Why K:D, Deaths, streaks and other stats are bad, and how PS2 can evolve the genre

[Tatwi]

Originally Posted by Malorn

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.

This is true. It's just human nature (operand conditioning in action). You're right that they are playing into a counter productive part of our nature by displaying narcissistic stats with such emphasis.

It's the problem with most of these computer games these days, where every player is supposed to be "the great hero" of the universe. Makes me want to puke.

I have no idea why the SOE folks would want to jeopardize the "combat on a massive scale" aspect of PS2 by slanting the emotional feedback toward antisocial killwhoring. Especially considering that without players there isn't a game to play at all. Eventually the majority of people will get bored of being farmed by the killwhores and they'll stop playing. Welcome to Planetside 1's tiny population.

There are just too many other games (and things to do) out there to NOT emphasize community building game play over all else. Planetside 2 needs a strong community more than it needs any other aspect of its development. Period.

Why?

Because 100% of the game play requires other people.