Systems: Informative and useful stats.

[Memeotis]

Is K/Dr an informative statistic for outfits? It's a tricky one, since a high K/Dr can both be hugely positive or hugely negative. In order to evaluate whether a player's K/Dr is complementary or hurtful to his overall usefulness on the battlefield, you have to factor in a ton of different variables and finally you actually have to play alongside him to see why his K/Dr is what it is. Is he achieving it by ignoring his actual class role? Or is he sacrificing himself constantly for the sake of the squad?

In other words, K/Dr in and of itself is not a very informative statistic.

I thought it would be interesting to think up some statistics, which are not as ambiguous as K/Dr, but instead enables you to make obvious conclusions. I personally only have one idea so far, so this is very much an open thread where you guys can post your statistics-ideas as well.

My idea is the following:

Downed/Deaths

When you are effectively "killed" and you enter a state where you can be revived by a medic, your downed counter will increase.

Only once you get finished off or choose to respawn will your deaths counter increase. In case PS2 has insta-death from explosions, then a death from an explosion would have to count as both a downed and a death in order to prevent the stats from getting distorted.

Why is this statistic informative? Because it separates the players who are frequently near medics from the ones that aren't.

Why is this statistic useful? A high Downed/Deaths ratio will be a strong indication of a team-player, streamlining the recruitment process for outfits.

The implementation of a downed counter would require the aforementioned mechanic of explosions, and PS2 would also have to have a bleed-out timer.

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Another idea could be to allow players to construct their own comparisons between statistics, even using extremely specific ones like: mines deployed, or TR tanks destroyed with mines. Make it very deep so that players can be creative and that SOE won't have to think up all of them.

To make a system like this really useful, you could allow outfits to make a template that contains a range of different statistics and stat-ratios. This template could then be made part of the recruitment process, and when players apply their stats are immediately fed into this template for the officers to look at. They could also include stat-requirements of say 2.0 K/Dr and display it with colors, for example: 2.35 and 0.89. This template could be both for in-game, but more importantly, outfits should have the ability to add it to their websites.