Hoofhurr Wrote:Oh I agree but as a former raid leader in pug environments having to reestablish credibility every time you want to organize something is very taxing. We go through this every time we play a new game. I guess I'm trying to create a transparent leadership metric. Maybe there is a way for the game to keep track of how much influence/morale people have invested in a player historically.
That's basically what Planetside did with its Command Rank system and I thought it was one of the worst features of the game. Basically Command Rank was meant to be a leadership system, but since it didn't decay, you ended up with a every moron veteran in the game having high command rank and thus access to "leadership" features even when they weren't really leading anyone right at that moment.
From the perspective of a pugger, I don't want you showing up and activating command skills when I have no idea who you are; I didn't vote for you or want to follow you, but you have access to these command skills because of some previous battles you had been in where I wasn't present.
So the idea here is that if you want to activate command abilities
in this battle, you must be actually getting people to follow you
in this battle.
It is a pain to have to keep re-establishing leadership but that's where things like guilds or community comes into play.
I also think this could be very nicely facilitated via an easy interface.
e.g., imagine you open a window where you can see everyone involved in the battle. You can, without having to "join group" or anything else, simply change who you "report to" on the interface. The person you report to gets your morale points to spend on abilities. So any General Patton can wander over and start shouting and if people like what he's saying, they can quietly shift to him.
We could even throw in some RTS elements, like you get to share radar with everyone that's reporting to you, and you can use a map interface to send them orders ("go here", "kill these people", "wait here", etc). If they don't like the way you give orders, they quietly shift their reporting to someone else or turn it off.
Conceptually the "hero" could become simply an RTS commander who is collecting resources from people to spend on battlefield structures and improvements for his team to use. If you're solo, your own trickle of resources isn't going to do much. If you join a group, you contribute to them and use what their commander selects. If you get people to follow you, you get their resources and can pool it together to buy better stuff.
Kind of imagining the HL2 mod Empires or a Natural Selection type of thing, except you get to decide who your commander is and you can switch it on the fly.