People simple refuse to follow orders, briefings are pointless

[BeardedWall]

It's boring and no one listens to orders because ever round is exactly the same for both sides. For marines it's run into the caves and shoot shit. EVERY round. The only way to win is to shoot the xenos. Forever. Doesn't matter the map.

For xenos this is fine. they work well together as a team. they are "okay" right now.

But adding more tools isnt going to fix the problem for marines. Command is irrelevant. It wont matter how many fancy arrows, lines, whatever. If the only way to win is to kill the xenos.. then people are going to run into the caves; period. 95% of the map is irrelevant. Marines play entire rounds without command; the xenos cant play for 5minutes without a queen.


The solution is that you need to create more ways for Marines to Win.

Command is only useful if it can make decisions; and the current decisions it has is to push forever, or evac. And those are the only things marines look for, or listen to.

You need more ways that marines can win the game.

For example, if the marines could instead hold engineering and charge a particle bomb.. command could choose between eliminating the hive, or utilizing the bomb. Briefing would instantly become more interesting, and orders matter more. No longer are we pushing to hydro. Squads would have to pay attention.

Throw in a few more win conditions like developing a virus bomb in research using captured xenos (I dont know whatever we can put our heads together on more win conditions). Suddenly command has to make choices between which path to victory (or abandoning some) to take. You were trying to charge a bomb in engineering then ob'ed engineering? Better change tactics.

You need to give marines a reason to interact with the map. You need to give them a reason to hold points. I mean it doesn't even make sense lorewise. The ONLY option command has is to send endless waves of marines into a scary dark cave full of xenos until one side wins? Fuck that..

[CABAL]

snip

Yes and no.

Yes, because more objectives to win is something interesting and no, because it would be still more fun to hunt and kill all benos, than not to hunt and kill all benos. Atleast, for the great majority of average CM players.

It would still would matter little if command decides to go with virus bomb, or particle bomb, or by hunting all xenos.
Average PFC would see those options as: Defend something, Defend something, Go and fucking kill benos.
Guess which one will majority of marines pick.

The same would be for benos, if they also got objectives. Do something lame, do something lame, or just kill marines. Obvious pick.

I dread to say that the only way to make those objectives viable in the eyes of players is making them the only way to win. Which means making benos into infinite horde where death of a beno equals to a couple of minutes spent in D-chat and then walking all the way from deep caves to the frontline.

But that carries its own set of problems.

Only intel was kinda able to pull it off, but only because there was a dedicated role for it and rest of the marines simply did what they were always doing, with objectives being completed in the background and being only used if main unga murderball failed, so we all retreat to FoB and defend till nuke goes off. Or it was never used, because marines killed all xenos, so there was no point. And it still didn't attract anyone into attending brieffing, or listening to orders.

In short, as it is currently, objectives won't work for both sides.

[BeardedWall]

Yes and no.

Yes, because more objectives to win is something interesting and no, because it would be still more fun to hunt and kill all benos, than not to hunt and kill all benos. Atleast, for the great majority of average CM players.

It would still would matter little if command decides to go with virus bomb, or particle bomb, or by hunting all xenos.
Average PFC would see those options as: Defend something, Defend something, Go and fucking kill benos.
Guess which one will majority of marines pick.

The same would be for benos, if they also got objectives. Do something lame, do something lame, or just kill marines. Obvious pick.

I dread to say that the only way to make those objectives viable in the eyes of players is making them the only way to win. Which means making benos into infinite horde where death of a beno equals to a couple of minutes spent in D-chat and then walking all the way from deep caves to the frontline.

But that carries its own set of problems.

Only intel was kinda able to pull it off, but only because there was a dedicated role for it and rest of the marines simply did what they were always doing, with objectives being completed in the background and being only used if main unga murderball failed, so we all retreat to FoB and defend till nuke goes off. Or it was never used, because marines killed all xenos, so there was no point. And it still didn't attract anyone into attending brieffing, or listening to orders.

In short, as it is currently, objectives won't work for both sides.

I dont suggest them for both sides. I think xenos are good where they are. Just marines need the options. It would also help differentiate between the two sides. Xenos do one thing only, kill. Marines can do X,y,z.

And you are always going to have those marines running around killing. the difference will be where. If 80% of the marines are in engineering.. the ungas will still unga.. but they will be doing so near hydro/beach.

command have the options of multiple lzs and then multiple win states.. suddenly we have many more combinations and decisions.

[Tails of Akira]

Yeah pretty much

[Dreven]

Actually most of the time marines do follow my briefing plan because i announce it a dozen times, poorly draw it, explain how it will work, and I like to think I have a certain level of trust with alot of marines that they will listen to my wacky flank idea even if it results in everyone dying. The thing is the plans are all for deployment, like doing a big encirclement of bar in the first 10 minutes of big red. After that the marines will always naturally form into a deathball and the battle becomes a tug of war at choke #4 or the FoB. I almost always try and do deployments where every squad has their own route from either LZ1 or LZ2 (dual drops are cool), but after that I expect it will just grind into a deathball because thats simply how the game is designed post DEFCON. As for getting marines to fallback, its simply a matter of persistence, you just gotta keep screaming sometimes. If your really desperate you can pull the old "queen is at our backlines" trick.

People do listen to orders if you communicate well, have a good reputation and actually try. Most command just does the meta hydro route which is fine, but I feel like this culture of "well marines dont listen anyway" has really ruined alot of potential for unique and fun rounds in alot of CO/XO players. It also shows in that alot of command players never grinded up the SL hours like we all used to ***back in my day*** which is how you get your name known as a leader, its really obvious when a commander has more MP playtime than marine playtime.

And when you do play SL, dont expect your whole squad to follow you because they never will. You will however have a smaller core of guys, often newer players that will stick to you, and if your a cool, funny and talkative guy then more will follow you. As you play more you will make more friends and get more of a squad, everyone else you just consider as a scout/flanker/rambo and don't get mad at it.


tl;dr if people don't listen to your orders at all, skill issue, go to the gym and grind up some rep.

[derpymcderpderp]

unless ur name is wamajamakama windhelm or honorable CO Juro The 5th Emperor of Japan people will not care about ur briefing

[50RemAndCounting]

unless ur name is wamajamakama windhelm or honorable CO Juro The 5th Emperor of Japan people will not care about ur briefing

Quite sad how people will only follow elite famous legendary CO players like Wilhelmina Woodcarver or Junji Toshido the deputy leader of the Kwantung Army, this really speaks about the pointlessness of the CO whitelist

[Mightbearetard]

We had some good ideas here, we had some bad ideas. Hopefully they will merge them for a week to see how they work.

For the grid system, yeah now that you explained, it's even worse than I thought. There is no point hitting the wall here, we will disagree. I could write 5 pages why it's a bad idea, no point. 95% of marine would hate it and could not follow it.

For the love of GOD don't think with your head for a second, try to put yourself in other people's shoes.

Man I feel like I'm in my friend's model 3. They updated the damn dash and it takes 4 click on fucking turn on AC. Totally not related to CM and yet it is. I swear sometimes people are allowed to design or implement things what they will know how to use but out of 100 people 99 will hate. What were they thinking? Why they are allowed to do changes that everybody will hate? It was good as is. Have the people even spent 1 second driving this thing? Jesus fuck some schmuck is getting payed big money to fuck up a perfectly working tablet. And nothing personal, but the grid system is like this. Just...fuck sake...don't.

For the other suggestions, adding a separate objective to straight up win a round, that is an event. If you want them to charge a particle bomb to get 1000 metal, 4 sentries and other stuff? Sure. That can make things spicy. With that said, I doubt it will be ever implemented to flat out win a round as it sounds OP.

If you want to make the game a little more spicy, get back the AA boilers, let them shoot Almayer and cause a HE OB sized explosion in a random room. Probably not medical or CIC, but why not blow up canteen or OR lifeboats. This is not a solution for anything, this will just add some nice RP and spice up shipside play.

Right anyway, most solutions are simple. If you have to make a 2 page document explaining how to use this thing that nobody will read and nobody will care..guess what it failed. But implement something simple like containers room on LV having 1000 mats, sentries, expended AP ammo and other goodies that xenos can not melt? Hell yeah we push there, give us the orders. Simple works. Why would an unga ever follow a complicated thing?

[Usnpeepoo]

nobody really cares about forum ideas hate to break it to u

[Santiago Delgado]

PFC main here, the reason why nobody will listen to your stupid orders some of you CO's say is because you say dumb like "PUSH EAST THEN SOUTH" that is stupid fucking vague, and half the marines will go straight east until they hit a wall then go south, the other half will go east for awhile then south at the first crossroads. Like Pocahontas Healer said communicate. I WANT YOU MAGGOTS TO GO EAST UNTIL THE DAM THEN MOVE SOUTH. DELTA WILL GO SOUTH PAST THE HANGER THEN EAST STRAIGHT INTO HYDRO DAM. REPORT ANY HOSTILES AND WE WILL REASSESS!

If you give vague orders nobody is going to know WTF IS GOING ON, they will group up with the other 4 marines who wandered the same way while the rest all split up doing what they thought was east then south. You have just split the marine force into tiny groups like dividing up a delicious cake for the xenos to eat bite by bite. Think of a rally point on the map you want everyone to go to. find out the ways to get there. and make damn sure everyone is on the same page by repeating and repeating some more, then describe how you want it done, repeat it again, make sure they are on the same page as a squad.

I don't ever play command but at the very least I know when an OP is going to fail based on orders alone before we even drop. We were on Fiorina last night, the orders were literally deploy LZ2, push west then north for all squads. Guess what happened? What I described above, we split up cause nobody realized that it's fucking miles until you hit the edge of the map going west. So 10 marines went west for 100 yards then north, another 10 went west for 200 yards then north, etc, etc, until I was with 6 marines in fiber brush dying to a squad of xenos. We got shit on cause those orders were shit and it was a shit plan. At least Mahatma Windboy Gives us a MS paint map we can all follow so we're all on the same page.

TLDR: Up your fucking orders game COs...