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Kills/Deaths

A scoreboard should in my opinion be a method to display someone's performance and how much someone helps his team. And not about how good someone is at hitting distant targets, staying alive or whatever.

It could do both. It doesn't have to just do one because some people believe it should just be that way. That's all I'm hung up on here.

I'm sorry I don't have screens to show you how a scoreboard that doesn't highlight deaths could lead to people doing stupid things to boost their score. I don't come to every thread ready to meticulously pick apart your suggestions. It's not that hard to imagine though, FPS players are often like that.

If you think otherwise, well, just look at all the underhanded things people do already to maximize their score in Ostfront. Take away the deaths attached to those actions and it'll just get worse.
 
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I have to agree with the OP. Showing the K/D, or keeping track of it at all, would change the way people play RO and in my opionion to the worse. I belive that the majority of players care more about their personal stats (I'm guilty) and I can imagine how attacking teams would bog down because everyone is carring more about their own stats than that of the team.

One of the major pros with RO for me is that I don't have to worry about having a good ratio. I can concentrate on doing what is best for the team.
 
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Based on the live-from-Tripwire bashcast, the current scoreboard (still beta) according to John Gibson breaks down the players points in different columns. One lists kills, another teamplay points, and their total score (to the right of these) is the sum of both of these points.

I think this works just fine, since the player's total score is a composite of both teamplay and kills. And I find it nice to know how much of my score was kills vs teamplay, which I find lacking in RO since it is all lumped together.

I wouldn't worry about obsession over K/D ratios. If RO2 is anything like RO1, the teamplay points you earn by resupplying machine gunners and capturing objectives greatly outnumber the measly totals you get from killing other players:

1 pt per player killed
5 pts per MG resupply
10 points for capturing

Makes the kills seem pretty insignificant doesn't it?

Fully agreed, that's how it should be done!
 
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If you think otherwise, well, just look at all the underhanded things people do already to maximize their score in Ostfront. Take away the deaths attached to those actions and it'll just get worse.

Currently in roost deaths are not taken into the score equation either, so its not like anything will be any worse in that regard. People will indeed try to maximize their scores people always will, but dying often and ramboing isn't the method to maximize any score ever. Its just that dying will then only be as important as the game play makes it be.

I think that if dying should become more important it should have a reflection in the actual game play, like for instance limited personal reinforcements. And as I've said in every post my suggestion wasn't even about making the game use purely Kills/Hour but Kills/Hour multiplied with Kills/Deaths so staying alive actually would become more important than in Roost.

The key was that Kills/Deaths doesn't show the full information, that beside staying alive you need to make kills. As the enemies return to the battlefield.

In a map like Koningsplatz there are enough reinforcements for every player in the axis team to die once every 2 minutes. As long as people stay under that they do not negatively affect the rest of their team (and logically assault classes are somewhat allowed to die more than say rifle classes). By making the game only based on Kill/Death ratios severely lowers the chances of success for the attackers as less people will take the chance to cap, as people end up playing more secure than a map was designed for. (the attackers can die once every minute for instance on Konings).

For the attacking team you need people that take chances, in real life a battle for a building isn't completed in 20 minutes. Yet the time limit in RO is something like 15-20 minutes to capture multiple, if people do not take chances then the attacking side will never attack.

Scores have the nasty habit that people that optimize for them can often care more about their personal score than the benefits of the team by trying to win the map, and that is why I think that scores should be in line with what helps your team win. So that if people maximize their score they actually are a good and important asset to their team. So when factorizing in a score for killing it should in my opinion be the killing that helps the team win. How hard or beautiful a shot was doesn't matter to the rest of the team.
 
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Trouble i forsee with making limited respawns an individual thing is you'll wind up with a server full of campers - with no one waitnting to advance and die as it'll take away a life.

Which is fine the side on defense, not a great idea for the attackers who have to advance to win.

Just keep KD as it is now with it not being the most important thing
 
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Ramboing becomes a problem when the game itself does not punish dying enough. If that is the case, I don't think a scoreboard can fix anything. As it is extremely difficult to give score appropriete how much you contribute to team victory, I think the scoreboard should just be about showing score and score/minute.

The good thing with a level system is that one can look at the scoreboard and get a feeling about if the teams are uneven or not. People try and avoid getting a situation where there are 4 guys of lvl 10 playing against 4 guys of lvl 40 for instance.

So some kind of player information should be on the scoreboard too, don't know if TWI ever said anything about that or what they feel.

(sry if this didn't add anythign to the discussion, I didn't read the whole thing :D)
 
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Ramboing becomes a problem when the game itself does not punish dying enough. If that is the case, I don't think a scoreboard can fix anything. As it is extremely difficult to give score appropriete how much you contribute to team victory, I think the scoreboard should just be about showing score and score/minute.

The good thing with a level system is that one can look at the scoreboard and get a feeling about if the teams are uneven or not. People try and avoid getting a situation where there are 4 guys of lvl 10 playing against 4 guys of lvl 40 for instance.

So some kind of player information should be on the scoreboard too, don't know if TWI ever said anything about that or what they feel.

(sry if this didn't add anythign to the discussion, I didn't read the whole thing :D)

TWI has said at some point that the team balance function actually takes into account every bodies level (lets just hope they apply some statistics to it, instead of simply saying a level 10 is double as strong as a level 5).

I think that the absolute measurement of score isn't as useful as score/hour or score/min (based purely on the results of the last map of course). As with a time factorization you can compare the score of someone that played for 15 minutes with someone that played for 30 minutes. With absolute values you could expect that a player of the same strength that played double as long would have a score double of the other players (although it gives a player insight in what actions are worth how many points). In public play you often have a lot of people join and leave all the time. Making it that the bottom half of the scoreboard is not necessarily a bad player but simply players that joined in late.

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Personally how I would hope the scoreboard would be is the following.
Show 2 score sets one based on teamwork one based on kills.

Both displayed like this:
Killpoints/hour * Killpoints/deaths = your killscore
Teamworkpoints/hour * Killpoints/deaths = your teamworkscore

Why keep them separate? Personally I think its just darned hard to combine them in such a fashion that people continue to do both rather than focus on one or the other.

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Killpoints:
Where kill points are your kills but scaled up depending on how important a certain kill is. Where killing people that are in the capzone or moving to the capzone give you more points. Where killing enemies that make a lot of kills give you more points. And finally where killing rare but important enemy classes gives you more points (Squad leader / Commander and perhaps sniper and MG).

Teamwork points:
Teamwork points are points you get for following a commanders order, resupplying a machine gun, capturing an objective. Another thing that is important for teamwork points is that people actually get points for defending and holding a base. Too often in public games when there are multiple cap zones open people capture something, and immediately go to the next cap to maximize their points, while actually holding on to a cap zone after capturing it would be more beneficial to the team.

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The key for me is that any score factorization should be helpful to the team, for instance giving ammo to an MG should only give you points if he requests ammo. In public servers I've encountered loads of times that people try to resupply me by standing right in front of me so I can not fire at the incoming enemies.

But as well when displaying score, it should display how much your killing helps your team to win the match. Someone prioritizing important targets is worth more than someone with some more kills but only killing regular guys.
 
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What I find lame more than a k/d ratio is people doing suicidal things because they know they can just respawn. Guys with demo charges and leaders yelling people to rush cap zones without regard to enemy fire seem to be the worst for this. People can say others are cowards for trying to stay alive. I say they are being more realistic about things than the clowns that are reckless.
 
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thing is that people shouldn't waste lives because they personally would get ****ed with it. Currently the only thing that gets harmed for suicide charging is your team in a distant matter, you don't have any feedback yourself.

Which is why I think a factorization of K/D multiplied with a Kill/Hour ratio would work ok. And why I'm heavily pushing on individual reinforcements, so if someone is wasting lives you obtains instant feedback.
 
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thing is that people shouldn't waste lives because they personally would get ****ed with it. Currently the only thing that gets harmed for suicide charging is your team in a distant matter, you don't have any feedback yourself.

Which is why I think a factorization of K/D multiplied with a Kill/Hour ratio would work ok. And why I'm heavily pushing on individual reinforcements, so if someone is wasting lives you obtains instant feedback.

Thing is, some people won't care even if you showed how much they hurt the team.

You just have to try to find a way to make staying alive rewarding in various ways, and dieing aversive in many ways.
 
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Personally, I would like to see a Kill/Death ratio listed. I'd like it to get an overall reference for myself. It doesn't have to be displayed all the time, perhaps only at the end of the round.

Now, for those that say showing a K/D ratio would just lead to players hunkering down and defending, I think that is mostly BS. Sure some players might, but I believe most players would just subconsciously take it into account and perhaps play a bit better, sorta like injecting a little fear of death that we are all trying to get suppression to accomplish.

I also believe that there are some players out there who believe they are Rambo's and could really benefit from knowing they are dying much more recklessly than they should be. I'm not talking about those players who take chances when it necessary for the team, and play carefully the other times when they should. To me those are the more ideal players. I'm talking about those players who just rush out into the killing zone screaming everyone else is a camper and then they die just to repeat it after respawn.

I'm also going to add that a high K/D ratio doesn't mean that the player cares more about staying alive than helping destroy enemy forces. It might mean that... by a player being super careful, but it can also mean that they actually have killed a large portion of the enemy team! They might have died alot, but have inflicted tremendous casualties on the enemy while doing so. That is where (Zet's) Kill/Hour ratio would be useful in combination with a K/D ratio. A high K/H ratio might look good, but the player might also have done so much dying himself to achieve that, that they actually hurt their own team tremendously.

All in all, these ratios and other information could be useful for players in looking back at how a round went and how they have been playing as of late. There is no one magical ratio that tells how a player is doing.
 
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Thing is, some people won't care even if you showed how much they hurt the team.

Change that to most people won't care even if you show how much they hurt the team. Unless you know and care for the players you play with most people simply won't care if their actions will lower the chances of victory and fun for their other team mates. People don't bother to save reinforcements and will simply to continue to waste them when a team needs to hold back, and on the other end people don't bother to stop camping when the team needs to advance.

Which is exactly the reason why I am for making staying alive more important by for instance individual reinforcements and factorizing in a K/D ratio in the score. But rather than only looking at the importance of not dying looking at the importance of killing as well. Both are important and both should be showcased.

My main point again is that a pure K/D ratio as a score doesn't give any valid information of how well someone plays in a game with re-spawns. Killing more than you get killed is important, but when there is a constant stream of enemies, there needs to be a quantitative amount added to the equation.

Someone with 10 kills and 1 death is not as good as someone that got 100 kills and 10 deaths within the same time span. And just because someone played for 1 hour doesn't make him 4 times as good as someone that played for 15 minutes. The factorization of time is simply something that should not be left out of the equation, as long as you are playing against a clock.

Heck I would be happy if there was both a Kill/Death ratio and a Kills/Hour ratio, as then people can quickly see that while someone got a good K/D ratio he killed pretty much nothing. Depending on what matters more for your team at some point people could then make their own decision what should be optimized. (for instance K/D being more important for defender and K/H being more important as attacker).

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To envision what I want displayed.

Rather than simply showing a K/D ratio of say 4 for a person that made 40 kills with 10 deaths during a period of 30 minutes, I say display it as follows:

Step 1: Look at the amount of kills and deaths someone would have in a period of an hour. In the case above that would be 80 kills and 20 deaths.

Step 2: When displaying the kill death ratio show 80:20 in the scoreboard instead of 4 or 4:1. So the quantitative information isn't lost in the ratio.
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This keeps the K/D ratio visible and the advantages of that however you do not loose the quantitative informative of how many kills someone made.
 
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To envision what I want displayed.

Imagine a player got 30 kills in half an hour and died 10 times.

rather than displaying a 3:1 K/D ratio, I basically want it to display 60:20 in the scoreboard.

30 kills in a half hour means 60 kills in an hour, while 10 deaths in half an hour means 20 deaths in an hour.

a score display of 60:20 allows you to see immediately what someones respective K/D ratio is while displaying a quantitative term that is normalized against time.

Just to be clear, do you think this 60:20 ratio should be displayed in addition to a raw score that takes into account the raw number of kills and teamplay activities (caps, reloads etc.)?

I understand the concern about the effectiveness of a player only being measured as a raw number related only to the quantity of kills and specific team objective successes and not factoring in time played and deaths, but I also don't think a K/D/hour ratio is a be-all-end all metric.

If the RO1 raw score is like a baseball statistic measuring hits, a K/D/hour is like batting average. Perhaps slightly better but real baseball sabremetric guys don't put much weight in average either.

I don't think it can be said that given two players each on the server an hour, the 10K:1D player is better than the the 100K:11D player. In fact I know I'd rather have the 100K:11D player. True, he took 10 more reinforcements from my team but he took 90 additional reinforcements from the other team.

According to your metric Player A has a score of 10:1 = 10 while player B has a score of 100:11 = 9.09. Therefore you say A is better, but I still think B is better. I guess the fact that you obscure your K/D/hr score with a colon helps keep people from comparing directly but still.

In my opinion there should just be two numbers on the scoreboard. A raw score, and a smaller raw score / hour. If you want to factor in the negative effect that deaths play on your team you do that by modifying the equation that calculates the raw score.

For instance, create a constant that you multiply your number of kills by that is higher if you have a high K/D ratio and lower the lower your K/D ratio.

Bah, why not, here's a formula to calculate a player's raw score that Twipwire could tweak. I'd also be in favor of adding additional variables to reward good behavior and punish bad but this is basically the RO1 system plus a few I read about being implemented in RO2.

Score, S = K*[(K/D)^(1/8)] + 5*R + 2*L + 10*C + D + 3*E

Normalized Score, N = S/t

K = (# enemy kills - # FF/suicide kills)
D = # deaths at hands of enemy
R = # MG reloads
L = (# enemy squad leader/hero kills - # FF squad leader/hero kills)
C = # caps
D = # kills of enemies in controlled capzone
E = (# kills of enemies actively capping your zone - # FF kills of teammates actively capping zone)
t = time playing in hours

For comparison, this "efficiency factor" I chose given by [(K/D)^(1/8)] is 1 if K/D=1, 0.75 if K/D=0.1, 0.92 if K/D=0.5, 1.06 if K/D=1.5, 1.15 if K/D=3 etc. (Just plot the equation in your calculator or excel).

Perhaps the fraction that is raised to the power could be map and team dependent. In other words configure it so it has less of an effect for the attacking team who has tons of reinforcements but increase the effect on a player on a defending team with minimal reinforcements.
 
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