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.