Ideas for the scoreboard / leaderboard

Topic for people to post there thoughts on how the scoreboard should work.

Questions:

  1. How many points do you get for destroying each type of ship?
  2. Do you get points just for damaging ships?
  3. Are player ships worth more points than non-player ships?
  4. How do you prevent players from collaborating to game the system?
  5. Does the leaderboard ever reset?

My answers:

  1. I’d give all ship types the same point value.

More points for larger ships makes smaller ships useless, literally just a stepping stone to the larger classes where you can start accruing meaningful point awards. If all ships give the same reward it balances out so that larger ships can still get more points as they have more destructive capability, but smaller ships are still useful.

  1. It overcomplicates things giving points for damage.

Just award the points to the player that did the most damage.

  1. Yes, but not always.

I’d give all NPC ships and player ships a points value of 1, with an exception. Higher level players (see below) would have a point value equal to their level.

  1. This one isn’t going to be easy.

One thing you might try is not awarding points if a player kills another player for the second time in a row. However players could still alternate between collaborative kills and combat kills, or four players could team up and alternate. This needs some serious thought.

  1. An ever increasing leaderboard will just lead to 50% of your players being stuck in the bottom 50% of your leaderboard forever.

That’s not good and will drive players away pretty rapidly. My solution would be to make it work like a Formula 1 (motor racing) championship.

Each battle would be scored using the 1 point per kill simple scoring mechanic. At the end of each battle, the battle scores will be ranked from best to worst with championship points being awarded to the players based on their rank in that battle:

1 - 25 points (MVP)
2 - 18 points
3 - 15 points
4 - 12 points
5 - 10 points
6 - 8 points
7 - 6 points
8 - 4 points
9 - 2 points
10 - 1 points

This way lots of players have a chance to accumulate championship points. It also highly rewards players for logging on to empty servers.

Championships will be time limited, a year is probably too long, I’d probably ballpark it at about three months per championship but it could be much shorter. Then the winner gets a trophy for her profile and the championship is reset and it all starts again.

Current championship points will also determine the “level” of the player*. For every 10 championship points the player gains a level. The level could allow the player to access better ships or equipment more quickly, but it will also give more points to any player that destroys them. This is a nice feedback mechanism where getting better at the game makes more people want to kill you, thus increasing the challenge.

* Previous champions could start the current championship at a level** equal to the number of championships they have won.

** Give the levels fun names with options for the player to choose from.

5 Likes

I thought about this one before, just gonna pitch that in.

As each ship is designed for a role, the points that are received should be role specific. For instance an interceptor is an anti-bomber, anti-interceptor and anti-turret ship, the base points allocated would be something like this:

* Bomber kill      - 3 points
* Interceptor kill - 3 points
* Turret kill      - 2 points
* Everything else  - 1 point

In contrast the bomber is an anti-installation and anti (medium) capital ship so it would receive the base allocation according to that.

* Hauler kill     - 3 points
* Structure kill  - 3 points
* Corvette kill   - 2 points
* Everything else - 1 point

And so on, the point is to guide the specialization of ships, as long as these points and kills are clearly communicated to the player (after each kill), you should get gameplay where players are conforming to desired behaviors.

5 Likes

Thanks for the feedback. Now is the perfect time to talk about these topics since we’ll start the initial implementation pretty soon.

The formula-1 championship points system is very interesting. I think it’s worth some serious consideration, or being integrated with our ideas at some level. I like that it’s relatively simple and easy to understand for most players, and effective.

I agree with critic that the points system has to be a bit more advanced. Some of the ships are more of a support role, so they should be able to get points for fullfilling these roles. A corvette needs to get rewards / points for repairing / resupplying ships, and not reward going for kills. That raises the question of how to award points to capital ships; for example a destroyer is supposed to escort cruisers and protect them from missiles/torpdoes, which means we might want to give points for torpedo kills too. It starts to become tricky since AMS lasers are automated, so in a way you’re rewarding the player for not being passive… We also need to take into account how to award points to a carrier player ( I guess that’ll become easier when we revamp the carrier gameplay, maybe a point per spawned player, or AI squad deployed ) and the future hauler ( points for a successful haul between a factory and a station ? ).

That being said, I think there are still some important things that we need to figure out.

  1. Should there be a different score for PvP and PvE ? Players are obviously far more skilled than the AI will ever be, so does it make sense to have a single, unified leaderboard ? A player that is very skilled ( ex.: Mattk50 ) but does not connect very often, and only do PvP, would end up with a lower score than a newbie that grinds bots for hours… so that kind of defeats the purpose of having a “competitive” leaderboard. It’s possible we might even want to drop the PvE aspects, as in: only reward players with points when they’re facing another player… ?

  2. As I mentioned in the community update #145, the idea we’re currently going for is an ELO system, similar to what Blizzard uses in their games. Players would start at a fixed score ( say, 1000 ) and earn points for kills ( in a similar way that we discussed above ). In that system, you’d have the “mirrored” part: losing points when you get killed, or when one of your turrets get destroyed, etc… In a proper ELO system, a weight needs to be assigned to take into account the difference in skill level between the parties.

(Also note that an ELO system is basically a good answer to Crayfish’s point 4: "players collaborating to game the system).

If we drop the ELO idea and go for an absolute points / championship system, the question becomes: do you get negative points when you’re on the losing side of a battle ? Or is the loss of the objective sufficient as a penalty ?

3 Likes

You’d be disincentivising people from working together to bring down ships with a system that only rewarded one of them. It’d mean the game would reward people for splitting up and doing their own thing.