rating system

[poesel]

This has been mentioned deep down in the Sabbath thread but I think it deserves a separate discussion.

We have one ranking system better known as result table. That will be IIRC changed anyway although Clay hasn't talked about when and how.

The proposed ranking system would gather the numbers from the result tables from several scenarios and create some relative ranking of players.

I have to say I would not like to have such a system for several reasons.

1) which games do count? We currently have only one server but shooting down bots to score?

2) what would a good kill ratio mean? I think I would score pretty good in that number but I'm absolutly crap as a commander.

3) someone playing a support role wouldn't score much and end up as PFC but he is actually the one whos managing the team.

So I really would like to have a more meaningful results table which shows more/better what I have done in THIS scenario. But I heavily doubt that any automated scoring system would work out. DT as too many possibilities of how to play to fit that in a single ranking system.

OTOH encouraging and enabling more teamwork would be fantastic. DT is made for that.

IMHO each player should be able to make a simple profile of himself about what he WANTS to play. Its a game and its about having fun and you usually have fun while doing things you want - not by doing things a rating system tells you. Who is doing what can be sorted out better by the humans.

For example:

If you get a commander, an artillery guy and some grunt (imperial or not) then all is set. If you have two wannabee commanders in the team - let them settle it themselves. As last escape they can simply start a vote. If I had to choose between Nexus and someone else I would know where to put my vote.

Automated teams would be nice, but hey - 'change team' is just a click away.

[__Yossarian0815[jby]]

Maybe rating games won/lost )maybe with a game type qualifier) might make sense? Not sure, but I agree with your points 1-3 that everything else would be a problem. Like the house to house last sunday, I got 3000 team points, but thats just because I happened to be the guy in the cutter.

PS: Poesel, did you get my email about

the videos?

[Toby Haynes]

Right up front I'm going to say that any ranking system people come up with will be flawed. Now I had better explain myself before I'm thrown out of the airlock ...

The first step in any ranking system is built on statistics. There are obvious figures to collect: </font>

• number of kills</font>
• number of deaths</font>
• shots fired</font>
• shots hit</font>
• objective points scored</font>

There are probably more that I have missed but that will do for starters.

Now - you can come up with interesting statistics based on these. Hit percentage is an obvious one. Shots fired per kill and Hits per Kill are interesting but flawed unless you break them down by ammo type. A skilled player firing the 120mm HEAT/AP can get a lot of one shot kills. The same skilled player firing the 14mmAP won't achieve quite the same dizzying figures, at least against the Thor. That doesn't make the statistics "bad" - but it does make them a little harder to interpret.

Maybe a better system for ranking than simply assigning scores based on the statistics is to look at who each player has killed and been killed by. That would allow a ladder-style ranking where your position was improved more by knocking out tanks belonging to players/bots with higher ranking than you. Vice-versa, being killed by the poorest player in the fleet would hurt your own ranking and improve theirs.

Now the ladder system does not do anything to measure the abilities of the player for good strategy or good team work, but hopefully the result would be reasonable.

I'd still like to see all the statistics collected too - while they might not apply to the ranking, it would be interesting to compare the figures for different players.

[Ithai]

One other statistic that should be tracked is vehicles disabled. I shoot to disable not to kill. If I can take you out of the fight and force you to expose a drop ship thats a far greater cost than killing you outright and causing you to drop in a fresh vehicle.

[poesel]

One thing that might be easy for Clay to do is to dump the result table in a log file as csv and make that file(s) available through the net. I think we have enough programmers here to write a parser to gather the statistics.

That way the devs wouldn't have to come up with a rating system and everyone can have the stats he likes.

[Imperial Grunt]

My vote would be for team rankings and not individual rankings. Individual data can be tracked and shown, but a high kill ration does not always mean that you are the most valuable player, for all the reasons poesel and toby have mentioned.

But if we had a few teams, then we could do a tournment or something like that.

The best part for some standard teams in my opinion is to do the battle planning ahead of time.

[aittam]

the other thing that should disappear are the negative points received when turrets deploied blow up, that what their are ment for

[Smeltz]

I like Gunts suggestion. Team points should be awarded for declared games. Problem is making sure everyone stays on the same team. Maybe a team score listing team members. Example -- one Sunday I'm a Blood and am on the winning team twice. Next Sunday I'm on Water and win once. Both Sunday's were 3 matches. My score - 3 out of 6. Other statistics could be added for bragging rights. This way no matter who you team up with the ultimate goal is a win, and it doesn't matter if your the guy in the cutter or the guy running defense.

[Macrobiotic]

Could an 'honour' system, similar to what America's Army applies, be used?

I quite like that approach.

Particularly as it's designed to reward teamplay.

Isn't that what these games are all about, anyway?

[Tarquelne]

Originally posted by Macrobiotic:

Could an 'honour' system, similar to what America's Army applies, be used?

I quite like that approach.

What is it?

Isn't that what these games are all about, anyway?

Well, they're really about [CENSORED] [CENSORED] goats and [CENSORED]. Not that anyone will ever actually talk about it.

[Macrobiotic]

The honour system in America's Army is based around earning or losing points due to the actions you make within the game.

A player will earn points for killing opponents and lose points for killing teammates.

Points are also earned for medic duty. If a player heals a teammate, he will earn points.

Also, additional points are awarded to the entire team for a victory. The rank within a team will have an impact on the points earned.

A squad leader will earn the most points. Team leaders will earn slightly less. Grunts will earn a basic amount.

The idea behind the system is to encourage team-play and discourage players from just killing everyone in sight.

Players with less than a certain amount of points are often prevented from joining the more popular servers.

The honour system also transposes in-game points earned onto a graph that increases geometrically, to convert them into 'honour' points.

A player starts with 10 'honour' and earning enough game points to achieve 11 'honour' is fairly easy.

Getting up to 12 is a bit harder, and so on.

For a player to achieve 100 'honour', he would theoretically have to have played every day for several years.

Hope that is a reasonably clear explanation.