The officer class basically means nothing right now. People sort of listen to people in the officer roles but it’s really a joke. Nothing makes you special because you grabbed the officer slot. I hope the future isn’t just going to be purely first-come first-serve. Most games use classes in that meaningless function.
You can do a few things to make class worthwhile. One would be with this mythical syncing of the company tool and the game. However, I vehemently disagree with the idea of using the ‘company’ ranks or anything like that. Any system needs to work so that a server can still host events with pre-planned officer roles even if the chosen people are a private or a nobody.
The best thing I can envision is something I’ve imagined for a good while and goes as follows
The company tool is synced with the game. There exists a separate ‘scoreboard’ for your team than just a list of players which is interactive. It allows you the option to upvote and downvote people on your team regardless of their current role. These votes go to your permanent profile. Players of a certain upvote superiority can bump the officer class.
Alternatively…. The officer class is something you can only spawn in once (unless teamkilled). The players with a higher upvote number can spawn into it sooner (or whenever they want to spawn as it next). Allow them to go to the flag bearer and immediately de-spawn and re-spawn to speed the process up unless they want to be skipped. Lower players have to wait if higher players elect the officer class (max of two at a time or whatever). This way… the class isn’t used as much as a kamikaze class when you get one shot at it per round.
There should really be a short 90 second ‘warmup’ period for all maps. Where players can spawn in but not go anywhere far. At the end of that warmup the round restarts with the roles/classes finalized whether there was any system like this or not. It’s silly for players to always have to sprint to the objective first thing rather than talk for a minute and wait for the slow pokes to spawn in.
Important: Downvoting does not ‘remove’ an upvote it just shows up on your company profile. Why? Because the lack of upvotes will speak for itself in the ranking system. And, having lots of experience leading teams, if you’re a good leader you will make enemies for good and bad reasons. Plus you don't want people trying to climb over each other to get officer roles by downvoting. Downvoting shouldn’t be able to take away the praise of others. Servers can filter out or have a lower TKing threshold for people with a low reputation on top of marking their company profile which cannot be duplicated without another purchase of the game (also very important). Servers can also turn the company tool sync off.
Also important... you need to be able to upvote/downvote anyone not just current officers. Else you'll have superstars with the officer class and others won't get a shot.
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Upvoting or downvoting also leaves a record on your profile as the giver as well as the receiver and can be edited later and comments can be added. If you really want to do it right... you could have the tool keep track of how long you played with players in the same team but don't weigh the votes on a scale to that or else clanmembers will be able to make each other seem awesome by spending a lot of time in servers together! Just have that information there so that recruiters and vetters can see patterns of misconduct or irregularities.
Imagine the potential of actually having a reputation in a game rather than having no freaking idea who you're playing with and always having totally random people behind steam names.
A far more basic system would simply be elected officers. Each teammate gets 10 votes and gives as many of them as he wants to any given players (except himself). You can vote for any player, whether they try to choose an officer class or not. So a hierarchy is built and players can serve as the officer in that order (if they so choose to serve). If the player quits the game or leaves the team those votes are erased from consideration. This can be settled in your 90 second warmup.
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