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

[SkilletSoup]

KDR needs to stay in the game. I use it as a way of measuring my OWN personal progress using MY own style of play. KDR on leader boards are meaningless as you know not the style of play, that includes farming and cheats. This game will need all the stats it can get since there is no end game per say.

[Disillusioned]

The best way to combat this will be ignoring the eventual "look at my beast k/d" threads that will be created daily. As a long time Battlefield player it always amazed me the things people would do to artificially boost their stats- 300 games of rush played, 1 mcom destroyed and such.

Most of the people who will play only for their stats and generally do nothing team oriented are typically attention whores...pay them no mind and they'll eventually disappear. Hopefully.

[StumpyTheOzzie]

Totally agree with OP. Deaths is irrelevant in this game. If there were ticket counters like other games with a set number of respawns for the empire, then it would be important.

Since your personal resources is really the only limiting factor in this game I really don't think that kills or deaths have any purpose.

Especially since I'm a support player who rarely carries a weapon in PS1, it's ultra useless for me. I'd much rather rate myself on armour repaired or "people spawned from my galaxy" or some other metric. I'm doing much more important work for the empire by providing a forward base of operations (short supply lines = victory) than being a shooter.

Having said that, if the shooty types want it, keep it in but I hope sensible Outfit leaders can have access to other stats during my application process.

[Rockstone]

I agree with OP, from beginning to end. Lets enter the 21st century, with style!

[Khellendros]

I disagree with removing any stats. We need MORE stats, not less. Kills, deaths, captures, assists, heals, rezzes, score, and anything and everything else the devs can think of.

[Malorn]

Wow that was one hell of a necro....


You can find it, but it doesn't have to be prominent in the game. It can be buried somewhere. It doesn't have to have a leaderboard promoting it either.

Information is OK, but which information is prominent must be carefully considered.

[StumpyTheOzzie]

kilometres flown, galaxies deployed, spawns from said gals, km driven in each of the vehicles, shots fired, shots hit, headshots, and a million other things but especially time played,so that you can measure how active that player is.

[Goldeh]

I like what Malron says

You have my support.

[IceyCold]

I wouldn't say remove K/D so much as add a support point tally as well.

Support points gathered from revives and heals, as well as vehicles repaired / destroyed and Deployables set.

I want to see a lot of stats, so when I see a player with a 1/5 K/D and then look below it I see that he also has 300 revives a day and 6000 HP healed; now I know he's not a bad player he's just a really fucking good medic.

[BuzzCutPsycho]

Stats Promoted by the game prime player behavior

The study of priming teaches us that passive stimuli can shape our behavior. Things like which stats appear on your character sheet will prime players to improve them, even subconsciously. For example, if you constantly reinforce that "captures" are important in the game, and put capture stats front-and center on the stats and have the default leaderboard show captures then you will see a change in player behavior as they are subconsciously primed to play for captures.

(More on priming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29)

The good side of this is that the developers can significantly and subtly influence the behavior of players by carefully choosing the stats which are promoted. The bad side of this is that if they don't carefully choose them with the understanding that their choices will affect player behavior then they can introduce ruinous game-play.

K/D is Ruinous

The primary motivation for this post is to highlight K/D, which is a particularly ruinous stat (which according to videos) is currently being promoted by PlanetSide 2. The gaming world has a terrible culture precedent where the barometer of player skill is by default kills-per-death. Try this trick at home - play a round of BF3 or just ask another BF3 player how well he did. The vast majority of the time players will read their K-D stat. They will rarely read their score, and almost never cite whether their team won or lost. Years of early session shooters have erroneously trained us that the K/D stat is important. Some people think it needs to be present. It does not, and the game will be better off without it.

The danger K/D poses for PlanetSide 2 is that it discourages risk-taking which leads to derisive game-play. Taking risks increases your chances of incrementing the death stat, which sends the K/D in the wrong direction. Taking objectives, helping other players, being the first man to assault a defended position - these are all behaviors that are discouraged by the promotion of K/D. This is one reason many players will resort to being relatively useless and sit back and snipe so they can preserve their stats rather than assault a well-defended position. If it's a good farm they will have no interest at all in advancing objectives, preferring instead to sit back and rack up stats.

If the "death" stat were not shown on a scoreboard or leader-board then you would see significantly more teamwork and objective-based play in PlanetSide 2. It is as simple as this - when there is no perceived penalty for taking risks you will see more risk taking. Risk taking is good in games and especially so in a teamwork environment to keep the game from stagnating. The only thing K/D teaches players is that they should avoid risks. It is a selfish stat which when promoted leads to poor game-play and derisive player behavior.

Developers have a huge opportunity

The developers of PlanetSide 2 have an opportunity to leverage the priming to influence the game by promoting stats that encourage the behaviors they want to see in game. But choosing any simple stats is meaningless and squanders this opportunity. The best stat for developers to promote is score because it is abstract, defined by the developers, and they can directly control what influences it. Simple stats like kills, captures, and K/D cannot be influenced; they are crisply defined constructs. Score is malleable. For example, if the devs which to encourage more captures, they can increase the score value of a capture. If they want to encourage more kill streaks, then they can increase the kill streak score bonus. If they want to encourage more ammo dropping by engineers they can add score for kill assists from people who were recently given ammo, and/or the score value when ammo is received.

Score is a universal stat that is defined by the developers and can therefore be controlled by the developers. It is a tremendous opportunity not only to create a universal calibration of how effective a PlanetSide 2 player is, but it also allows the developers to change the impact each action has on it. Additionally, the "death" stat is naturally factored into score - dead players don't score points. Time spent returning to a combat zone is time not earning score, so naturally dying less can be one way to improve one's score. Playing with medics and utilizing squad spawn and teamwork is a way to minimize these effects and so score takes that into account also. It's an elegant solution.

Other interesting stats could be derived from score, such as showing players where their score contribution originates, be it kills, revives, captures, etc. You could classify them, have pretty color charts, and even bring in leader-boards based on categories of score gain, from support, kills/assists, vehicles, objectives, etc. Who are the players with the highest objective-related scores? Who are the players with the highest kill-related scores, be it direct kills, head-shots, streaks, assists, etc? The possibilities are rich here for PlanetSide 2 to influence what players perceive as important and aggregate many similar types of game-play together.

Recommendation

Deaths as a stat need to be gutted from the game. It is a negative thing that discourages risk taking; just get rid of it. With it goes K/D, and in its place a universal developer-controlled stat can exist.

The best stat to promote is Score/Minute. The /minute part factors in playtime so casual players and hardcore players are on relatively equal footing in terms of making the leader-board. It becomes a fair comparison. It also becomes a measure of efficiency; simply playing a lot and racking up score isn't enough to dominate a leader-board. Players should be encouraged to be productive which is precisely what score/min achieves.

Please understand the power that stats have on player behavior. It isn't simply information; it influences the way the game is played. Don't blindly follow tradition and squander an opportunity to set the tone and influence player behavior in PlanetSide 2.

[moosepoop]

there is a positive aspect: outfits can evaluate the fighting abilities of their members. then you can sort the members into different squads for different purposes acccording to their abilities.

for example you can group the outfit members with the highest k/d into an elite squad as vanguard/flankers, while grouping weaker members into your main force.



you can place outfit members with highest acuracy in the back while equipping low acuracy members into a close quarters combat squad.

[Buggsy]

Absolutely. Dittos OP.

Originally Posted by Khellendros

I disagree with removing any stats. We need MORE stats, not less. Kills, deaths, captures, assists, heals, rezzes, score, and anything and everything else the devs can think of.

Devs shouldn't be wasting their time with stats at all. The point of MMOFPS is to win the game, not farm points like World of Warcraft.

[Blackwolf]

Originally Posted by Raymac

Plus K: D ratio is such a ubiquitous tracking stat that it is now as common as ammo. It's a standard feature at this point. I do like the idea of tracking other stats as well and letting the community give more weight to those other stats.

I like where this thought is going.

Provide more then just the K/D like healing, repair, revivals, vehicle kills (tracked by individual vehicles), vehicle losses.

PS1 included a break down on pretty much everything you did and put it into a merit system that allowed you to wear your merits with pride even if it was damn near impossible to tell who had what merits on their shoulders at first glance. Their mistake was that they started tying in-game rewards like certain vehicle variants and -cough- vehicles -cough- to earning merits. That was what the certification system was for, and should never have been stepped over.

Going for those merits was actually fun, even if the majority of them involved killing an enemy. The streaks were challenging most of the time and pride was reward enough.

[Buggsy]

Originally Posted by SkilletSoup

KDR needs to stay in the game. I use it as a way of measuring my OWN personal progress using MY own style of play. KDR on leader boards are meaningless as you know not the style of play, that includes farming and cheats. This game will need all the stats it can get since there is no end game per say.

My own personal progress is, "Am I having fun?"

[Landtank]

Originally Posted by Buggsy

My own personal progress is, "Am I having fun?"

Brings up the idea that everyone has different views of their own personal progress.