I already thought about it a bit, and have a suggestion:
As we all know that votes almost never succeed, voting commanders just won't work. By the way I don't know how the voting option can be modified at all, and if it can contain more than two options. If it was restricted for 2 options it would make no sense at all, as there should be more than 2 candidates to vote for. And a single vote for each candidate with "yes" and "no" would take too long, and would be unfair for those being the last to be voted. (unless the system can wait with the result until the last vote has passed
)
So I thought about another system: a forum vote!
Players who are willing to candidate for a commander role can field in a thread, and then a vote will be added, and let's say the ten players with the most votes become commanders. They PM their nickname and cd key to chadz (I know, PM :roll:
), and he gives them commander right, as soon as they log in with the particular character. (I think the commander feature should be bound to certain characters, to help the players recognizing their commanders).
Commander rights means: he is the only one in a team being able to place flags, and players don't need to join a batallion to see them, they see them always. And the arrow, too. And then there is another important feature: he gets an additional chat key, to write messages onto the screen of the players where usually "The poll has been rejected" and "Khergit Khanate wins" pop up. This way you can make those players follow, who actually are willing, but don't follow the teamchat at all. I know this feature is easily abused, spamming the screens of players with bullshit, that's why I planned a forum vote. So better vote for people you trust in
And for those cases of hardship not willing to follow team tactics at all, the commander can be muted always.
The commander features are only enabled, if two or more commanders join a server. So autobalance has to always put them into different teams. If there is only one commander he can't do anything, as it would be unfair for the other team. If there are more than two commanders, the order of the forum votes decides. So the commander #1 in the forum would ALWAYS be the commander, commander #2 only if he isn't in the same team with commander #1, and so on...
I think this is a good solution to provide the community with some commanders, give them actually some use ( = screen messages, so only those players don't follow the team tactic who really refuse it. The other players, who didn't pay attention till now, will be "cought" by this system
), and probably improve the gameplay.
If you think those screen messages are "too much" we can just make a special chat colour (orange or whatever) either as alternative to the screen messages or as replacement. Of course the screen messages are only for "emergency cases" to tell players to "stop" or "fall back".