Arguments concerning the support of a proposition always border on the appeal to popularity fallacy. What people value isn’t necessarily valuable when the indicator needs to be tared on ‘winning the match’.
Now you can say ‘who cares? I there’s one statistic that has the more support than all the others then why take it away from people?’
That’s the elementary ‘first past the post problem’ explained here:
//youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
The most popular choice isn’t automatically the majority choice. This is the reason why giving the public a single choice results in so much dissatisfaction.
Anyway, to break it down further:
There are two camps in this debate. Those that value prestige and those that value effect. Those that value prestige want to give the highest score to players that make you go ‘wow!’ when you see them perform in frag movies. Players that value effect want the player that plays vigorously to win and the player that plays vigorously to improve his score to be completely indiscernible from each other.
These two camps will never agree on an indicator and trying to align these two preferences under the same score is impossible so I’m not going to bother (and thankfully at least one of them has stopped bothering as well).
That means that as far as the ‘effect’ players are concerned we can break the issue down by simply listing the options we have.
Let me break down the problem here:
We have five options:
- Don’t track anything at all old-school, has it’s merits but ultimately unfufilling. People have ego’s and ego’s want to compare themselves to others.
- Track everything and let players decide what they value.
This turns the game into a sandbox because you now established that winning isn’t the most important thing to accomplish any longer. “Woot I got the highest accuracy” “Who cares? I ran the longest distance!” “So what I fired the most shots!”
-
Establish a singular statistic as a skill indicator
Same problem as above. The moment you do this you establish that winning no longer is the most important thing. Kills per minute the prevalent indicator? Then suddenly the whole game is about killing as efficiently as possible. ANY singular statistic becomes the main purpose of the game.
-An average score based on several statistics Again, same issue as above, only harder to manipulate because players will have an issue keeping track of several directions to play in. Bottom line is that fragging and staying alive is all that matters, doing objectives becomes an annoying distraction that only serves to lower your score.
Collect all tangible beneficial actions that we know will contribute to winning and express them in xp/min
Are we certain that that revive was necessarily the best thing that player could do? Not under the old systems. That’s the flaw and that’s what this system is currently attacked on. Not everything the (current!) xp system rewards is valuable. A fair point but not unsolvable. Rather than switching the indicator it’s it’s base dataset that needs tweaking. Not just the weights between actions but a more sophisticated context-sensitive aproach. Additionally match outcomes should skew it to get an even more representative score.
This score is the hardest to accomplish because the underlying clockwork needs to be detailed and sophisticated. I believe that’s worth the while because the xp system doesn’t only judges a player, it also rewards the player for doing well. So any advancement in this field is a double win.
this will mean that the new modes/maps and the action you do on those modes/maps will not be bound by the majority choice system, but by the things that are important in those specific modes/maps. Let’s say a new mode will need a system who ranks the teams by the time it takes them to complete a map, or by KDR, or WLR, etc.