Why K:D, Deaths, streaks and other stats are bad, and how PS2 can evolve the genre - Page 21

**Malorn** · 2012-07-23, 02:48 AM

And yet you seem worried. It's something easy enough to remove, and is there anyone who won't play the game because it doesn't have a death stat being visible? That would be quite ridiculous.

Negative stats shouldn't be tracked. It affects the game, like it or not, and the behavior it encourages is not good for the game. Just because we're in an era where we feel everything needs to have numbers doesn't mean those numbers need to be prominently displayed or elevated to inappropriate importance. I think the developers are smart enough to realize that and are capable of making decisions. Things that are "in" now aren't necessarily going to stay that way. That's what beta and feedback are all about.

kaibutzu · 2012-07-23, 03:03 AM

Originally Posted by Malorn

And yet you seem worried. It's something easy enough to remove, and is there anyone who won't play the game because it doesn't have a death stat being visible? That would be quite ridiculous.

Negative stats shouldn't be tracked. It affects the game, like it or not, and the behavior it encourages is not good for the game. Just because we're in an era where we feel everything needs to have numbers doesn't mean those numbers need to be prominently displayed or elevated to inappropriate importance. I think the developers are smart enough to realize that and are capable of making decisions. Things that are "in" now aren't necessarily going to stay that way. That's what beta and feedback are all about.

stfu

u probably suck at fps obv dont wanna show your 0.79 k/d

Zulthus · 2012-07-23, 03:48 AM

Originally Posted by kaibutzu

stfu

u probably suck at fps obv dont wanna show your 0.79 k/d

Obligatory .gif

Watch out Malorn, this guy is dangerous.

Just so this post is considered a contribution to the thread, K/D should not be tracked as it is not an accurate measure of player skill and contribution. That guy sitting over there with a 50/1 K/D is most likely just camping that doorway with a sniper rifle. SPM is a much better way to track how useful you are.

Flaropri · 2012-07-23, 04:33 AM

Originally Posted by Zulthus

Just so this post is considered a contribution to the thread, K/D should not be tracked as it is not an accurate measure of player skill and contribution. That guy sitting over there with a 50/1 K/D is most likely just camping that doorway with a sniper rifle. SPM is a much better way to track how useful you are.

Neither is batting average. Doesn't mean you shouldn't track it.

maradine · 2012-07-23, 09:57 AM

I've refined and tl;dr'd my earlier position into "Track Every Thing". Record every useful and useless bit of data, expose the API, and let the community decide what's important.

Realistically, KDR isn't going anywhere without a mass revolt. This thread is decent evidence that the community wants a number of different things. So track 'em all.

ZaBa · 2012-07-23, 03:24 AM

It's great how you seem to assume that the presence of stats you don't like automatically indicates that sensible things like the number of people you've transported in your Gal, heals, revives, repairs etc won't also be recorded. (hint: they are)

Regarding your concern about "negative" stats: deaths is a useful statistic to have, because it directly represents how much time you're spending not fighting (and conversely, how time you are spending fighting). If someone chooses to focus on dying less and killing more (a worthwhile goal for an HA player) in order to maximise their time on the front and thus their usefulness to the team (also points

), it's good for them to be able to see how they're doing with that.

But all of this is pointless because K:d is a curiosity; the main counter at the top of their stats tracker as of E3 is points/hour.

deltase · 2012-07-23, 03:41 AM

As i've always said, K/D is a stat that is nothing. For me it doesn't show, if you are good or bad. So The score thingy is way better cause it shows how much you took part in a battle or something like that.

EisenKreutzer · 2012-07-23, 03:50 AM

My K : D will probably have 50-100% more D thank K. I die a lot, because I suck at games. Hopefully K : D won't become the GearScore of Planeiside 2...

pengalor · 2012-07-23, 04:04 AM

They should just have options to hide them. I want to see my stats. Kills, death, SPM, number of revives, ammo given, accuracy, everything. It helps me to improve as a player by allowing me to critique my own performance. If you are worried about what the community is going to judge others on, there will always be something. You don't lower the bar to meet the lowest common denominator, you raise it and expect people to rise to that level. The highest level is choice, the choice to show whatever stats you want and allow you to base your performance on whatever you like. We don't need to be babied by the devs and told "you're not grown-up enough to see this stat and use it in a 'responsible' way".

Originally Posted by Plunkies

No. It's fact. It's literally fact. Working under the assumption that teamplay > KD whoring, it's a fact. Under no circumstance that I can think of will tracking deaths HELP teamplay in any conceivable way. I can come up with dozens of ways it will discourage it. How could it? How could it encourage anything but dying less? How could that lead to anything but players taking less risk?

Yes, because the mark of someone wanting a reasonable argument is accusing people who disagree with them of being trolls....

Except he's right. It's not fact, it's your opinion. It's based entirely on what YOU think will happen and circumstances YOU can think of. There's been no research, there's been no study, just random and biased observation. That's opinion.

EisenKreutzer · 2012-07-23, 04:28 AM

I fear that a prominently displayed K : D ratio or an easy way of accessing peoples K : D could potentially hurt the game, or atleast some aspects of it.

To support my claim, I present to you: GearScore from World of Warcraft.
Lots of people say GearScore ruined WoW. While I would hesitate to go that far, it did change lots of social dynamics in the game, and not for the better. Basically, for those of you who have never touched WoW, Every item you equip has a level. gearScore was a user-created addon that tracked those item levels, and displayed them as an overall score easily available to users of the addon.
What this meant was that people had an easy way of quickly looking at a character and "rate" their overall performance.
Thats where the shit started.
People with lower GearScores were excluded from everything. Guilds, Raids, even dungeon groups. You could literally be kicked from a PUG if your GearScore was too low in somebodys eyes.

Simply put, GearScore split the community.

Now, you might say that this was a good thing, as it separated the good players from the bad, but I don't agree with that.

I am also not saying that K : D in Planetside 2 will automatically turn into this, but the potential is there.
So just keep that in mind.

Mythoclast · 2012-07-23, 04:29 AM

Originally Posted by EisenKreutzer

I fear that a prominently displayed K : D ratio or an easy way of accessing peoples K : D could potentially hurt the game, or atleast some aspects of it.

To support my claim, I present to you: GearScore from World of Warcraft.
Lots of people say GearScore ruined WoW. While I would hesitate to go that far, it did change lots of social dynamics in the game, and not for the better. Basically, for those of you who have never touched WoW, Every item you equip has a level. gearScore was a user-created addon that tracked those item levels, and displayed them as an overall score easily available to users of the addon.
What this meant was that people had an easy way of quickly looking at a character and "rate" their overall performance.
Thats where the shit started.
People with lower GearScores were excluded from everything. Guilds, Raids, even dungeon groups. You could literally be kicked from a PUG if your GearScore was too low in somebodys eyes.

Simply put, GearScore split the community.

Now, you might say that this was a good thing, as it separated the good players from the bad, but I don't agree with that.

I am also not saying that K : D in Planetside 2 will automatically turn into this, but the potential is there.
So just keep that in mind.

This I agree with. Make KDR only accessible in some out of game stat screen and this effect would be negligible.

Aurmanite · 2012-07-23, 04:51 AM

Track everything. Don't take away an essential part of my experience.

Accuser · 2012-07-23, 05:05 AM

Here's an idea:
Give every player the ability to not track K/D at all on their account. Killwhores are going to killwhore even if you didn't track deaths. But completely disabling K/D on your account will force others to look at other stats if they want to evaluate your character.

Emperor Newt · 2012-07-23, 05:42 AM

Maybe track deaths, but only show it somewhere hidden in the web-profile or whatever.
KDR ingame doesn't tell you anyhing, especially not how good a teamplayer someone is. I very vividly remember the 6 sniper teams in BC2 which had tons of kills but where simply unable to do the objective.
If there is a ingame display then just show kills and some kind of "team score", just like Tribes Ascend does (just leave out the stupid stuff like in TA returning the flag. so infuriating...). It might not be perfect, but it's better then judging people by their KDR.

Trennen · 2012-07-23, 06:06 AM

KDR is a useless stat that only shit head fps **** need to stroke there e-peen to.

The only stat that matters in PS2 is the score stat and if they have any stat tracked it should be a score per death average. This would be the only way to really tell your worth in the empire.