[Malorn]

Instead of arguing with monkeys I'm going to be productive here and offer you all an example of how stats are currently shown in PlanetSide 2 and the huge weight kill-stats and specifically K/D is weighted.

Before anyone freaks out about tech test violations, all of these images are from publically released videos.

For these shots I used the TotalBiscuit video w/ commentary from Matt Higby (the one where Kevmo is playing), and the E3 Day 3 video where Purrfect walks us through the stats screens. Simple captures from there.

Ok, let us begin.


First, the default player screen. This is the screen you see when you look at your player profile in game. What do you see?


On this screen we see prominently displayed - kills, deaths, and K/D occupy the center-most locations, with "score" on the right side.

The only nice thing in this is at least the Daily Score Leaderboard is in a more focused position than the Daily Kills Leaderboard.

From looking at this screen alone what the devs are telling me the player is that Kills, Deaths, and K/D are the most important stats. Score is still up there, but that's the only stat that might reflect anything other than personal kills and my ability to get them without putting myself in harm's way.


Next screen. The stats page.


With apologies to the colorblind I have conveniently color-coded areas of interest. Green are things which reflect possible teamwork, while the Red reflects purely selfish stats.

As is plainly visible, the very top of the screen (which remains through most of the tabs), the two most prominent stats are Score Per Minute (SPM) and K/D Ratio. SPM is great, but why does the game elevate K/D to such importance? That sends the message to players that one of the two stats that matters most in PlanetSide is K/D, which is ridiculous.

Next we have in the middle of the screen a tab whose default showing appears to be Kills, showing me my kills, longest killstreak, and daily, weekly, and monthly kill counts. Not terribly bad in its own right, but the default nature of this is poor, and there are no territory/capture stats at all showing how good this player is at capturing territory, or reviving teammates or anything other than the Score aggregate (which is a good aggregator).

At the bottom in overall stats we have a list, which unsurprisingly starts with the selfish killstats first, and only then does it list the more teamwork oriented stats of assists, base captures, and score.

It's important to point out that the only territory-control related stat that appears here is WAAAAY down at the bottom with nothing else of relevance. No repair amount, no healed amount show up either.

It's the same sort of shit you'd see in a session shooter. No teamwork emphasis, no playing-the-objective emphasis - no sir, kills, deaths, and K/D are the most important things here.

The only saving grace is that SPM is elevated to a prominent position at the top. That's good. But then they ruin it by putting K/D right next it it in almost equal standing.


Last, lets look at one of the class breakdown pages.


What we see here is so sad its comical. The top of the screen shows stat sumamry with "Most Kills" and "Best K/D Ratio" listed at the top. Because Best K/D ratio is clearly why someone plays a medic, amirite? Where did SPM go? Why not show off the class where you earn the highest Score Per Minute? It was prominently displayed before, where did it go?

Score is still shown, and so is SPM, in the individual class sections. Score is there, and so is SPM, but SPM appears after we look at Kills, Headshots, Deaths, and K/D ratio. Clearly the PlanetSide 2 dev team thinks these stats are important.

Where are the stats for most control console captures? What about territory captures? What about resource accrual? What about revive stats, and heal stats, and repair stats? Where are ASSISTS?


The stats for this game are horribly skewed towards cultivating selfish killswhore stats and do nothing to promote teamwork stats or objective-based-play. These stat screen is a perfect example of everything wrong with gaming culture right now. The only thing that keeps it from being a complete pile of shit is the prominence of "Score per minute" in a few places, and score in others. The rest of it just encourages people to play solo, ignore objectives, ignore teammates, and find the most efficient way to kill people, regardless of everything else going on. Encouraging that type of player behavior will doom planetside.

The way PS2 handles stats is the biggest mistake they are making in the game. Depraved disregard of the power of stats and the impact it will have on player behavior.