Leadership

In many online shooters with any kind of leadership system (whether its only squad leaders, or leaders of entire teams) there has always been a lack of real power over the subordinates. KILLZONE 2 has squad leaders that could act as mobile spawn points for their squad-mates. Squad leaders in BATTLEFIELD 3 have the power to designate objectives as the squad's priority. MAG had the most in depth leadership system out of any shooter in recent history; squad leaders, platoon leaders, and company leaders (OIC/officer in charge) that direct the actions of 128 players. Though leaders in MAG possess a variety of strikes, tactical maneuvers, as well as abilities like setting waypoints as well and FRAGO (marking objective as the squad priority), but something was still lacking. MAG, and all these other games lacked the power to truly make someone follow orders. I don't expect Dust 514 to give the commanders and squad leaders the ability to subvert the will of other players through some sort of magic, but there needs to be better ways on incentivising players to follow orders.


There are many possible ways to accomplish this in Dust 514. One way is the ability to control which spawn points players are allowed to use. It has been confirmed in an article from Eurogamer that commanders will be able to deploy spawn points for his teammates to use, but what if leaders could lock use of certain spawn points for specific squads? This would allow leaders to force those specific squads to use the spawn point closest to where the leader wants them to attack (by locking the other spawn points), thus raising the chance they will actually attack the target. Another possible solution would be to give leaders the ability to select the general areas where squads have been ordered to attack, and set the areas as the only place where the respective squads can get war points, experience, kills that count towards stats, etc. This would also make players go to and attack where they are commanded to.

You may be asking "Why is it so important? can't gamers be trusted to take orders if its in their best interest and will lead to their victory?", but it is important because sadly not everyone respects the chain of command, nor values victory as top priority. When empires can rise and fall based on the results of Dust 514 battles, simply trusting that to take orders despite the evidence to the contrary is simply not the best option.