Let's say leader put a bunch of archers on a field, when they would be better off 10m away in the trees or on a hill for some cav protection.
Of course this sucks, but there is of course a bigger radius in which you count as "at the flag", I would say 25m at least, as you still have to move. I don't think you need commands that are more percisely than "take the way here, between these two houses" and "We wait behind this barn", which can be a fairly wide space.
And finally I am so optimistic about the people volunteering for commander and being elected by the community, that I must assume the commander has a reason to place the archers on the open field. And again, as I said, you are free to follow every single command or not. If one command doesn't suit you, don't follow it. If the commands start to annoy you, exit the command system.
People won't be mindless robots, you would reduce the whole game to nothing for 99% of players.. Besides we had a commander system not so far away from what you suggest once upon a time.
Teamwork has to be more fun for everyone than what we have now, or there is no point in this thread.
That's the real challenge.
Well, they already are mindless lemmings, so I am confident you can turn them to mindless robots, too. Especially if you support their urge to farm
Teamwork is fun per se, most people just don't know about it.
It's like a rock you have to get over a hill. It's difficult to push it up, but once you reached the top, it will keep rolling by itself. You first need "real", concrete rewards for it, so everyone sees a benefit in them, never mind if it's the real benefit of tactics or not.
The point is to make a good part or even the majority of the team use tactics. If they do so, a good part of the rest will follow, be it only because of some "sheep"-mentality or the fear of fighting alone if not sticking to the group, and you will have only a few players who jump willingly into their bukkake-rape.
If this becomes custom on the servers, it will have several effects:
most important of all, people will start to learn and to realize. They will see that tactics help a team winning, more than having a lot of skilled players, and with right tactics (and the enemy team making mistakes, e.g. using no tactic at all) you can kill all the 80 enemy players with 5 own losses or so. (Extreme example, but happened). People will see the benefits of teamplay, and they will realize it's not a tad less fun than charging headlong into the next bunch of enemies, if anything, it's more fun!
And people will learn about tactics themselves. They will see which things work better and which worse, and the overall understanding of tactical matters will increase. Which means people will wait BEHIND bottlenecks, not IN them, or they will hold a hilltop by going into cover right BEHIND it, instead of exposing themselves to enemy fire ONTOP of it. The game will become more professional.
And finally, new players (whenever there is steam sale you get a whole new bunch of them) won't learn the game to know any other than with using tactics, and so they will use them themselves, by default.
If we reach this point (simply by taking advantage of the greed of the players, rewarding them for following mindlessly, at least in the beginning), chadz can make a new patch that kills the game, removing all command rewards. Players will cry and flame about the missing rewards, but they won't suddenly stop using tactics. Perhaps the overall teamplay level will be that high, that commanders are not even needed that much, any more.
We must create the "custom" of teamplay. People are creatures of habit, once they get used to something, they stick to it. Removing the rewards after some time again will bring back the total "freedom" you were missing in my suggestion. The difference is, that at this point the community will be "educated" enough to gain some advantage of it.
tl;dr
Honestly, Vibe, I couldn't care less. Either contribute something or just fuck off, I don't care, but please stop spamming around, increasing your post count e-peen.
