New XP system hypocritic? Suggestions to make it&Meta better

Killjaeden · 2013-01-10, 11:03 AM

I'm happy about the intended changes. SOE seems to agrees that K/D isn't a good thing in the stats, because it's meaningless. K/D doesn't mean a player is good. He just kills more then he dies, but doesn't take into account in what timeperiod. Score per minute is the way to go.
Edit: Higby corrected K/D to XP/D after i made this post. All except one problem still persist with that idea however.

But wait! Why will the dynamic XP per kill be based on Kill (edit:now XP) per life then? Isn't that hypocritic? It should be based on score per minute as well, using the continent wide average.People with low K/D (now XP/D) will give "a fraction of the xp we had before" according to Higby's post.
If i didn't manage to kill somebody in my current life i give little reward, if i killed a whole squad without dieing i give alot of xp. Whenever i respawn this resets.

Problems i see when thinking about K/D (XP/D)based dynamic XP:
-K/D (XP/D) is not a measure for how well you do ingame. Not at all. You can get a K/D of 5, means 5 kills and 1 death in a gametime of 2h... that's a plain horrible performance. And yet the game rewards the enemy as if he killed a mass-slaughterer, who does that on a 2 minute basis, when someone kills you.

- Someone playing support class, doing supportive roles all the time usually has a horrible K/D - sometimes not even a single kill. And yet he helps the team big time if done right. If i kill one of them as assault class i get penalized in my reward as if i killed a newbie, who has no clue what or where to shoot. not relevant anymore

- If i try to stay alive longer, i won't necessarily get more xp, as i have to let opportunities for xp pass in order to stay alive sometimes. However, if i do stay alive longer, the game rewards my enemy that i tried hard not to die.

- A skilled guy who sprays death left and right wherever he goes just redeployed to another location. E.g. Biolab. If i redeploy there and somehow manage to kill him somehow, i get just as much xp as if i just killed a newbie who spawned at a sunderer and looks around not knowing where to go. Just because that guy didn't kill anyone/ or made XP at that moment doesn't mean he is a bad player

-A virtual life in Planetsife is meaningless: you don't get a penaltie for dying, other then the deathcounter, which has no effect on your character progress. You can respawn in a couple of seconds, or redeploy etc.
The game rewards a suicidal gameplay - run in and kill as much as possible until you die. If you killed yourself in the process, even better, because the enemy didn't gain advantage of your death in form of XP.
And with the K/D (now XP/D) based XP system the enemy won't get much reward for stopping a suicide runner before he can do damage. He only gives a proper reward after he managed to wreak havoc. At which point he could suicide once more to not give any reward.

-The K/D (now...you get it) system rewards you for letting the enemy kill your people. Imagine i am a HA walking towards the frontline. I see two of my own snipers and see a LA who is just about to flank them. If i kill him right away and protect my team mates i get little reward. If i wait until he killed both and then surprise and kill him i get alot more reward. Is this really what you want to reward, SOE?

- The system is prone to abuse, even more then the current one. We already have enough pilots who just suicide by either crashing into you - or suicide into the ground/jump out once you get on their tail and realize that they are not good enough to stand against you. The K/D system increases that even more. Imagine a "filthy rocketpod spammer" who farms infantry. He killed a dozend and now he has an A2A pilot on his tail. Knowing that he now gives plenty of XP, the urge to deny the enemy this sweety is even greater. The easiest way - crash yourself, jump out and die, deconnect... Possibilities are endless and easy. Same can be said for anybody with high XP/D, they could just redeploy to whipe their xp.

Luckily not everybody thinks like that, but there are enough people out there who do that. It doesn't matter to your faction if a medic tries to save your life, it's essentially just for his personal xp gain.
I can just as well respawn, with the benefit of beeing completely rearmed, full shield and special ability, beeing in a safe place where i can't get shot again immediately. Especially if the way between and death is just a couple of meters.
Yes i know there are people who do serious teamplay, but the majority of the unorganized hordes don't. And XP are the best way to "guide" every player to make stuff that helps your team. Not just the teamplayers.

The game should reward a faction that tries to save lifes. Not necessarily in XP. I'll come to that in a second.

- The guys with the higest XP/life are often vehiclegunners. Whereas infantry usually has a K/D of 1 and perhaps 2 assists. Speaking for an assault class. From my experience, support classes can make more easier. So, in the end you just reduce the reward for infantry in general - everyone except vehicles (which are killing machines after all) and some very good players, or lonewolf snipers get less XP in general.
And with less XP per kill you encourange what? Yes exactly, getting a vehicle to make killing easier! And fighting in meatgrinders to get XP

-Another thing this K/D per life based XP generates: it amplifies the drive to steal kills from your own team members. Spamming 4 rockets at a tank just to see it taken out by a 20mm on a sunderer and get a cheap assist is horrible. Even more so if you would get like 500xp for that HE farm-player.

Conclusion: Instead of just making spawn camping unattractive, the K/D dynamic system would create even more disparity and problems, also greatly affecting infantry gameplay in a negative way.

So here's my suggestions:
- Make the dynamic XP based on score/minute. A successfull player has a high score/minute, regardless what he does. Whether that is playing an assault class, support class, driving/flying vehicles, beeing suicide runner etc.
Get the average score/minute on the current continent every - say - 5 minutes and compare the player's score/minute against that. If it is lower then the average, give lower XP to the guy who killed that player. If alot higher, give more XP

- Introduce a XP "timer" after spawn if you want to reduce spawncamping incentive. Similar to the immunity. 10seconds after respawn a player (regardless of score/minute) gives 5 xp. And then the XP slowly count up, up to the maximum. 1 Minute should be enough, because if the counter is too high it just encourages suicide runs of the defender. However, it isn't a good way imo.
Here's why:
You have to understand that spawn camping sometimes is the only way to keep the enemy forces at bay. If you don't they spread all over you and take you out. So as an attacker you have no choice other then to "defend" yourself against the possibly endless swarm that comes out of the spawn room. This also applies to the defender who stands on the walls of an AMP station and shoots attackers who made their way over to you from the sunderer hidden behind a rock formation. You put your life at risk to defend that place, but don't get rewarded as much as the attacker for doing so.

You could take out the Sunderer, but often that's not possible because of the large zerg. Or because there are 3 engineers repairing it all the time. You need a lot of firepower to counter that. All while beeing swarmed by enemy infantry.

__________________________________________________ ________
Metagame improvement suggestions:
The game should reward a faction for keeping it's soldiers alive:

Example: A large force of the enemy attacks your facility. Your smaller force defends it. The battle goes on, and the defenders could fight with the attackers to a stalemate. In other words - for everyone of you that died, 3 enemies died. Even if you didn't gain any ground, the defenders as a whole should be rewarded for their good work in making the enemy pay.
How to do it - Count deaths on both sides (teamkills count too!) for a certain timeframe, in the vicinity of the facility. If a medic revives someone, the counter reduces by one. Count the average of attackers and defenders during that dimeframe as well. Now you calculate the relative number of deaths inflicted. The side that has a higher "relative inflicted deaths" count gains an advantage.
Number example: Attackers have 40 soldiers, defenders 25. During a time frame of 10 minutes the attackers inflicted 120 deaths, the defenders 'only' 100. This results in 3 inflicted deaths/soldier for the attacker (120/40), and 4 inflicted deaths/soldier for the defender (100/25). The defenders clearly outdid their opponents, made them pay a higher price in pixel-blood, despite beeing outnumbered and not achieving the same deaths on their enemy.

The reward could be either a small amount of extra ressources, or result in higher time required to capture the facility for the enemy, etc. Or XP for all people that where present in the vicinity over the whole timeframe.

Additionally there should be boni for beeing severely outnumbered (like 2 to 1 or more) as defender. Perhaps the defend bonus % could be increased if you are outnumbered, and be decreased if you have alot of forces in the area and only a few stragglers left from the large battle before.

Most of the times people don't fight until the end. They just redeploy to another area and the whole base is empty shortly before it's captured. There could be a Last-mans-stand Bonus after the facility has been captured, IF your forces where outnumbered. So essentially it works like this: The base flips returns and as (ex) defending player you get a screen message popup: Last mans stand!. After this message appeared you get a Xp bonus of 30% if you are still in that area, which will wear off after 1-2min.

If your faction restores ownership of the facilities controllposts within 3min after a base has fallen into the hands of the enemy it could give a "counter-attack" bonus if you manage to hold the controllposts for 1min at least - perhaps 50xp for everyone in that area (similar as if you had captured the facility)

Instead of giving one large XP injection for capturing a territory you could make it smaller by giving rewards to people during that capture and reduce the final XP bonus a bit. Perhaps you could reward securing/capturing of those outposts around a facility to players near it as well, because it's crucial and not always cause of the action of just one person.

Ok this is the last suggestion (for now =P)
An outpost/facility could give more capture XP if that cuts off enemy territory, or reconnects your own territory with an isolated one.

Thanks for your attention.
Please excuse language mistakes - i'm not a native speaker.

maradine · 2013-01-10, 11:08 AM

Dude, that's a fucking wall.

As a service to you, let me pull out what I think the kernel is, here -

Originally Posted by Killjaeden

So here's my suggestions:
- Make the dynamic XP based on score/minute. A successfull player has a high score/minute, regardless what he does. Whether that is playing an assault class, support class, driving/flying vehicles, beeing suicide runner etc.
Get the average score/minute on the current continent every - say - 5 minutes and compare the player's score/minute against that. If it is lower then the average, give lower XP to the guy who killed that player. If alot higher, give more XP

I like it, but I'll let the people who are passionate about the XP system dig into it. Personally, I measure success on whether I get to deconstruct my ride at the end of a mission.

I don't think the metagame suggestion is consistent with a narrative where everyone's a fully-insured, instantly replaceable collection of trigger muscle memory, but that's neither here nor there.

PredatorFour · 2013-01-10, 11:39 AM

I think score per min is slightly better. But even then does score per min mean a player is good ?

A hero can be defending against the odds and get a few kills but more deaths. Doesn't mean he is bad, far from it - fighting against overwhelming odds and slowing their attack for the empire... putting their body on the line. I think having good score per min and k/d doesn't necessarily make you a great player, in most cases it makes you a coward.

maradine · 2013-01-10, 11:53 AM

Originally Posted by PredatorFour

I think score per min is slightly better. But even then does score per min mean a player is good ?

A hero can be defending against the odds and get a few kills but more deaths. Doesn't mean he is bad, far from it - fighting against overwhelming odds and slowing their attack for the empire... putting their body on the line. I think having good score per min and k/d doesn't necessarily make you a great player, in most cases it makes you a coward.

How would having a good score per minute make one cowardly?

Kerrec · 2013-01-10, 11:55 AM

Change the way XP is calculated for vehicle kills. If you do 50% of a vehicle's HP in damage, then you immediately get XP for doing that. Then drastically reduce or eliminate XP for actually getting the kill.

Once that is accomplished, then you can do dynamic XP purely based on how much XP a player has accumulated since his last DEATH.

ShadetheDruid · 2013-01-10, 11:56 AM

I think it's a bit of a mistake to make assumptions when all we know about the changes to the system is a few line summary.

Firstly, the kill streak stop reward is already there in game, right now. So they're just going to change it up a bit so you don't get so much for someone who hasn't done anything and more for people who have. In terms of kills, at least.

Combine that with not getting much XP for newly spawned players, it's going to be more attractive, gaining XP-wise, to go into battles where you can pick off people on kill streaks (instead of camping a spawn in relative safety). How people react in a general combat situation isn't going to change, because the system isn't changing that much from what it is in regard to that particular situation.

Secondly, nowhere does it say that the dynamic XP is solely based on kills (or time alive, for that matter). Likely, killing a support class player is just going to be the same as it is now* (unless you kill them as they're freshly spawned, obviously).

It's only newly spawned players that will have reduced XP rewarded for them, not necessarily everyone who lacks kills.

*I do agree that it would be nice to factor in support actions.. so killing, say, an engie who's been keeping an annoying MAX alive for the past 10 minutes gives you a nice juicy reward..

..But overall, this is still going to be an improvement over the original system. Less rewards for spawn camping, more rewards for killing people who are rampaging across combat zones, as well as changes to how much support classes gain in terms of XP, and XP for deterring vehicles.

Killjaeden · 2013-01-10, 12:02 PM

Originally Posted by PredatorFour

I think score per min is slightly better. But even then does score per min mean a player is good ?

Not necessarily. I agree that it is not perfect, but it's alot better then the kills you currently have in your player-life. I'd say score/min is the only measurable way to see how the player does. You can't measure "tactical decisions" of a player - at least i have no idea how to do that. Also, what defines a "good" player?

The better the XP reward system (rewarding more things other then kills, resupply and base capture) becomes the better the score/minute statistic becomes at measuring how "good" a player is

Edit:

Originally Posted by ShadetheDruid

..But overall, this is still going to be an improvement over the original system. Less rewards for spawn camping, more rewards for killing people who are rampaging across combat zones, as well as changes to how much support classes gain in terms of XP, and XP for deterring vehicles.

And who exactly rampages across the combat zones? Nobody, except tanks and air. And the odd lonewolf sniper. Everyone else as i would gess the highest average beeing 3Kills on one death if at all. Most have 1 or lower. So, in the end you just reduce the reward for infantry in general - they don't have a high K/D to begin with.

And with less XP per kill you encourange what? Yes exactly, getting a vehicle to make killing easier!

Another thing this K/D per life based XP generates: it amplifies the drive to steal kills from your own team members. Spamming 4 rockets at a tank just to see it taken out by a 20mm on a sunderer and get a cheap assist is horrible. Even more so if you would get like 500xp for that HE farm-player.

Secondly, nowhere does it say that the dynamic XP is solely based on kills

Originally Posted by Higby

Dynamic XP system for player kills, players who have more kills XP earned on their current life are worth more XP. Freshly spawned players will be worth a fraction of the current kill reward

He seemed to have changed it from kills to XP 5 min ago. That makes it better, but still not better then SpM based reward. Many problems i explained still apply.

Phantomdestiny · 2013-01-10, 02:50 PM

GUYS GUYS GUYS THIS THIS THIS

tweet by higby
Clarification on dynamic XP: it won't just be kills that increase a players XP bounty, that was a poorly worded example...

2nd tweet by higby
Any XP earned will add to your XP bounty, not just getting kills.

ShadetheDruid · 2013-01-10, 02:55 PM

Originally Posted by Phantomdestiny

GUYS GUYS GUYS THIS THIS THIS

tweet by higby
Clarification on dynamic XP: it won't just be kills that increase a players XP bounty, that was a poorly worded example...

2nd tweet by higby
Any XP earned will add to your XP bounty, not just getting kills.

Excellent, thanks.

Seems asking for clarification of a summary does pay off.

Sturmhardt · 2013-01-10, 03:01 PM

Let's see how they build the bounty... I think the general idea is great. Nothing to add.

Killjaeden · 2013-01-10, 03:03 PM

Originally Posted by Phantomdestiny

GUYS GUYS GUYS THIS THIS THIS

Yes, i have seen that - the only thing this affects is one point on the list however, amongst many others. I've edited the top post to reflect the change of wording.

Brusi · 2013-01-10, 03:44 PM

Thanks maradine. No way I was going to read all of that without a heavy dose of caffeine

Phantomdestiny · 2013-01-10, 03:48 PM

Originally Posted by Killjaeden

Yes, i have seen that - the only thing this affects is one point on the list however, amongst many others. I've edited the top post to reflect the change of wording.

tbh that point is pretty important . support roles are the bases of a game like ps1/ps2

Ohaunlaim · 2013-01-11, 03:28 AM

XP earned to increase bounty seems fair enough to me.

But to discourage camping a 20-30 second timer where reward rises from 0xp to a base 100xp would be nice. After 20-30 seconds everybody would be worth 100xp and then bounties could be boosted beyond the base reward with the new dynamic system.

That way, beyond spawn campers, net exp is increased for everybody.

MaxDamage · 2013-01-11, 03:36 AM

Too long, didn't read.

Too many people butthurt over K/D.

They are not removing it, nor can they dictate how people use it.
They did not "Decide that it was bad" they are taking the loudest whiners lead on this.

I will continue to use K/D as a base for improving my game (I don't HE/Zephyr/whatever grind) and to judge people.

Tough luck for you noobs and whiners.