Malorn's Stats Thread Reborn

[Flaropri]

Originally Posted by Revanmug

You kinda prove his point. You might be doing your job but other people still have to do the killing and if they fail at killing, your job will be harder.

Depending on the person's job, a higher k/d might be more important comparing to another's people job. As long as any other stats are shown so you can judge yourself, Why would that wrong? Just make sure no stats look more important than the others since changing kdr for a score or something is nothing more than changing the bad to another place.

My point was that killing isn't important for individual stats pending type of play, not that killing isn't important at all. The idea that all players need to individually have high K/D is wrong in TF2 and not just for the Medic (who needs high A/D). In fact, for some roles, if you focus too much on getting kills you aren't doing your job. An Engineer that goes off to get kills without protecting his nest risks losing it and putting the nest in an overly aggressive spot could leave the objectives undefended (some Engineer builds are good for aggression though, mini-SG and all, but you generally want to use that only when defense is already covered).

I've been saying from the beginning that more stats is best stats, just to make them equal in importance/prominence, so we're on the same page here. The thing is, there is a difference between individual kills and team kills, and I dislike the implication that K/D is particularly important for everybody on a team. I was merely responding to that on the individual basis. Killing is important, but not on an individual basis, especially for PS2, which has more support/logistics to take care of than most FPS games, including TF2.


To sum the thread:
And that's the point of Malorn's concerns. People who go after the objectives, who play a support role, etc. aren't going to generally have particularly high K/D, because it isn't their focus many is the time I've run in as a scout, knowing I would die horribly, just to tag the Intel or to keep the cart from rolling back. That isn't to say that the rest of their team isn't out murdering people in the most brutal of fashions, but if Kills are over-hyped and made overly important some people will get frustrated with being "forced" to play a support role or "forced" to capture points or "forced" to baby-sit the parked Gal (whether by necessity or by orders from guild-mates) and ending up with "lower stats" or whatever. This in turn might lead to less and less people willing to perform those important tasks. It's already a bitch to try and get medics in TF2 random servers as it is (and yes, I will often switch to Medic when it's needed).

In essence, if a given stat is glorified for whatever reason, then the concern is that people will forgo important roles in order to cater to that stat. (This is also why I'm concerned about Score-whoring as well, Tribes Ascend has some good examples of how that can fail as well, as the video mentioned.)

Ostensibly, it shouldn't matter, but many people get affected by that sort of thing. Absolutely don't remove stats, I dislike that sort of approach, but remove emphasis by providing more stats on the same screens, etc.