I’m fine with the game tracking all sorts of stuff. Kills, hit/miss ratio, fastest speed, farthest distance from a star, total cargo delivered, etc, etc. Just don’t have an official means of making them public - and make it easy to fake the stat report from the game. So if I take a screen shot of my stats and post it on a forum, folks can look at it and see that I could easily just put any old number into the screen shot. Or the text listing. Whatever it is. Don’t watermark the stat display. Don’t use a strange font. Just make it short and simple and easy to fake. The only people whose stats you trust will come from the players you trust.
A spinoff trait of this is that the only stats you’ll care about are the stats of the people you care about. You won’t be competing against everyone who plays Battlescape. Instead, you’ll be competing against the people that you run into all the time on a given server. The people you get to know.
If you never get to know anyone, then you’re obliged to bring up your stats with whoever you bump into. Which is why you never get to know anyone.
Note that I don’t necessarily want “winning” to be the main focus either. I want “having fun” to be the main focus. That may be “winning” or it may be “figuring out how to operate a carrier effectively” or “getting my Kessel run down under 20 parsecs” or “bringing some more newbies up to speed on fighter tactics.”
Stat tracking. Are you guys going to stat track or do you want “us”* to do that? I expect Infinity to be rather bissy at the moment. I’m sure there are others who would be more then happy to pick up the slack.
*by “us” I mean people that can do programming. That being not me.
Good, come up with something. What I want is poor players like my self playing with people at poor level.
About 30 years ago this guy wanted to play chess with me. I told him my level was the ability to beat seven year olds.
He wanted to play anyway. He beat me in three or four moves. Then he told me he was the state champion for Utah. I asked him how was that fun for him.
I don’t want to play ill people like that I want to play people in my own ranking.
In yet another post lost to the old forums, I suggested a system where players could vote to uprank or downrank other players. So instead of trying to figure out an automated ranking system, just let the players sort it out. Naturally, they’ll only vote on ranks when a player on the other team is too good or a player on their team is too bad. With enough votes, the player’s rank changes.
Servers would have allowed ranges of ranks. So when you go to the Novice ranked server, you won’t run into any Grandmaster ranked players. But you may find some Novices who are definitely playing above Novice level. They’re the ones stomping your team, and at the end of the game the votes are tallied and new ranks are issued. Just remember to upvote the guy that keeps killing you before rage quitting.
The same thing can be done for griefing and trolling or just general behavior. If you want a rough and tumble server, go to one that has like-minded players; they won’t kick you for being rough and tumble. If you want a more civilized game, go to the appropriate server. Naturally, griefers who could get enough players onto a server could take over, but that’s the way majorities work.
I don’t entirely disagree with this, but it also opens up Pandoras box. If my version of fun is “learning the game” or even trolling other players That’s going to frustrate a lot of the serious players who play a competitive arena game to win.
I understand that having fun is agoal, but winning is the main goal for an arena match. This isn’t the mmo where you can do want you want. This is an arena where defeating the other time is the whole point of the game. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun while contributing to your teams success, but how can you define when its detrimental.
For many players getting better(so that they can win) is fun!
Bentware, when I spoke I was talking of stats so that you can see how you are doing as a pilot. I wasn’t at all thinking about a ranking system and I don’t have any ideas on how one would be implemented.
In a battle of 5v5 like dota 2, the level of the individual player really maters. You can’t have 5 pros on one side and 5 noobs on the other and expect an even fight, or anything close to it. You can’t even really have 3 vs 2 pros. But in a battle of 100-200, the individual skill of the players tends to not matter as much, as long as communication levels remain the same. At least, that’s my experience for planetside 2. Of course, there would be times where I’d be in a zerg of 50 odd scrubs ghost capping something, then out of nowhere a squad of 10 advanced, obviously communicating players who would then proceed to stop us.
k/d wouldnt be as bad of a stat if it only counted the last 20 games or whatever, It’s really not smart to include someone’s first game with their last game in their total k/d stat, though.
If it’s a round based arena game winning is going to be the objective, players shouldnt be encouraged to fly off and do some random nonsense to get an acheivement or something. That kind of open world “do whatever” gameplay only really works in an MMO setting where you arent tied to your team mates.
[quote=“Skyentist, post:125, topic:995”]
That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun while contributing to your teams success, but how can you define when its detrimental.[/quote]
If there are 100 guys on a team, then my individual contribution is going to be fairly modest. I better have something to do in the game that I enjoy because I’m rarely going to get a sense of “Oooo. We won because of what I did.”
If I’m responsible for scouting, then scouting better be fun to do. I have no intention of sitting on my hands in some remote sector of the game arena so that my team can win.
If I’m responsible for making the attack on the base, then that better be fun to do. I’m not interested in holding down the fire key at a spawn point so that the same 10 guys don’t get out of the base to reinforce a key battle so that my team can win.
I really don’t care that much about winning a computer game. I’ll happily lose if I have fun doing so.
Also have hopes that 100-200 people battles wont end up like EVE engagements.
Where one calls targets and rest just focuses fire on single ship.
Said ship explodes in seconds.
So on and so forth.
Sure lets have 100+ people in one fight, but composed of multiple smaller battles.
How to achieve that… limiting weapons range comes to mind.
Or do you guys think it is too unrealistic?
Eve’s extreme focus fire scenarios are due to a range of things things, most notably automatic targeting and lack of collision/worrying about firing arcs intersecting allys, and topped off with ewar like stasis webs, target painters that multiplies well against single targets. Additionally the defenses in eve (remote repairs/boosting) works pretty well if you make the mistake of spreading your firepower. Remove those and extreme focus fire scenerios will only become relevant for extremely slow, long range capital ships, which i hope the design will be for few of those. And, with so few of those, focus fire from hundreds of them causing insta exploding ships isnt a problem anymore.
Overall I agree with @Skyentist’s sentiment that public stats can shape players approach to gameplay - highlighting one behavior as better than another. We’ll likely be collecting a lot of stats, more than what we make available to players, for the purpose of tuning gameplay, weapon balance, etc. To address @JB47394’s point what any one player defines as fun changes from one player to the next. Overall we expect playtesting to have a significant impact not only on which stats we decide to make available to players but the definition of “fun” for the entire game. Our goal is to iterate significantly over the development of the game and we hope those people who pledge the Developer and Alpha tiers will be looking forward to actively participating in that process.
I know it’s a bit cliche to say we are going to have transparent development but I really mean it when I say that we hope to have a set schedule of weekly playtests with the dev team so that we can actively solicit feedback and ideas as we go along. Of course despite that the single biggest limiting factor will ultimately be the amount of money we raise during the Kickstarter.
Well, yes, obviously. The point is not what players think is fun, but what the gameplay focuses its attention on. Players will gravitate to the gameplay that appeals to them in any given session.
As @DirkLarien mentioned, EVE Online has gameplay mechanics that pretty heavily focus on winning. The gameplay itself is not particularly engaging, but if you like to win, it’s a great game. Huge battles and vast territories and grand alliances hang in the balance. Wins are WINS, like no other game.
So when you put in scouting, it shouldn’t be designed to fill a win/lose mandate in the game structure, but to give scouts something entertaining and challenging to do.
Example:
Win/Lose Gameplay: Scout flies off to a location, drops a sensor. Everything within 1AU of the sensor is visible to his team. Scout flies back to friendlies and shoots stuff.
Fun Gameplay: Scout flies off to a location. Limited sensors require that he scan at a distance, then move closer to probable contacts. Multiple sensor techniques, each having tradeoffs, mean that the pilot has to juggle a number of factors, sometimes resulting in flying blind for short periods of time. Scout has to communicate what he sees. All the while the scout also has to make sure that nobody shoots him.
The former fulfills the demand that scouting be involved in winning the game. The latter fulfills the demand that scouts have something to engage them.
This is excellent news, not sure if I need to beg here, but please have an option to log all this data to a file, it will make our (modders and stat junkies) job much easier.
Stats are good, but I guess you won’t allow us to manually turn off certain stat aspects? I prefer not to get reminded of every single time I screwed up in a game for all of eternity.
We haven’t decided which stats we’ll be exposing to players however we’ll be collecting information with regard to as many aspects of your gameplay as we can on validated servers. As I mentioned before the majority of this stat collection will be geared toward tuning and balancing the game.
Just launch the Kickstarter already.
Have you heard of the Lean startup? Testing, prototyping an idea before going full scale and wasting years?
You wasted like 10 years before revealing it to the public, to see their reaction. Congrats.
You make it sound so simple. Perhaps it was, for a number of reasons we didn’t think so, but we could’ve been wrong. This is the first time we’ve all brought a cutting edge new game engine built from the ground up to market and due to the onward march of hardware improvements that gets harder every single day. At this point it’s all water under the bridge. We’ll be launching the Kickstarter shortly and we sincerely hope that you all will enjoy the fruits of that labor. Better late than never I suppose.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
at the moment. I’m sure there are others who would be more then happy to pick up the slack.