Will there be a rating for good pilots down to dreadful pilots like me?
I’m hoping there will be more things in a closed system to do then fight. Perhaps the first side to make the what ever.
Just something from the Infinity supporters who are bad pilots. o.0 And don’t want to get killed through the monitor.
I’d like to include robust stat tracking that we can use for auto-join and team balancing. It’s a bit too early to say exactly what would be tracked and how that data would be used in these calculations but we understand the value of tracking that data to give players the best possible experience. Also many players have an interest themselves in that data so we would certainly make whatever data we were tracking available to the player so they could track their own progress/rankings.
Please don’t let those stats be public. Please.
You don’t want people to become asinine about their stats or something? I loved Halo 3’s match making. It wasn’t toxic at all, and very worthwhile to play!
Then what am I supposed to publish on the sports page? More Lorentz contraction retractions?
Why not simply have it like EVE’s API where players can decide to share their stats if they chose to?
I considered that as well, but I don’t see how it can help much for the case Naiba is worried about toxicity. If stats really cause toxicity, then if they’re displayed optionally it seems reasonable to expect the community to still grow obnoxious fanatics who find nothing better to do than be rude, disgusting and antisocial regardless of the users who choose to not become involved with the public stats system.
I’m not really sure exactly how stats and explicit competitiveness are related with player toxicity.
That’s simple: it’s a way that you can see that you’ll be teamed up with worse players in the future because of something someone else did.
Alternatively you can track individual stats rather than just whether or not your team wins. In that case, in order to get matchmade with better players there are a number of tasks you can choose from such as “getting a high K/D ratio” and some unimportant stuff that someone else should go do now.
And of course since the important thing about the game is to get higher numbers so you’ll be a better human being than those noobs on your team, if it gets to the point where the enemy team is slightly ahead, slightly better organized, you might as well go sit somewhere safe and spend the next 30 minutes flaming your team.
Or at least the above seems to be how a very large portion of the internet thinks.
I might change my name when I play I:B. I expect to change my name when I play Infinity. I might take the Thumb Wars names of Soondead or Gonnabiteit.
I do NOT want to play with a bunch of people who know what there doing!
I want to play with a bunch of people who know what they’re doing (at least relatively), and if it’s not fun that way then then it’s a poor game and I shouldn’t waste my time.
I don’t see how that’s a problem, because it also means the other team will be “worse players.” If they really have the skill they do then they can get back to the rank they were before easily rather than riding on the skill of match-maked teams they usually enjoy bringing hatred upon. Halo 3 had ranked and social playlists, and I think that was a good place to start.
Alternatively you can track individual stats rather than just whether or not your team wins. In that case, in order to get matchmade with better players there are a number of tasks you can choose from such as “getting a high K/D ratio” and some unimportant stuff that someone else should go do now.
I’m thinking you could weight with something like this:
ratio = ((sin(teamPerformance*a) + 1) * 0.5 + playerPerformance)*0.5
ratioInverse = 1/ratio
someScore += teamPerformance*ratio + playerPerformance*ratioInverse
‘a’ might be 2pi or somewhere around there. The other constants probably would need some tweaking too, but I think this illustrates the idea.
You’ve made the mistake of thinking that the kind of person that would abuse another player for their win/loss or kill/death ratio is also the kind of person who is interested in having a fair, balanced contest.
No, I’m reasoning about how the game can be designed to make a “fair balanced contest” the most obvious way to succeed. That involves carefully evaluating which queues are in the game. It’s part of a lost art that some of the ancients call: game design. Unfortunately nobody understands this black magic.
Also, that’s still a poor observation on their part, because it will always be impossible for them to * hijack the stats system to always get the best teams * … lol this nonsense. If you raise to a rank you don’t deserve then your team will be worse and you’ll probably fall back to a lower rank over time while the deserving players suffer a small loss and retain a firm hold on their rank until improving towards the next rank. If you fall to a rank you don’t deserve, the games you join will be less skilled but your team will be better with you on their side-- so it’ll be a piece of cake, and you’ll likely re-obtain your previous rank very quickly. The only way to get the best team for certain is to be the best team.
Clearly, the games which stats systems’ fail also probably aren’t implementing them (into the match making heuristic) correctly. A non-functional, red herring match making system is probably the most harmful queue for players, but there’s plenty other. My point here is stats are not a queue for players to become offended about other players’ performance unless stats are integrated into the game in a way that is implied to be dependant on teammates. It’s possible to suggest using the lobby interfaces, rank mechanics and overall responsiveness meta-concepts which inherently correct these problems, but keeping stats hidden will not have any effect on player perception unless they are presented in a way that is critical and indeed determinative.
Though I don’t think the original point there is solid in the first place, I just realized you mean a private observation, rather than public. If this really is a problem, then you can keep matchmaking mechanics and information isolated to the multiplayer lobby while postgame results only include results of the game. Key stats improvements can be screensplashed (not a harmful queue), while the advent of a rank decrease will be reserved until returning to the multiplayer lobby.
In Halo 3, the pregame match-lobby rank labels were useful to determine how I’d need to play. If my team looked a bit under skilled compared to the opposing team, then I’d play with a more careful approach once the match began (and everyone was happier about the fact, eh). Nobody ever complained about having a poor team before the match began, because it was usually never completely evident. It was always a surprise and very worthwhile to be a good sport. So, in conclusion, visible stats still seem to be trivial. They mostly seemed to improve the Halo 3 community, not hurt it by any means.
The most important pieces to get right are the core game itself and building a matchmaking system that does what it should do. I’ve played far too many games which make nonsensical matches, like a bunch of rank 5’s vs a team of rank 16’s or something (whatever the rank really means). Yeah… don’t do that. I’m guessing this is because the developers didn’t understand the real meaning of their ranks and probably chose a poor ranking scale in the first place – but it’s more obvious their matchmaking system simply doesn’t work.
I think a more interesting and unnoticed aspect about ranking systems is supporting the differences between experienced, passive skill vs frontier, hard-core mindset skill. That means the difference between a guy eating popcorn, sipping a drink and relying on their hardwired experience in contrast to a player who may not be as skilled but is trying very hard (self innovation) to keep up against their Goliaths. This is where a ranked + social combo is also useful. In the ranked category, it’s important to lean into the gameplay and give it your best every game to retain the rank. In a social, you’re more free to relax, experiment with how you play, gain experience and still be successful without having a stroke.
A lot of players enjoy the progression/achievement aspect of a game, even if their skill is low, so I wouldn’t be in favour of discarding the traditional cumulative progression system seen in the majority of games. Even a low skill player can reach the highest level of progression if they play for long enough.
However, this system is useless as a metric for gauging player skill and hence matchmaking, but I don’t want to disregard the low skill/casual achievers so I think it should be present but not highly visible.
I believe the predominant ‘rank’ should be a continuously assessed measure of performance. This would be based on stats like KDR or kills/resource usage ratio or whatever makes sense within the mechanics. Ideally this would also include feedback from other players eg During or at the end of a match, player A could click a button to say player X was a good wingman and player Y was a good strategist.
In another match player B sees player X has an above average combat ranking so decides to fly with him.
In Battlefield a player might have a high number next to their name but that tells me nothing about the likelihood of them covering me effectively.
This works so long as peoples feedback is weighted in some fashion. For instance, a troll who goes around ranking everybody else as poor should have their feedback largely, if not entirely, ignored.
Fun fact: Most game-related flaming on teh interwebs isn’t based on solid points. To begin with, it’s based on something to do with a game on teh interwebs. My post had nothing to do with anything but making the numbers from or existence of such a system known to the public.
I agree completely that having a system balance teams in a smarter way than based on how many people you’ve killed in a given round would be a great idea, and if inovae is building their own account tracking system from the ground up making sure there’s a way to track and record performance data should be relatively cheap.
I merely believe that unless you can make a system that’s 100% accurate with no cheap ways to boost your own ranking and no risk that the mistake of someone else can’t cause even an apparent dip in ranking, you shouldn’t make the numbers - or even the effect of those numbers - visible to the players, as it’s more likely than not to cause behavior I’d rather not see, and I assume inovae would prefer their game(s) to provide enjoyable experiences to as many of their costumers as possible.
Far better idea to make longest killspree the publicly visible stat for use on Kichae’s sports page, do away with matchmaking entirely (who would queue for a 256-player game that can last hours or days, anyway?), and use a weighted algorithm of historical and current skill, experience, communication*, and leadership* to handle squad-based auto team balance.
*) reason I choose to add these two things to the list of stuff to track is because it’s the stuff that matters to me. Obviously there may be other things that matter to more people, and actually tracking them in a meaningful way would be difficult but not impossible. In fact, I think I’ll try branch off another thread about just that topic, might not happen 'till next year, though.
I think your saying the same thing as I did. I want to play with people that play at my level.
(Crap I’m going to be playing with seven year olds )
Ya that. Balanced with all the other points you guys are making.
Anything that can be pulled out of the information packets between server and client WILL be pulled out. If you need an example, just look at World of Tanks: they have all sorts of stats websites.
That being said, it’s a two-headed monstrosity. The stats on a per-player basis are amazing: it told me how much damage I was doing, how much I was taking, how my gameplay was compared to that of the community as a whole.
That last note is also the downfall for World of Tanks. The community is TOXIC beyond belief over the quality of player. Anybody not better-than-average is deemed incompetent, ignored, harassed, and often driven away from the game because of it. I would love to see my personal stats (I’ll give a list of my favorite stats below), but the community absolutely must be dissuaded from using it as a method of abuse, to the point of removing it from the public eye over allowing abuse.
That being said, some of the stats I want to see:
-Highly detailed KDR board (What was I flying, what did I kill, what killed me)
-% time spent in each ship chassis
-% games played in each ship chassis
-Weapon use stats (shots fired with kinetic vs. energy vs. missiles, for instance)
-Hit % (simple shots fired vs. shots hit)
-Hit type % (% shield hits vs % hull hits)
-Distance flown
-Time spent in ship hangar bays
-Time spent in open space
-Time spent in atmosphere
-Number of times self-unalived, and how (reentered atmosphere too fast, dove into gas giant, crashed into asteroid, etc.)
Can’t believe I forgot my favorite:
-NEMESIS! (Who has killed me the most?)