Malorn's Stats Thread Reborn

[Tatwi]

Hamma asked me to remake the thread and get new feedback after the topic was covered in this Totalbiscuit video (jump to Question 2 at 5:52),


The original post is here. There's lots of great feedback in that thread and Hamma has decided to make it the topic of discussion on a future AGN show.

In a nutshell, the concept is basically that making Kill/Death ratio a prominent stat may take away from the community, objectives based game play that Planetside 2 is all about, because K/D ratio encourages people to simply kill other people rather than take part in objectives and community play.

Here is Malorn's original post on 2012-03-07, 02:48 PM,

Its been discussed before, but it was the only thing that jumped out at me as concerning in PS2's recent footage.

Why It's Bad for the Game


What the developers elevate stat-wise is what players will strive to improve.

As it is, the game looks as though it was modernized successfully to a modern FPS. However it also inherited some facets that are counter-productive to a game like planetside. Emphasis on stats, kill-streaks, and dominations/revenges are one such mechanism. It is archaic and seemingly mindlessly moved forward without careful consideration of the value it provides the game.

The game that made stats and kill-streaks prominent in FPS games is Unreal Tournament. A deathmatch-focused game where the only real measure of how successful you are in the game is....kills and deaths, and how long you could go or how many headshots you could rack up. That's where it was born. Since then players liked those stats and they found their way into future evolutions of games, even Planetside. But does that mean every FPS game should have these things? Absolutely not.

Stats and score in a game is how players measure how successful they are at the game. If the game elevates a particular stat and features it and makes it prominent in the game, like Kill-streaks or K:D ratio, then that is what players will strive to improve. These are not good in a team-based game. They aren't good in Battlefield; they weren't good in Planetside. By elevating them and even showing them the makers of PS are saying to players "This is important, you should improve this".

The worst stat of all of the stats is the "Death" stat, which also derives K:D. Deaths as a stat do not send a good teamwork-oriented message. Anything that puts you at a risk of death without providing kills will harm your deaths, and thus your K:D. Flying a galaxy is a risk to K:D. Capturing an objective is a risk to K:D. Repairing someone or healing someone else is a risk to K:D. Reviving someone is a risk to K:D. This stat does not produce anything productive whatsoever. It is a carry-over from the days when deathmatch was the purpose and kills/deaths were the only measure of "skill" in the game. Planetside is different. Planetside has teamwork and objectives. It has many paths to success - one path should not be glorified over others.

Deaths should not even be tracked - at all, ever. Players should be encouraged to do whatever activities they are good at, and not be discouraged from taking risks by penalizing them with another tally in the "D" column. The stat serves no purpose other than to harm the game by negatively affecting player behavior.

To provide some more examples:
- Do you blow up that parked galaxy (respawn point) or do you farm it? K:D is improved by farming it, it is not improved by blowing it up.
- Do you drive a galaxy and park it for your team to help take the base? Or do you hop in a tank/reaver? Piloting the galaxy does not improve your K:D and only risks making it worse.
- Do you go revive that teammate out in the line of fire? K:D is put at risk, and you might give someone another kill on you contributing to your own domination.
- Are you the first to breach a door or do you sit back and snipe? K:D says not to risk the breach, sniping better improves the stat.
- Do you capture the tower or farm the spawn room? K:D says farm.
- Do you blow the base generator and cap it, or farm the kills? K:D says farm.

In all of the examples above, the best thing to do for the team and for the empire is not what K:D encourages. Quite simply it encourages the lamest and most counter-productive behavior. It takes the path of least-risk. It doesn't encoruage support roles. It doesn't encourage taking objectives. If the game elevates and promotes these stats then PS2 will not have a lot of team play or objective-taking. It'll just be deathmatch in an open world. That's epic fail to me.

What you promote matters - so don't promote things that are counter-productive.


So if not deaths and K:D, then what?

Fortunately Planetside has something much better than K:D - it has Score. Score is beautiful. Score is awesome. Because Score can be generated from just about anything. "Experience points" is effectively the same as score for all intents and purposes. Assists, captures, heals, spawns, defenses, kills, revives, etc.

Because score is awarded for any activity it becomes a universal stat capable of equalizing every type of play and encouraging team play. Someone spawns at your Galaxy spawn? More score for you! Get an assist-kill? More score for you! Capture an objective? Huge score bonus for you! Revive a teammate? More score! Repair a tank or max - yep, more score.

Score is purely results-based. That's why it must be the primary measurement in Planetside 2 for success. When I open up stats, that should be the stat bolded in large font that is shoved in my face. When I go to the leaderboard, the default and primary leader board should display score, score/min, score/day, score/session, etc. It's all about score.

Secondary leaderboards should exist for kills, revives, captures, repairs, assists, etc. People good at those things should be recognized too, but the one equalizing stat is score.

A player will ask the universal question "Am I doing well?" Score gives the best answer. Score is tweakable, giving the development team the ability to fine-tune and encourage specific behaviors over others. If some type of lame behavior awards a lot of score and you want to discourage it, it can be tweaked to award less score or have diminishing returns, etc. Score gives the developers power to incent players to do specific behaviors.

Instead of kill-streaks and dominations, award people for score milestones or support activities like having 50 people spawn out of your galaxy, or capturing 10 territories or other such things. Bounties for such activities are another great way to utilize score as the universal measurement of Planetside success. You could also use score to balance out things like teamkilling/wounding by providing a debuff of sorts that reduces your score generation. So many options here to utilize this universal stat to shape player behavior.


Evolve the Genre

Planetside is a game-changer, and one of the best ways it can change the game is to improve the genre - get rid of that archaic 1990's stats and move to something better. Make a better game. Encourage better behaviors.

Removing deaths as a stat and promoting Score will not cost you players. Nobody will stop playing Planetside 2 because they dont' get to see a stat with their deaths being tracked. What they will see will encourage success of their empire.

Move PS2 forward. Get rid of deaths as a stat. Get rid of kill streaks. Just take it out and see how it plays. Bury kill whore stats and put them at the same level of importance as any other activity, like heals, revives, captures, etc. You won't miss them and you'll see people doing new behaviors they might never have tried before. Evolve the Genre.

[Harasus]

Fully agreed. K/D is not the objective, why should you be rewarded for it?

[Littleman]

I've always wondered why FPS' moved into K/D. Ever since early arcade games, score has always been the determining factor. You get first place, put in your initials, walk away, and let someone else try and beat your score, or you can try and top yourself.

If UT used score points, and placed a huge emphasis on say, flag caps and returns or control points, it would encourage more focus on the flag or points during CTF or domination, respectively... it might encourage TKing for those points too, unless there were harsh penalties to one's score applied to FF of course.

[Landtank]

I say keep it in, it's not my goal but I like to know. They should keep it.

Plus, if you kill enough people it WILL have an impact

[Harasus]

Originally Posted by Landtank

I say keep it in, it's not my goal but I like to know. They should keep it.

Plus, if you kill enough people it WILL have an impact

Right, and let us throw in a "meters run" stat too, which pops up on the screen in capital letters:

"1 000 METERS!"

"DOMINATION: 10 000 METERS!"

"REVENGE: YOU OUTRAN A GUY!"

"RUNNING SPREE: 1337 METERS!"

It is not my goal either, but heck, I would like to know. Plus, if you run enough it WILL have an impact.

[Eyeklops]

Originally Posted by Harasus

Right, and let us throw in a "meters run" stat too, which pops up on the screen in capital letters:

"1 000 METERS!"

"DOMINATION: 10 000 METERS!"

"REVENGE: YOU OUTRAN A GUY!"

"RUNNING SPREE: 1337 METERS!"

It is not my goal either, but heck, I would like to know. Plus, if you run enough it WILL have an impact.

I want to know anytime one of my stats == 1337, just saying

[EisenKreutzer]

Originally Posted by Harasus

Right, and let us throw in a "meters run" stat too, which pops up on the screen in capital letters:

"1 000 METERS!"

"DOMINATION: 10 000 METERS!"

"REVENGE: YOU OUTRAN A GUY!"

"RUNNING SPREE: 1337 METERS!"

It is not my goal either, but heck, I would like to know. Plus, if you run enough it WILL have an impact.

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

[ArmedZealot]

Originally Posted by WildVS

I agree with what TB said. One thing to incentivez more team play in PS1 they started out giving 5K XP for a base capture, quite a few points at the time and offset the kill,kill,kill mentality to some degree. Then somewhere along PS1 history, base caps were lowered to 2.5K XP so the pendulum swung in the direction of kill based XP. For PS2 just do what they initially did in PS1 and more heavily reward territory cap XP versus kills. Kills still matter and get XP but it much more rewards a player to work as a team when they get larger XP bonus based on territory capture.

This basically.

If you want to reward teamplay there are better ways than just removing K/D. Incentivize people to play as a team and completing objectives beneficial to their empire.

Keep K/D on a back menu and leave it off of the HUD by default. Even better take it out of the game altogether and put it on the website.

[BuzzCutPsycho]

Stats Promoted by the game prime player behavior

The study of priming teaches us that passive stimuli can shape our behavior. Things like which stats appear on your character sheet will prime players to improve them, even subconsciously. For example, if you constantly reinforce that "captures" are important in the game, and put capture stats front-and center on the stats and have the default leaderboard show captures then you will see a change in player behavior as they are subconsciously primed to play for captures.

(More on priming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29)

The good side of this is that the developers can significantly and subtly influence the behavior of players by carefully choosing the stats which are promoted. The bad side of this is that if they don't carefully choose them with the understanding that their choices will affect player behavior then they can introduce ruinous gameplay.

K/D is Ruinous

The primary motivation for this post is to highlight K/D, which is a particularly ruinous stat currently being promoted by PlanetSide 2. The gaming world has a terrible culture precendent where the barometer of player skill is by default kills-per-death. Try this trick at home - play a round of BF3 or just ask a player in PlanetSide 1 how well he did. The vast majority of the time players will read their K-D stat. They will rarely read their score, and almost never cite whether their team won or lost. Years of early session shooters have erroneously trained us that the K/D stat is important. Some people think it needs to be present. It does not, and the game will be better off without it.

The danger K/D poses for PlanetSide 2 is that it discourages risk-taking which leads to derisive gameplay. Taking risks increases your chances of incrementing the death stat, which sends the K/D in the wrong direction. Taking objectives, helping other players, being the first man to assault a defended position - these are all behaviors that are discouraged by the promotion of K/D. This is one reason many players will resort to being relatively useless and sit back and snipe so they can preserve their stats rather than assault a well-defended position. If it's a good farm they will have no interest at all in advancing objectives, preferring instead to sit back and rack up stats.

If the "death" stat were not shown on a scoreboard or leaderboard then you would see significantly more teamwork and objective-based play in PlanetSide 2. It is as simple as this - when there is no perceived penalty for taking risks you will see more risk taking. Risk taking is good in games and especially so in a teamwork environment to keep the game from stagnating. The only thing K/D teaches players is that they should avoid risks. It is a selfish stat which when promoted leads to poor gameplay and derisive player behavior.

Developers have a huge opportunity

The developers of PlanetSide 2 have an opportunity to leverage the priming to influence the game by promoting stats that encourage the behaviors they want to see in game. But choosing any simple stats is meaningless and squanders this opportunity. The best stat for developers to promote is score because it is abstract, defined by the developers, and they can directly control what influences it. Simple stats like kills, captures, and K/D cannot be influenced; they are crisply defined constructs. Score is malleable. For example, if the devs which to encourage more captures, they can increase the score value of a capture. If they want to encourage more kill streaks, then they can increase the kill streak score bonus. If they want to encourage more ammo dropping by engineers they can add score for kill assists from people who were recently given ammo, and/or the score value when ammo is received.

Score is a universal stat that is defined by the developers and can therefore be controlled by the developers. It is a tremendous opportunity not only to create a universal calibration of how effective a PlanetSide 2 player is, but it also allows the developers to change the impact each action has on it. Additionally, the "death" stat is naturally factored into score - dead players don't score points. Time spent returning to a combat zone is time not earning score, so naturally dying less can be one way to improve one's score. Playing with medics and utilizing squad spawn and teamwork is a way to minimize these effects and so score takes that into account also. It's an elegant solution.

Other interesting stats could be derived from score, such as showing players where their score contribution originates, be it kills, revives, captures, etc. You could classify them, have pretty color charts, and even bring in leaderboards based on categories of score gain, from support, kills/assists, vehicles, objectives, etc. Who are the players with the highest objective-related scores? Who are the players with the highest kill-related scores, be it direct kills, headshots, streaks, assists, etc? The possibilities are rich here for PlanetSide 2 to influence what players perceive as important and aggregate many similar types of gameplay together.

Recommendation

Deaths as a stat need to be gutted from the game. It is a negative thing that discourages risk taking; just get rid of it. With it goes K/D, and in its place a universal developer-controlled stat can exist.

The best stat to promote is Score/Minute. The /minute part factors in playtime so casual players and hardcore players are on relatively equal footing in terms of making the leaderboard. It becomes a fair comparison. It also becomes a measure of efficiency; simply playing a lot and racking up score isn't enough to dominate a leaderboard. Players should be encouraged to be productive which is precisely what score/min achieves.

Please understand the power that stats have on player behavior. It isn't simply information; it influences the way the game is played. Don't blindly follow tradition and squander an opportunity to set the tone and influence player behavior in PlanetSide 2.

[Malorn]

I was a bit surprised to see this resurrected, but I'm in total agreement with TotalBiscuit. As I've said before it's the prominence of the stats that causes problems. It's in-our-face as a constant reminder, rather than an advanced option for people who care about it to check up on. TotalBiscuit had a great explanation. I hope the dev's listen to him if not to us about this matter.

[Blackwolf]

K/D isn't the objective and never was the objective. But the idea that the K/D stats are what ruins the team play of the game is just wrong. The only people that would be consciously or subconsciously affected by having those stats up are more interested in killing other players then in completing objectives to begin with.

Most of the objectives met in the game are achieved by going through the enemy and the KDR is a means of measuring your ability to do so as an individual. Improving that stat by improving yourself helps you achieve your objectives better. And as TB said in that the stats shouldn't be removed.

Now what I would propose is that all stats of your time played remain hidden from view until you log out. Once you officially log out of the game, the game pops up a run-down of your accomplishments during that session as well as totals. Maybe even save each sessions stats so you have a comparison of how well you did, how long you played, how much you accomplished (including base captures, kills, support kills, etc.)

This way you aren't subjected to any kind of constant need to change your play style in order to improve your K/D ratio, but still have access to that information so that you can try to improve yourself and keep track of what is and isn't working for you.

[bmfof]

It's amazing how such a small and simple feature stirs so much butthurt in the glass.

The notion that K/D shouldn't be tracked because it's not an objective is laughable - enemy extermination is the prevelant method of reaching objectives and accomplishing the more challenging tasks in the game. Having a gauge on that performance is important in order to monitor both your and your outfit's overall usefulness with this particular method. If you are a bad leader you'll take someone with shit K/D and kick him out because you can't find a purpose for him, thus your outfit will suffer, because it'll end up being composed of FPS junkies with no tactical foresight. If you are half competent and you're able to detect someone's strenghts then more power to you - at the end of the day a good outfit is compiled out of all kinds of players - medics and engineers who'd rather stay in the back for support, infiltrators who'd scout and backstab enemy lines, pilots who fare better with vehicles, and your HA, LA and MAXs cannon fodder platoons - the more varied your force is, the more effective it'll be.

K/D junkies will be K/D junkies regarldess of whether you track their stats or not. Let them have their fun - it's completely irrelevant if they have good stats, if they can't follow simple objectives and listen to orders they will remain useless and eventually give up on the game. But I'd rather cultivate them and keep them in the game, instead of just putting a cockblock infront of them from the getgo and alienate them during the first 5 minutes of playing.

[Symmenix]

Originally Posted by Harasus

Right, and let us throw in a "meters run" stat too, which pops up on the screen in capital letters:

"1 000 METERS!"

"DOMINATION: 10 000 METERS!"

"REVENGE: YOU OUTRAN A GUY!"

"RUNNING SPREE: 1337 METERS!"

It is not my goal either, but heck, I would like to know. Plus, if you run enough it WILL have an impact.

Have all kills In game announced by the Dota 2 mega-kill announcer
M-M-M-M-M-MONSTER KILL!

[Ruffdog]

Won't farming be worse in PS2 if XP per kill is static and not on a sliding scale like PS1? What I mean is, and vets will know, if you killed Jonny NC and he spawned 5 minutes ago, your XP reward will be a lot more than if he spawned 5 seconds ago.
This is why I never liked incessant farming. It was naked K/D and not for XP. The XP you got per kill was less than a single tick of ANT refil.

[Landtank]

Originally Posted by Harasus

Right, and let us throw in a "meters run" stat too, which pops up on the screen in capital letters:

"1 000 METERS!"

"DOMINATION: 10 000 METERS!"

"REVENGE: YOU OUTRAN A GUY!"

"RUNNING SPREE: 1337 METERS!"

It is not my goal either, but heck, I would like to know. Plus, if you run enough it WILL have an impact.

Well atleast I don't have to take you seriously ever again.