Remove KDR

[MrVicchio]

K/D.. you can't get rid of it unless you stop tracking kills or deaths or both.

Pen, paper, calculator, spreadsheet.

Peeps will figure it out.

K/D is a problem for the insecure. If you're worried about K/D... you're playing PS wrong, period.

[Shamrock]

It's a decent point, and worth paying attention to, I doubt SoE will remove it altogether. Other metrics for measuring a players skill/performance should be the center of discussion, if we could come up with a few that would encourage team based objective play that would have a real positive impact on player behavior.

[Silent Thunder]

See the problem is no matter what, people will find a way to hyperinflate their metrics. Remove K/D ratio? People will track by Score/Min and hyperinflate that by parking HE tanks on the side of the crown. Remove Score tracking? People will count by Battlerank. Remove Battlerank? People will count by certs. Et cetera, Et cetera. No matter what you do, people will find some sort of metric to hang onto and put above all else.

At the end of the day, nothing you can do will stop the people who care more about their ego than actually helping their team, so it's best to just sigh and move on to ideas that will actually help the game.

[Dragonskin]

Originally Posted by Silent Thunder

See the problem is no matter what, people will find a way to hyperinflate their metrics. Remove K/D ratio? People will track by Score/Min and hyperinflate that by parking HE tanks on the side of the crown. Remove Score tracking? People will count by Battlerank. Remove Battlerank? People will count by certs. Et cetera, Et cetera. No matter what you do, people will find some sort of metric to hang onto and put above all else.

At the end of the day, nothing you can do will stop the people who care more about their ego than actually helping their team, so it's best to just sigh and move on to ideas that will actually help the game.

Score per minute is also trash. In BF3 it was a good stat unless you were a stat padder, but generally those people were easy to spot. In Planetside 2 it could have been a good metric, but was screwed over when they decided to put implants and membership boosts in the game.

My SPM is higher on my TR character because I have the new 50% alpha squad booster running. I play pretty much exactly the same as I did on my VS character which only had the 10% alpha squad implent until recently.

[Assist]

Originally Posted by Dragonskin

Score per minute is also trash. In BF3 it was a good stat unless you were a stat padder, but generally those people were easy to spot. In Planetside 2 it could have been a good metric, but was screwed over when they decided to put implants and membership boosts in the game.

My SPM is higher on my TR character because I have the new 50% alpha squad booster running. I play pretty much exactly the same as I did on my VS character which only had the 10% alpha squad implent until recently.

I think players use score per hour to compare to themselves, not to others. For instance, I judge whether or not I was successful that day based on my score per hour. While some would view that as wrong, with the current objectives of the game, it's the best judgement of whether or not I improved my character efficiently that day.
If you're using it to compare to others that's just the wrong way to use personal statistics. There's nothing in Planetside 2 that effectively compares your score to other players scores. K/D for instance is completely different from infantry to tanks to ESFs and finally Liberators. Score per hour is effected the same way (it's simple math to figure out what everyone's score per hour is based on their boosts, but vehicles dramatically changes that). Accuracy is effected based on the weapon(snipers are high, lock-on weapons, then you have stuff like shotguns over 100% and C4 detonations without them planted, etc). Same concept applies to Kills/headshots ratio. Kills per minute is also based on weapon/vehicle choice. If they had seperate stats from vehicles to infantry you may be able to come up with a more accurate idea of your skill in a specific vehicle to another players skill in that specific vehicle, but even then it's hard to judge because it's not an arena shooter.

I really can't think of a single statistic in Planetside2 that tracks how skilled a player is compared to another player, maybe you could argue accuracy of a specific infantry weapon(CARV). The only thing the stats are good for is tracking whether or not you improved from your previous session.

[MaxDamage]

It would be carebear everquesty bs to even consider it.

Accuracy doesn't necessarily mean anything either.
I think if we could reset specific stats, knowing that we'd been shooting around like imbeciles in warpgate for example (guilty) then sure.

At the end of the day the stats are there to measure your own progress.
If you want to compare them to others out of any relevant context then go for it.

[snafus]

I'm more worried about my vehicle timer then my K/d ratio. They just happen to coincide with each other in a way.

[Dragonskin]

Originally Posted by Assist

I really can't think of a single statistic in Planetside2 that tracks how skilled a player is compared to another player, maybe you could argue accuracy of a specific infantry weapon(CARV). The only thing the stats are good for is tracking whether or not you improved from your previous session.

Right, and the point of this thread really isn't about comparing yourself to others. The point was that KDR negatively impacts players behaviors. On the other hand, while SPM is still kind of a trash stat it still mostly encourages positive behaviors.

The goal of the thread is to get more people playing the objectives instead of playing their stats. Removing a stat that is overall useless could help improve general game behavior.

How about this then?

Let's take KDR/Death count and make it a MLG content specific stat. MLG is all about competition and comparing yourself to others. So if people want to raise their KDR stats then they can be put in a position that might be better suited for it.

The core game can do without the stat completely though because no one has listed any positive behaviors that the stat actually promotes in the core game.

[Cats]

Originally Posted by Dragonskin

So, with the news that you can reset your KDR coming I think it is a good time to talk about simply removing this useless stat to begin with. I brought this up in another thread and felt it was worthy of it's own thread.

KDR changes your in game behavior so that you only worry about making sure you kill more than you die. It prevents you from effectively contributing to your faction.

So here is a vid also talking about it and I think TheKoolaidLine nails it. What positive behaviors does KDR promote in a game like Planetside? Why is it a stat worthy of being displayed in the game? Because like DrankTHEKoolaid... I can't think of a good reason to have it.

Kill Death Ratio

And in the first two minutes he gets a generator down solo. Somehow I don't think he was going to accomplish that if he kept dying two times for every kill he got.

Originally Posted by Figment

Since there's infinite respawn, there's no virtue to killing the enemy more than they kill you. The only thing of strategic importance is killing the spawn points and then whatever had spawned. Suicidal tactics do that best in this game.

You're completely wrong of course. Killing brings you closer to objectives. The spacemen are the obstacle. Piling your corpse onto them at gunpoint only prolongs their defense against you. Managing a favorable exchange rate will push them back though. That is the entire point of the MAX crash, they are made for pushing into defenses and killing every non-MAX class with a good exchange rate.

[sauna]

Yes, please remove the death stat.

I'm tired of people logging off instead of dying. This happens on Miller and the players doing it...well, not hard to figure out by looking at what people has the highest K/D.

Same people also deconstruct their vehicles instead of losing a fight, mid-air, ground..whatever.

So sad individuals...

[RSphil]

i play Aces high with is a WW2 combat aircraft simulator. there is no K/D in this and none cares how many times you die. and we die a lot. with up to 600 aircraft and vehicles on the huge battlegrounds there are a lot of bullets heading for your squadrons. we fly into air battles that we are out numbered and still love it.

i think if K/D was removed more people would fight instead of hiding behind doors. bases would flip more as people would rush in and attack.

this is only my opinion from what i have seen when playing games with no K/D.

we shall see what soe chooses but i for one dont care about k/d as this game is too big not to die. it should be more about ground control and tactics then how many times you died.

i still love the game and play either way.

[Pella]

The only people that moan about the K/D stat are the people with a terrible one.

FPS culture, and competitiveness evolves around that very stat.

Win/Lose ratio.

[Babyfark McGeez]

I see a prominent k/d ratio not as the disease, but as a symptom of the overarching "disease" that is a (progression) system focused too much on personal performance in a faction (team) based game.

And together with flawed base design the result is rewarding cheesy gameplay.
I had my best k/d ratio (and xp/hour which is the REAL measurement of personal performance in ps2 - and is just as silly) when i was suicide bombing with c4 inside biolabs my faction was attacking; Jump out of teleport-spawnhut, fly high throw some c4 down, detonate it, die, repeat. I didn't even go for the cap points (like apparently EVERYONE ELSE TOO when i asked in /yell...), because well, it would end the killfarm...

That's why i have been saying you have to think this shit through before you go and build your game upon a progression system that undermines the actual idea of the game.

And we haven't even touched the "story" subject of how stupid it is for the military to intentionally put their troops at such a disadvantage untill they are deemed "worthy" enough to protect themselves better.

Sigh...i'm getting off track here...the point is: This whole progression (cert,xp) system is hindering the game(play). And making k/d ratios a prominent thing is adding to that problem.

[Assist]

Originally Posted by Dragonskin

The core game can do without the stat completely though because no one has listed any positive behaviors that the stat actually promotes in the core game.

I guess I see it differently, I don't see how they negatively impact a game. The reason people don't play the objectives in PS2 is because the objectives are meaningless. Once again, I think you guys are really giving the K/D stat far too much credit. It doesn't determine what players do, the players decide that and I think they decide that based on what is fun for them. Taking out a generator at a base means nothing in PS2, because it takes 15s to repair it back to full.

Your complaint seems to be that players are not playing the objectives in Planetside 2. I think you're wrong to correlate that to the K/D stat, as that is not the cause of the issue. The cause is the objectives have very little meaning or even impact on the game, other than for a few seconds(or a base cap, sometimes up to a whole big hour! )

[DrankTHEKoolaid]

1. Removing KD would obviously imply removing the death stat as well, I thought that kind of went without saying lol.

2. For those saying you use KD to track your progress... really? You need a stat to tell you that you're improving? And again getting a higher KD doesn't necessarily mean you're improving. It could mean you just simply decided to play a different class that day, or started using tanks more often.

3. Many people said to me after this video that camping hundreds of meters from the fight is because of certs not KD, look at games like Battlefield, (closest thing we have to PS2) there are no certs yet people still take a tank and sit on a hill hundreds of meters away. It's because they want a better KD.

4. Some of the best shooters of all time never had a KD or any stats for that matter, you played them because they were FUN, not because of a number.

Bottom line is that I don't think KD by itself is a bad thing, but when a number starts altering how you play, it can negatively affect games as a whole. It promotes camping, not just in PS2 but in every FPS. Furthermore it's not a true indicator, especially in a game like PS2, of how much you're actually helping your game.