Cult Citizen

[icycalm]

Our ranks/hierarchy can be found here: https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=7837

Currently, I am SupCom, and ChevRage, recoil and ysignal are Captains. Everyone else is Inquisitor.

This thread is about managing members' ranks, and as a first post I want to offer the new rank of Master Chief to shubn, if he wants it. The problem with the Master Chief loadout is that his two primary weapons can only be found via looting, so ideally you want Master Chiefs who loot a lot and have a ton of these weapons in stock, and shubn is the biggest looter in CULT by far. That doesn't mean he'll ALWAYS be big into looting, but that's what demotions are for. It's no problem if people go up and down in ranks depending on their schedules and playstyles. This is to be expected.

One problem with the Master Chief loadout is that he doesn't have a backpack, so how tf is he gonna keep looting without one? And why doesn't he have a backpack in the first place? Well, he doesn't have a backpack because 1) Only the small camo backpack looks good with his armor color, and 2) The railgun doesn't attach perfectly to the small backpack, it looks like it's floating, and that looks bad. I considered giving him the medium olive backpack that the Inquisitors are using, and that looks pretty decent on him, but the big guns then clip into his model most of the time, and he would be ruining every screenshot he's in, so that's out of the window until the clipping is fixed. I am sure eventually they'll put a backpack into the game that looks good on him and has no clipping issues, or they'll put different armor that's fit for a Master Chief and looks good with the current backpacks, so this problem is temporary, but it IS a problem. And this is how we'll deal with it: the Master Chief can do his looting when he's playing solo, with different armor. Even better, he can switch to Inquisitor gear whenever he wants.

That's another peculiarity of our rank/hierarchy system: everyone can switch to a lower rank whenever they wish, and then switch back again. This means that Chev, recoil and ysignal can also play Master Chiefs or even Inquisitors whenever they want. recoil also tends to loot quite a bit, and he has some big guns stocked from time to time, plus he blew up a C8R with a railgun the other day, so it would be cool if he played a Master Chief occasionally.

Switching loadouts in this way ALSO temporarily switches your place in the chain of command, so don't forget about that. It all boils down to what kind of ranks we need for each mission, and how many players we happen to have. If we have 7 players in the voice channel, we don't need 3 Captains, so one or even two of them can switch to Master Chiefs for that session, if they wish, as long as they have the loadout of course (they can also ask for shubn for some weapons, he usually has loads).

Back to shubn and his potential promotion, note that the Master Chief rank DOES come with increased responsibility, on top of the new loadout, so shubn needs to take that into consideration too, before accepting. The Master Chief is EXPECTED to loot, and supply people with specialized weapons when needed (e.g. give an Inquisitor a sniper rifle, and so on). He is the "looter" and "big weapons-bringer" of the clan. He is also the fireteam leader, and Captains will be dispatching him to lead teams of up to 3 Inquisitors.

So it's important that the Master Chief doesn't charge into fights, both because he's supposed to be leading the Inquisitors, and because he's bringing in the big guns and must keep them safe for when they're needed. Anyone who has this rank then must learn to hang back and not put himself into undue risk. Helping this is the fact that he runs VERY slowly with that huge armor (do the big guns also slow him down? I am not sure how complex the encumbrance rules are in this game), so he'll always be falling behind in sprints. So if someone wants to be on the frontline at all times, this isn't the rank for them. Having a Master Chief in the squad basically ensures that the Captain has big firepower to bring into bear when he needs it, and that's the whole point of this rank.

So think about it and get back to me, shubn. It's also no problem if we try it and it doesn't work out, I don't think there's any shame in that. I think it's better to do tryouts rather than me withholding promotions until I am 100% certain of them. I am not 100% certain of this, but if it sounds like it would be fun to you, we can give it a try.


TL;DR: All CULT promotions (and demotions) will be handled publicly in this thread.

[shubn]

Sounds good, we can give it a try.

I imagine I will be using the Inquisitor rank on simpler operations, and the Master Chief rank when the mission warrants it.

[icycalm]

I gave everyone their rank as Discord role. This way we can tag specific ranks. So we have Inquisitors, Master Chiefs and Captains. No Commanders yet. I plan to offer the position to someone as Stanton Commander when Pyro launches (and I’ll take Pyro myself). Hopefully someone will be interested. We’ll have subforums for every system, and also Discord channels for every system. Nyx should come soon after because it only has one landing zone iirc, and they’ve already made it (it used to be in Stanton for testing but then they removed it).

Let me know if I got your Discord rank wrong. It’s 21 accounts so I might have misclicked.