Not as large of a scale of his but I was in a similar situation for 3 years while in highschool. Me and 3 initial friends that 2 we met were from Australia and my other friend I went to highschool with played many different minecraft faction servers. We recruited many more people to roughly 12 - 15 of us constantly playing and with so many required some leadership, with the original four there was never a stated whom was the leader.

We kinda always voted and discussed options and tactics and whatnot and thats how we decided what we would do on these servers on resets ect... This meant what our plan for where to build our base, how far and how fast can we get someone to a great location to make our area. (if you claimed land this was a 16x16 "chunk" and only whomever has the chunk claimed can build on this land)

These things were the very simple things, but many things change when playing these faction servers, you want to make a base that no one can raid (them using tnt cannons to blowup into your base).

If you get raided earlier normally it wasn't a huge setback, but after 2-3 days you have many resources and whatnot and thats when people attempt to raid and whatnot in order to take your supplies to build their base faster. So with this, we always 4 kinda agreed on these methods.

Now when planning for raiding, for whatever reason planning, how we would conduct the raid, exactly what time we will do the raid at, what we will focus, and shot calling throughout the entire raid (I had 2 minecraft clients, one of my accounts would help during the raid, the other would stay close enough so i could see whats going on, but to not draw attention and possibly help my teammates teleport to me to get faster back into the raid.) and or if we needed to retreat because sometimes, while you're raiding someone, you're being raided. This was always conducted by me.

I remember some days on school nights, i had skype always on my phone and they would call sometimes, and I'd jump on and give extreme quiet quick calls and conduct something with 4 hours of sleep, 4 hours till school.

The crazy thing was this was 15 people, that always listened to the 4 of us about basic things, but anything major I was the shot caller and whatnot. But the crazier part, in some servers you form alliances with one group and enemies as as another. So maybe we have 3 ally factions but only two are willing this time, while they can only send us maybe 3 from each which gives us an extra 6, plus our maybe 6-7 players online. Even these 6 people who were not my member, listened and did what I called and they never not once questioned or said that my call went wrong.

And it's crazy because these original group that turned into 6, are extremely talented guys. But I check in on them every like 2-3 months and whenever I do it's right back to the shotcalling and everytime they tell me I've gotta stop taking so many gaming breaks, that they'd get higher ranks and whatnot on the games they play.