I wonder if "being a team leader" should come with some kind of reward? A small one, of course, since a large one would be unfair.
Or maybe, once the type race is over, players can rate their team leader's performance, and have a reward based on that?
These ideas would incentivise people to be a team leader, but I'm worried it may bring resentment if the reward is too generous. Maybe I'm worrying too much?
A team leader reward base wouldn't be ideal in my opinion because it brings back the initial critisim from the change (ie more popular players would be picked even if they wouldn't necessarily do a better job).
However, the ability to reward a team leader based on a number of factors (team placing+team member response at the very least) would be cool, as would possibly adding some form of MVP reward overall (perhaps to the person on the team who scored the most points? or a nomination system based on player votes) to give something to the teams who didn't have someone step up in time.
I'm basing my suggestions on 1) playing for a little more than a year so I saw both systems but wasn't baised towards the old one and 2) my own feelings from running the thread for my team during the october type race. While leaders have a small hand in how well the team does they are the ones setting the ground work for the team to spring board off of. I would love a good way to reward the great team leaders and keep encouragement for the good or so-so leaders, or the leaders who dealt with real life messing up the running for type race.
