The idea is simple: Every player gets 1 Leadership Credit (Confidence Point?) to award per week. If unused these expire every week. This is to make them less common and therefore more valuable. Credits given to a player stay with them forever and cannot be given out again. At the end of the match players on the winning team have the option to (on the final score screen) award their 1 LC(CP?) for the week to a lance or company commander on their team (who was filling that role at the end of the match). They do so by clicking a little plus sign next to that player's name.
Currently the working idea is a small dot next to their name on the lance, er, listy thingy in the upper left of the in-game HUD and on the, uh, screen that lists everyone in the game before launch (lobby?) and when you hit Tab. The color of the dot (possibly size as well, within restrictions) reflects what percentile of the total population of players with LCs that player occupies. Green means they are very low, bright blazing yellow means they are very high. A player with a higher LC score can take over a lance or company commander slot from a lower one at any time.
The end result is an easy indicator of battles won in a leadership role where a player performed well enough that other players decided they deserved a week's worth of thumbs up. Additionally, since the dot is an indicator of what percentile they occupy within the population, a leader can't earn a bunch and then enjoy their new status permanently. They have to keep earning them and in order to climb up the have to earn them FASTER than everyone else.
WALL OF TEXT BREAKUP PARTY!

FYI: I have no idea who the Lyran Guards are, just found this and giggled.
Time for some examples: Noob starts playing MWO, decides he/she wants to be a respected leader but fears he/she will get booted from a leadership role by a higher LC scorer or not listened to. First: the only people that can boot you from lance commander role are the 3 other PUGers in your lance. If they don't care to do it then you've got a chance. Second, by trying you open yourself up to as many as 11 LCs per match, something that is definitely worth a little effort. Third, a green-dotted leader is still at least 1 LC better (read: 1 victory in a leadership role that impressed somebody) than someone with no dot at all and we (sometimes) follow those now anyways.
What about friends upvoting each other? Yes, such circle jerks will definitely exist. However, while they are slowly taking turns getting a few LCs (keep in mind, each player only has 1 a week to give out so if they are taking turns they are only earning 1 per week on average) actually good commanders dropping with new groups every time will likely be winning an LC or two every victory or two. If a good commander spends an hour a day 5 days a week and 2 hours a day on weekends, average of 4.5 games an hour that's 40.5 games a week and exposure to 445.5 possible LCs. Figure half are wins and on average 1 player each win thinks the commander did well then that's 20.25 LCs per week.
TL;DR: Circle-jerks = 1 LC per week average, good commanders = 20+
Yes, this takes on another dimension once clans (guilds? girl scout troops? I never know what they're called, I'm just a filthy casual) get involved but they'll circle-jerk their choice commanders up to high levels all for what? So PUGs will listen to them? They're in a clan/guild/troop, when do they ever play with PUGs? And even if/when they do they DO still want to win so what would it hurt to listen to them?
To be a problem a group would have to spend months upvoting themselves to blazing yellow dot stardom, then go into PUG matches, steal the commander roles, and either work to sabotage the match (which honestly wouldn't be much worse than just having an average terrible team) or work to win the match and hog all the possibility for LCs. Either way, the experience is either no different or actually better for everyone else. Remember that potential LCs aren't even being wasted with this maneuver and the likelihood of dropping with the same dingbats again isn't high enough to worry about.
WALL OF TEXT BREAK UP AFTER PARTY:

Conclusion: In the end, players will be assessing the leadership of their commanders and deciding if they think that commander's performance was the best they've seen all week. I would not recommend changing it to earning 1 LC per some number of games because then heavy users in clan/guild/troops can unbalance the system too far by making ALL of their members blazing star leaders.
On the development side:
- This is 1 more stat to track and more useful than my MG accuracy
- A little tweak at the end screen where we can already input information
- A dot next to people's names
Edited by Ogrecorps, 05 August 2016 - 08:41 AM.