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

[Tatwi]

I don't think Kraft Dinner is that bad for gamers. I mean sure, too many carbs are bad if you're not getting an exercise at all, but I doubt the cheese sauce if going to kill you. Now the butter on the other hand, that's a different story. Lay off the butter if you're only running around inside video games!

[Sifer2]

I see this thread got necro'ed. I still agree with the original poster that K/D is not ideal for this type of game. I think it encourages the wrong behavior an worse actively discourages players from going somewhere on a map their faction is at a disadvantage. Or playing class's that are not great for getting kills.

I don't think it will be changed though. Cause I watched a Higby interview an he talked about how the stats are going to record everything. Even how many times you were killed by a particular player over the life of the game. Like when you die who you got killed by pops up and you see all that kind of stuff. Really reeks of session based arena shooter stuff to me. I think it will make the game community worse for it but I don't see them trashing all that work on the stats.

[The Degenatron]

Responding to the original post, first let me say that I agree on the surface. The gist is to promote team play and that to me is always a good thing.

However, Malorn, you contradict yourself when you say these things:

Originally Posted by Malorn

It has many paths to success - one path should not be glorified over others.

Deaths should not even be tracked - at all, ever.

Players should be encouraged to do whatever activities they are good at...

The idea that a stat should be removed totally and not shown to players goes against the notion of allowing players to choose their own path to success.

While I myself would rather track my progress based on ammo resupplies, repairs, and captures - another player may not. On the other side, I love playing as a Max, and what else is in the mind of a Max soldier than maximizing the number of kills while prolonging the use of their (possibly very expensive) Max armor - when I'm spraying death as a max unit, KDR is very important.

Snipers and Max specialist may be keenly attuned to their ability to kill-streak, cause maximum carnage, and survive. This also helps the team and is often the result of teamwork (Max's don't rampage long without an engineer). To arbitrarily remove at stat cuts these peoples metrics off and makes what would be a clear cut measure of performance in what could only be determined through a complex mathematical calculation.

You see, "Scores" greatest strength is also it's greatest weakness. It's like a gumbo, it may tastes delicious but you still don't know what's in it. It could take a player an hour to decipher what they were doing right two days ago that got a huge bump in score. And the weighting process itself is tricky. If you put a lot of weight on hacking a terminal to capture a base, then you'll have a mad dash to the terminal and no one watching the door. You could even get TKing to stop a friendly from performing the hack so that some jerk could get that score.

The point to all of this is simple: The mantra for the dev team has always been "We want you to play the way YOU want to play." Removing ANY stat simply because a group of people don't like seeing that stat cuts directly against that mantra. No one should be deciding how other players should measure their own success.

A better solution is to allow players to customize their own stats tracking. If you're an engineer, then you can put ammo supplies and repairs at the top of the screen in big bold text. If you're a sniper, you can put KDR at the top. This allows players to decide their own level of teamplay, their own level of success, and their increase their enjoyment to the max. Have the on-screen ques that promote "good behavior" plug into this customized, personalized stats tracking and display thing important to that player.

Another layer to this is that each class could come preset to a customized metric sheet. Players could then go in and tweak it to their liking. Just because a player is an infiltrator, maybe they don't want to snipe, and would rather sneak behind enemy lines to sabotage terminals. They could pull the default KDR off the top of the metrics tracking and place equipment destroyed on top. That's just one example on what could be endless combinations of metric tracking.

Again, I want to reiterate that on the whole I agree with your mentality, i just don't like the method you've chosen to promote as the solution.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by The Degenatron

The idea that a stat should be removed totally and not shown to players goes against the notion of allowing players to choose their own path to success.

Deaths are not a success metric.

[GreatMazinkaise]

Originally Posted by Malorn

Deaths are not a success metric.

Assuming they're measuring your success rate 1v1 then yes they are.

[goneglockin]

I don't care much about K.

But I'm all in favor of having a end-of-the-round style scoreboard that can be accessed in-game for all the participants in a single base cap.

That would make me hard.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by GreatMazinkaise

Assuming they're measuring your success rate 1v1 then yes they are.

By that logic a kill measures the same thing.

[The Degenatron]

Originally Posted by Malorn

Deaths are not a success metric.

But KDR is. And simply because it's not the way you or I would measure our own success, that's not a reason to remove the ability to track it from the game totally.

With the dev's wall of data being provided to external websites, it's conceivable you could have a website called "Planetside Deathmatch" which shows ONLY Kills, Deaths, KDR, and Kill Streaks on a leaderboard.

The idea probably gives you fits, but it is possible, and for some players a really cool idea.

To each their own.

Frankly, I'm not worried about players who are playing like that. They will watch as coordinated Outfits roll past, tear shit up, and roll out victorious.

[GreatMazinkaise]

Originally Posted by Malorn

By that logic a kill measures the same thing.

Actually, the combination of the two is required; if your K/D is > 1 in 1v1 fights you're a better grunt than someone that has a K/D significantly less than 1.

A squad of K/D 1+ is gonna be able to better take and hold points and repel forces of greater size. 1v1 K/D marks the difference between elites and zerglings.

[Katanauk]

I like my K/D/A stats, tells me if I'm playing well or not. same with Planetside 1, I always looked to my K/D/A and for me that told me how I was playing.

My assists were rarely from repairing, msotly driving, so they gave me an actual feel for how I was doing, as opposed to getting 200 assists from an AMS.


I like my stats.

[Malorn]

Instead of arguing with monkeys I'm going to be productive here and offer you all an example of how stats are currently shown in PlanetSide 2 and the huge weight kill-stats and specifically K/D is weighted.

Before anyone freaks out about tech test violations, all of these images are from publically released videos.

For these shots I used the TotalBiscuit video w/ commentary from Matt Higby (the one where Kevmo is playing), and the E3 Day 3 video where Purrfect walks us through the stats screens. Simple captures from there.

Ok, let us begin.


First, the default player screen. This is the screen you see when you look at your player profile in game. What do you see?


On this screen we see prominently displayed - kills, deaths, and K/D occupy the center-most locations, with "score" on the right side.

The only nice thing in this is at least the Daily Score Leaderboard is in a more focused position than the Daily Kills Leaderboard.

From looking at this screen alone what the devs are telling me the player is that Kills, Deaths, and K/D are the most important stats. Score is still up there, but that's the only stat that might reflect anything other than personal kills and my ability to get them without putting myself in harm's way.


Next screen. The stats page.


With apologies to the colorblind I have conveniently color-coded areas of interest. Green are things which reflect possible teamwork, while the Red reflects purely selfish stats.

As is plainly visible, the very top of the screen (which remains through most of the tabs), the two most prominent stats are Score Per Minute (SPM) and K/D Ratio. SPM is great, but why does the game elevate K/D to such importance? That sends the message to players that one of the two stats that matters most in PlanetSide is K/D, which is ridiculous.

Next we have in the middle of the screen a tab whose default showing appears to be Kills, showing me my kills, longest killstreak, and daily, weekly, and monthly kill counts. Not terribly bad in its own right, but the default nature of this is poor, and there are no territory/capture stats at all showing how good this player is at capturing territory, or reviving teammates or anything other than the Score aggregate (which is a good aggregator).

At the bottom in overall stats we have a list, which unsurprisingly starts with the selfish killstats first, and only then does it list the more teamwork oriented stats of assists, base captures, and score.

It's important to point out that the only territory-control related stat that appears here is WAAAAY down at the bottom with nothing else of relevance. No repair amount, no healed amount show up either.

It's the same sort of shit you'd see in a session shooter. No teamwork emphasis, no playing-the-objective emphasis - no sir, kills, deaths, and K/D are the most important things here.

The only saving grace is that SPM is elevated to a prominent position at the top. That's good. But then they ruin it by putting K/D right next it it in almost equal standing.


Last, lets look at one of the class breakdown pages.


What we see here is so sad its comical. The top of the screen shows stat sumamry with "Most Kills" and "Best K/D Ratio" listed at the top. Because Best K/D ratio is clearly why someone plays a medic, amirite? Where did SPM go? Why not show off the class where you earn the highest Score Per Minute? It was prominently displayed before, where did it go?

Score is still shown, and so is SPM, in the individual class sections. Score is there, and so is SPM, but SPM appears after we look at Kills, Headshots, Deaths, and K/D ratio. Clearly the PlanetSide 2 dev team thinks these stats are important.

Where are the stats for most control console captures? What about territory captures? What about resource accrual? What about revive stats, and heal stats, and repair stats? Where are ASSISTS?


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.

[GreatMazinkaise]

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.

Explain how.

What I'm seeing here is that bad killwhores that also happen to have brain damage will fail to win at Planetside. The good killwhores that are not brain damaged and play the objectives as well will proceed to beat the the bad killwhores while simultaneously farming the bad "teamplayers" who have poor K/D. Sounds like everyone wins barring the bads.

[Shadowrath]

Originally Posted by Eyeklops

I disagree. Recording deaths makes people think about self preservation, like people do IRL.

TL;DR

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by GreatMazinkaise

Explain how.

What I'm seeing here is that bad killwhores that also happen to have brain damage will fail to win at Planetside. The good killwhores that are not brain damaged and play the objectives as well will proceed to beat the the bad killwhores while simultaneously farming the bad "teamplayers" who have poor K/D. Sounds like everyone wins barring the bads.

I just did.
http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...&postcount=493

The prominence of stats reinforces what is important, and what is important shapes behavior.

To put it in simple terms so you can understand - the death stat makes you look bad. You will avoid that stat. In avoiding that stat you change the way you behave in the game. If the stat didn't exist, you would behave differently.

The problem is exacerbated by the stats the devs choose to elevate and display prominently, as illustrated in the post you quoted, so you must not have read it.

[Accuser]

Originally Posted by Malorn

I just did.
http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...&postcount=493

The prominence of stats reinforces what is important, and what is important shapes behavior.

I really hope some Devs check out that link, great analysis.