Guild Wars 2

What is the commander system right now? A blue tag above your head that costs 100g.
You will not make people give up the zerg/blob mentality if you don’t give them the tools to organize.

Here’re some ideas that should help with that:

Commander tools:
The commander will have power to assign players to specific squads and appoint squad leaders for those. He will also be capable of giving each squad leader a specific icon that can be seen by all players under his command. Commanders will have an exclusive chat ability that will display whatever he writes in chat in an annoucement format(like the pvp guys who says “Red team got a capture point”) for all the players under his command. Their screen wil display the squads in a collapsible format that he can click to see all members in the squad. The commander’s minimap will show all players under his command in specific colors acording to their squads.

Player Enlistment System:
Upon entering any WvW map a player has the option to enlist under one of the active commanders in the map. That can be done by right-clicking on the commander tag and selecting the option, but it could also be implemented in the LFG tool that’s coming. Once enlisted, the player can be moved and assigned to different squads by the commander. The players will see their squad companions, on the minimap, as orange dots and their squad leader as the icon given them by the commander.

What these features could mean for the game? First, commanders would stop being people who just waisted 100 gold on an icon that shows on the minimap an will have tools necessary for actually acomplishing something. Players will not be totally lost upon entering the map because they can find a commander and engage in organized and strategical play much more easily.

One thing to note is that commanders can’t force someone to enlist. If you don’t like that commander or he is just grieving everyone’s game you can simply not enlist under him and do whatever you want. That means those who do enlist will be doing so with the intent to play in a more organized way and will be much more willing to follow orders. The commanders will be playing a complitely different game but they’ve made their choice when they paid 100 gold for that.

Instead of seeing people mindlessly following the person with the blue tag we would see commanders leave squads to protect certain locations, or drawing the enemy to one location and sed a small team to hit another. This kind of play will be possible because people will have the tools to organize.

So you guys have any opinion on this? Is That a way we can make this better?

This is a really long post; you should maybe include a TLDR at the end of the post. I think that tool you’ve suggested would be pretty neat; basically, /raidwarning from WoW. Dunno about that enlistment stuff; I think the status quo is okay, and you can just call bad commanders out on their kitten and hopefully they won’t tag up again if they have two wits to them.

How to fix commander, IMO:

Commanders can draw circles and arrows on the map that last longer than no time at all.
Commanders can pick a color for themselves, and their circles and arrows will be that color.
Maybe can buy Commander for something like 100 WvW ranks, as well as through gold.

Lots of good stuff you covered. We certainly need a Grouping system that’s flexible enough that players can form forces the way they enjoy. Let’s hope that when they do make changes to the C&S system it’s changes the players want.