Cheers, that was the type of feedback I was hoping for!
The main concern is that, because a tactical shooter is good as infinitely complex, any attempt at codifying the actions within the game will always be an abstraction, a simplification. That in and of itself isn’t an issue for most folks here. But what someone like DAUK is concerned about is that should this model be used to asses a player’s worth, all kinds of loopholes in the system can cause players to gain either undue credit, or lack credit that was due.
I think the ‘Engineer maintaining a battery of deployables’ is an excellent example as it cuts right to the core of the issue. It’s an activity that would generate a lot of xp but can range between completely pointless to utmost important in the entire match. Under the current system, there’s no way to discern between a statpadder not only gaining undue xp but also being a burden to his team by doing something that doesn’t contribute substantially to the team’s progress, and a skilled player doing something really important in order to secure a win.
Two points are then raised:
Basically you’re putting value on menial, non-skilful tasks and the system has no way of interpreting intention, luck, abuse or tactics.
Senethro is saying the same thing
Its an FPS, I’m not sure that shooting being the most important thing is anything less than a feature. There might be room for a dedicated supporter in a class based RPG but in most FPS every player is a rifleman first and their class second. Theres also the issue that being good at your class is very easy but being good at combat is very hard.
I think it’s important to get this argument out of the way because it’s polluting the rest of the discussion. What’s consistently going on here is that you both keep driving things on the absolute. In essence the argument here is that cognitive, hand-eye coordination skill is the only skill that should be recognised and rewarded. The rest, the support, the objectives and employing all kinds of toys, that’s all things that doesn’t require right timing and accuracy and is therefore trivial. It may be important in the game but it’s not something that requires skill.
I just can’t agree with this. I think it’s regrettable that people can even view it in such a way. Yes, buffing someone, constructing something and employing something doesn’t require precise action. But that doesn’t mean the skill necessary to use these tools effectively is negligible. It’s the cerebral part of the game. It’s the part of tactical insight, macro-oriented decision making and prioritisation. If these things truly didn’t require skill then it wouldn’t matter when and how they were handled. You know that’s not true and you know that any decision in these games is rarely cut and dry. To shove all that aside merely because they happen at the push of a button rather than at a well aimed click of the mouse is selling the game short.
On top of that, many of these actions are highly reliant on the combat competency of a player. A medic that can’t fight his way to his victims is limited in his options. Players that know how to fight will fight themselves more often in an area full of dead enemies which allows them to employ their class tools and be a huge asset to their team. I personally like to see the game reward the players that are good at fighting AND at prioritising and wouldn’t mind to see people who are only good at either one of them struggling to maintain a high score as in my view, that makes you a less valuable player.
But hey, this may all be very subjective. I agree that if you think that indiscriminate killing is the only thing that should be recognised as ‘skill’ then I agree that an xp/min system isn’t suitable and you’re best off with just a k/d ratio.
The second point raised is far more interesting for this debate:
Either the XP farmer is considered skilful and raised up the ranks, or the awesome tactician is considered a farmer and held down the ranks. Which one is it? Lemme guess, more modifiers?
Yes under the current system there’s no way to discern between these two scenarios. Repairing a deployable always results in the same xp/min which makes the xp/min not only inaccurate for skill but also a perverse incentive for players to do the wrong thing.
Under my proposal there’s two things that prevent this from happening and it doesn’t need this fractal like system of branching out xp bonuses Inferno suggested.
- The result modifer at the end of the match already goes a long way in stopping this.
Currently, it doesn’t matter if you’re winning or losing. You always get the same amount of xp from your tasks plus a little flat reward for win. It means that in both scenarios both players still get the same base xp/min value from their task, but in the scenario where it’s a worthless task the probability of losing is higher than in the scenario where it’s an important task. This means that being a burden to the team by chasing these type of ‘xp leaks’ will increase the rate in which you lose matches which means that you end up having the loser’s penalty applied more often to you than to a player that contributes to a team.
Statpadders will find themselves on the losing side more often (after all, the side they’re fighting on is at least down one useful player, which does make a major difference in these games) and therefore will have the negative percentage penalty for losing more often.
Yes, this means that sometimes they strike the jackpot of statpadding and winning. But because they lose more often than not this approach won’t favour their average xp/min and that’s by itself already enough to stop it dead in its tracks.
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- The 'hot modifier goes further in increasing the chances that xp distribution is accurate.
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I don’t see why the ‘hot’ modifier, as explained earlier, shouldn’t be applied to deployable as well. If a deployable has been active recently (stopped a missile, damaged a vehicle, or even locked on to a player) it means it’s a relevant actor in the situation. Therefore it makes sense to hand out more xp for someone repairing, hacking, damaging or destroying it while it’s ‘hot’. Again, it doesn’t rule out exceptions, it’s only saying that the probability of the player doing a relevant action is higher. The few situations that this might not be the case is something I’m willing to take for granted because it averages out towards a more accurate system.
The hot modifier is doing the same thing as Inferno’s domino’s effect but only in a far more simplified manner. This doesn’t mean that we can still include chain-bonuses (games like War Inc. and even BF3 occasionally reward these bonuses). The hot modifier is simply a highly flexible way of punishing statpadding and encouraging a proactive approach to the game.
Here’s one more point that hasn’t been raised. I hoped other people would raise it but it’s worth discussing nonetheless:
-Next to the modifier being connected to the difference in the average team-rating, the modifier should also be connected to the average win-rate for that side on the map.
This is really simple. If statistically, defenders win 60% of the time on that map, then their modifier is cut by 20% to make up for the map-advantage they enjoyed. Including an externality like geometry advantage is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. You don’t want the masses of players to completely dictate the outcome, but a slight modifier like this helps in making the xp/min score more fair and it prevents players from bailing on being assigned sides that they experience as disadvantageousness.
Without xp/min such a modifier would be a lot more crude, but including it in the outcome modifier is quite elegant I think.
I hope I addressed most concerns. I’m sure I didn’t convince or satisfy everyone so by all means rebuke this again.
