect the ground in any meaningful way (like req or medbay not working at all because all doctors have a party). In other words you need the XO or CO.

    In my personal opinion there is just so much potential in having XO or CO free to RP on the ship while the other leads the operation. It doesn't need to be anything big like rebuilding half the ship or anything like that. Just small things like a boxing tournament, party in the mess hall or sermon in the chappel are all things that would benefit greatly from the active presence of a commander. You can talk with the CL about the current situation on the ground and the company involvment in it. You can negotiate with the corrupted hive a researcher made. You organize small construction projects like turning officer study into temporary housing for survivors and many other things of this nature.

    If any member of staff is reading this, trust me i understand you want to make marine command and xeno command similar with both sides having a single commander using the techweb system. And its fine to do that. But you don't need to remove XO from the game to accomplish this. Why not implement a system that would allow the CO to take over command from XO if he wishes to or keep the XO in command of the ground while the CO RPs on the ship. That way you would still only have one commander for each side for groundside while keeping shipside unafected. You can add a ruling preventing the CO and XO from deploying to avoid the one not in command becoming unga+ on the ground. I know there are many COs that would enjoy shipside RP and i know there are some XO mains that do as well. As for the others there is always cryo if someone just can't stand not being in charge of the ground.

    In the last town hall you said that you do want to keep the CM being MRP server but it's on the players to keep the RP going. If that's true then please stop removign all the tools that make the RP going. So many things got removed or changed mechanicaly, so many rules and regulations were put in place that make CM turn into team deathmatch game with any attemt of RP and RP events being laughed at (in some cases by staff themselves which sadens me even more) instead. So i implore you, don't make the XO role just one more item added to the list of those changes but listen to your playerbase for once and show some love to the people who enjoy the RP aspect of this game.

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    who thought that having a 2ic was even a problem? COs die, or they get busy, or they have more issues than they can handle at once, what do they expect COs to do? if anything they'll just conscript a pissant SO to do the same thing as XO but with less advantages or respect, which means it'll end up being the same situation but more confusing for command, and with a needless handicap.

    There's also the issue of people likely being pissy at XOs who take up the spot when the whitelisted COs have more permissions and abilities, if a CO is able and willing to join there is no mechanical advantage to have a XO play instead.

    Normally I accept dev changes if they'll be for the greater good in the end, but this literally just solves a problem that didn't exist, and competent COs will just undermind it by making themselves a new XO anyways.

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    The degradation of Roleplay is so entwined in the Dev team that there is little thought to any updates over the last few years as to "How will affect roleplay?". The worst is that it's not done on purpose, the Dev team ( and contributors) don't intentionally go out of their way to degrade Roleplay, it's more so that they simply don't care about RP mechanics nor do they know how to maintain current RP.
    It's never a thought, it's never tweaked to improve roleplay and there is little chance this will change without a leader in position who wants to promote stronger Roleplay.

    The townhall is an example of a single, potentially couple of staff members still fighting to preserve any form of RP on CM.
    Once they're gone, the talks of stronger RP enforcement and maintaining RP will fade and CM can finally shed the "Ruse" of maintaining RP.

  4. #4
    Ancient Member Hunk1's Avatar
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    Roleplay died, a long time ago, there are too many problems with staff and lack of communication between staff and development team, we were trying to enforce roleplay on a MOBA, That dosen't fit at all.

    The game took a wrong turn in development at some point in time, Roleplay isn't a thing anymore, and staff team (mods and admins) are undermined and no longer have freedom to do try to bring RP, The few attempts to bring RP consists on events of "Do-your-own roleplay" or Xeno cultists from dommy. I tried and failed many times doing RP events based on lore and military roleplay only to be answer via ahelp, "hey, could you stop, you're disturbing my game."

    This player base cannot be pleased, the part of players that want roleplay on the server is a minority and things don't go well, when you try to please the minority and leave the majority of the player base pissed off because, "Muh game, stop doing long ass announcements."

    Roleplay on CM is a shadow of his former self from 2016 and those changes don't affect only CM.

    Most of you already know, i joined byond on 2008 and play SS-13 since 2010, I saw the Community in SS13 grow up in quantity but decrease in quality, Roleplay is a rare thing to be found on SS-13 servers and can only be found on whistelisted servers. I returned to my home at heavy RP and i feel so glad to have returned that i am having more fun than all moments on CM since i joined staff.
    and i returned, and left. and returned again 19/06/2022, this is my life now.


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    I don't understand. CM is the most balanced it's ever been but it's cost us Roles people enjoy, the ability to preform unique tactics and strategies and our Roleplay.

    Is this it? Did we sacrifice CM's soul for balance?

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by Decker100 View Post
    I don't understand. CM is the most balanced it's ever been but it's cost us Roles people enjoy, the ability to preform unique tactics and strategies and our Roleplay.

    Is this it? Did we sacrifice CM's soul for balance?
    Yes, for years we told the player-base that balance does not equate to stronger roleplay but rather lowers it.
    Almost like we intentionally had the win-rate unbalanced to promote a story rather than a deathmatch.

    Surprise.
    Last edited by Fewher; 10-01-2020 at 08:51 PM.

  7. #7
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    who woulda thought

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    Whitelisted Captain 50RemAndCounting's Avatar
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    The claim that the optimization of gameplay mechanics, character abilities and builds, and so on, can only negatively impact roleplay and vice versa, is an inherently fallacious statement that had been existed and been identified as such for pretty much as long as roleplaying games existed.

    Good roleplay still exists and will always exist, here and elsewhere. It's just that people here have a very disturbing propensity to use the noRP boogeyman as a scapegoat for a multitude of lesser problems that have had collectively sundered CM and its community.

    And to facilitate good roleplay consistently, you need a good community. And from my experience so far, most ss13 communities are downright vile, especially its staffmanship - the sort that it attracts and the mental strain doing staff things puts on you really brings out the worse aspects of you - myself included.
    Sheeesh this boy LRP as hell!

  9. #9
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    No you're right the only solution is to perma-ban half the community without appeal.

  10. #10
    Senior Member Me_Bigsnail's Avatar
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    I am tired of these kinds of threads so I'll be doing some final statements about the topic, hopefully THIS time you get the point

    keep in mind its my own opinion and the dev team doesnt share the points i'm about to make.

    Regarding the CO/XO merge 'harming' shipside RP baffles me, shipside RP? You mean taking a seat with the CL who demands you to sign a paper every round? cool rp bro.
    Shipside RP isnt dead because dev team 'ruined it' in fact most coders are working hard on adding new things to the ship so people can interact with them, its the fact that marines dont interact with each other like they used to, this is a player sided issue, and if boomers show up and say 'back in my day...' I'll tell you that back in the day we had sulaco, a mess of a ship that had many useless spots, with shitty atmos mechanics that lagged the server and lockers that contained your gear for the sake of RP, we had necrosis to make things 'realistic' but instead it made things more annoying to deal with for medics and the marine alike, no one and I mean no one said 'Hey these mechanics actually forced me to use my neurons and it created a RP scenario!' It was YOU when you began to small talk the nurse who was healing your boo hoos when you were sharing that one time where you beaten a xeno with your bare fists to impress her, not the mechanics, not the funny admin who held you at gun point to RP.

    Wanna know why RP is dead? Its because of playerbase.
    Most of the players are self entitled to the point of toxicity (yes i'm using the word toxic on a serious way) or robustos who have played this game for so long that they'll probably give you one or two conversations before first drop if they know you.

    my statement doesnt represent the view of rp of the dev team
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