The current commander tag can be bought for 100 gold. But everyone knows it’s not a direct link to leadership quality – it’s how good you are at making money.
I want to suggest an upgrade for commander tags. You would still need to spend 100 gold to obtain them, but it would also have a secondary tier, that can only be obtained by good leadership. The idea I had was that players could vote up commanders. After a very large number of votes, it would raise to the second tier, denoted by a different color.
-This is something that is highly susceptible to abuse. To counter this, I would suggest that votes obtained from people in friend lists and guilds would be worth considerably less than people who are complete strangers. Votes are also limited per account, so no swapping to alts to increase votes. I have no idea how this could be coded in, or if it’s plausible.
-It needs to be an amount of votes that would prevent obtaining the higher tier in a short period of time. Getting to the second tier in say, a week, would be too short – you can’t master commanding that quickly. My idea is that it would take an average of perhaps two months before amassing the amount of needed votes.
-It would only be fair to include the option to vote down a commander, but again it would be susceptible to abuse. Perhaps it would need five negative votes to subtract one positive vote. That way one bad mistake on a newbie commander won’t result in a flash flood of negative votes.
-The amount of votes should also be hidden. We don’t want people running around with a tag on yelling ‘vote for me!’ And I want this system to disprove on ‘farming’ for votes. If you don’t know how many votes you have, you won’t focus on it. It should just be a surprise when you get the second tier.
-There should only be a limit of two tiers. If there’s more than one, people are only going to follow the higher tiered commanders. Those of lower tier won’t receive the knowledge of running a proper zerg, and they won’t be able to learn. It should only be “basic commanders” and “elite commanders who’ve spent a lot of time commanding and knows what they’re doing” (Where theoretically an elite commander should be knowledgeable enough to tell the surplus of his zerg to follow the other commander for better map domination).
-Once the second tier is received, it should still be possible to lose it. This way someone won’t take a long dedicated project of getting the elite status, and use it to troll people.
-In WvW, some servers will out-populate others. By that, you’d theorize that highly populated servers would be able to amass more elite commanders more quickly than low populated servers. Perhaps the current map population should be taken into consideration when a vote is tallied. The more people there are on the map, the less valuable the vote would be. The end result should be a vote on whatever server to be the same value, regardless of population size.
-You start with a score of 0, but you can’t go below 0. If you start out poorly you won’t have to work double time and be punished for your past actions.
-Once the second tier is reached, there could be a cushion of extra points given, so it won’t shift back and forth without stabilizing.
I want the idea where a new commander would go through a training process, and be graded by their peers. You start as a leader by buying the blue tag, and you get a visible recognizable promotion if you become a great leader. Elite commanders should be a rarity, but it won’t stigmatize non-elites. A commander can be just as good without having the elite tag – but commanders are more inclined to work toward the promotion, and thus emanate better leadership qualities.
I want the idea to be something like this: Did you know in martial arts, the black belt is not considered to be a master? They’re considered to be beginners. The colored belts before the black belt are meant to teach you the skills to become a beginner. Amassing the gold would be the colored belt, getting the tag would be the black belt, getting the elite tag would be getting higher in the black belt category.
It sounds good in theoryland, but it’s bound to be different in practice. What’s your input?
tl;dr version: Have the ability to vote a commander up and down within a very controlled voting system.