(Sorry about the following long-winded post, I know it’s an overly long read. 'tis 8 in morning and haven’t slept, which has a nasty side-effect of making me produce an inordinate amount of brain-farts. Thought I’d post it just in case one brain-fart turned out to actually smell of roses, napalm, or whichever morning-odour you prefer.)
One could compress a plethora of “scores” into a single unit, making it more representative of how useful a player was, and less indicative of exactly where a given player might have fallen through.
So, for example, compressing:
- Damage dealt
- Damage taken
- Damage healed (including revives)
And display that as “Damage”, which starts at 1, and increases with damage dealt and healed, but decreases with damage taken - down to a minimum of 1.
As well as:
- XP gained via objective related actions
- XP gained via ability use
- XP gained via assists
And display that as “Efficiency”, which starts at 0 and only increases.
And then finally sum it up in a total value - let’s call it “Worth” (those blasted stone-cold PMCs, eh?), which represents the ratio between Damage and Efficiency:
Efficiency/Damage = Worth
And the closer this score is to “1”, the more balanced the player.
If the player’s Efficiency score is higher than their Damage, their Worth will be more than 1, and if Damage is higher than Efficiency, it’ll be lower than 1.
That way, you have a scoring system that doesn’t encourage one specific action over another, but at the same time allows a quick overview of what kind of players you’re dealing with; whether they’re proverbial one-man armies that can hold their own (<1), or whether they’re very team oriented players (>1) - or “just right” (=1).
Obviously, if their Damage outweighs their Efficiency, their Worth will show as 0,XX, and conversely if their Efficiency outweighs their Damage, it’ll show as 1,XX, which of course can quite easily be construed as a negative in the former, and a positive in the latter.
But given that it’ll most likely only deviate by a few points in total - e.g. 5000/2500 = 2 vs 2500/5000 = 0,5 - it’ll only show which side of the fence a player is, but still somewhat encourage co-operative play.
And it will, of course, reflect if someone is focusing too much on a single aspect, which arguably isn’t beneficial for neither the player nor the team (e.g. 5000/100 = 50 vs 100/5000 = 0,02), albeit that might be exceedingly difficult to accomplish even if you’re aiming for it.
Alternatively, and perhaps a lot less convoluted, one could average it across the team, add together every team-members Damage and Efficiency score, producing a “Team Damage” and “Team Efficiency” score, and then divide that by the individual players’ score:
(Team Damage/Player Damage) * 100 = X%
(Team Efficiency/Player Efficiency) * 100 = Y%
And then show those percentages on the scoreboard, showing who contributed the most in terms of survivability, and who did most in terms of co-operation - and then relegate the convoluted “Worth” stat to a nifty Profile only score summary.
