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2012-07-31, 05:53 PM | [Ignore Me] #1 | |||
Contributor Major
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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,
Last edited by Tatwi; 2012-07-31 at 06:14 PM. Reason: Clarified title and spelled Totalbiscuit properly! lol... |
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2012-07-31, 06:02 PM | [Ignore Me] #2 | ||
Sergeant
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Fully agreed. K/D is not the objective, why should you be rewarded for it?
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Join the Terran Republic, for order, safety and law. We are the government, and all loyal citizens should work together with us to ensure a safe future on Auraxis. |
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2012-07-31, 06:12 PM | [Ignore Me] #3 | ||
First Lieutenant
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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. |
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2012-07-31, 06:08 PM | [Ignore Me] #5 | |||
Sergeant
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"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.
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Join the Terran Republic, for order, safety and law. We are the government, and all loyal citizens should work together with us to ensure a safe future on Auraxis. |
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2012-07-31, 06:10 PM | [Ignore Me] #6 | |||
First Lieutenant
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2012-07-31, 06:31 PM | [Ignore Me] #7 | |||
Sergeant Major
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2012-07-31, 06:48 PM | [Ignore Me] #8 | |||
Contributor Major
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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. Last edited by ArmedZealot; 2012-07-31 at 06:52 PM. |
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2012-08-01, 01:13 AM | [Ignore Me] #9 | ||
Sergeant Major
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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. Last edited by BuzzCutPsycho; 2012-08-01 at 01:15 AM. |
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2012-08-01, 01:20 AM | [Ignore Me] #10 | ||
Contributor PlanetSide 2
Game Designer |
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.
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2012-08-01, 01:32 AM | [Ignore Me] #11 | ||
First Lieutenant
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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. Last edited by Blackwolf; 2012-08-01 at 01:43 AM. |
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2012-08-01, 06:01 AM | [Ignore Me] #12 | ||
Private
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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. |
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2012-08-01, 01:43 AM | [Ignore Me] #13 | |||
Sergeant
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M-M-M-M-M-MONSTER KILL! |
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2012-08-01, 02:00 AM | [Ignore Me] #14 | ||
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.
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2012-08-01, 10:19 AM | [Ignore Me] #15 | |||
Second Lieutenant
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Last edited by Landtank; 2012-08-01 at 10:25 AM. |
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