(god forbid) Stats

(Cankor) #1

There was a nice discussion over on the ETQW community forum about stats and how they tend to change player’s motivations and therefore screw up game play. IMO the arguments that stats can be a very bad thing are very compelling. That said, S.D. has indicated they are trying to make a game which is embraced by the masses, and I think everyone who is a fan of past S.D. games wants them to succeed in this endeavor because we want them to kick ass and make a bunch of money (just so long as we don’t have to deal with the worst elements of those masses in the games we play).

So, and I’m not sure if this is actually the case or not, but it seems like there’s going to have to be some type of reportable stats included in the game to keep those masses happy.

My suggestion is this then: Give the players accessibility to their own raw data outside of an “official” stat site. This should be in the form of web services or something similar (as opposed to just an XML page on a website. Let the players/clans then create their own stats sites that players can “opt into” by signing up to any site they wish to be a part of.

This should help in a couple of different ways:

  1. Players who don’t want to have their stats made public won’t feel the pressure to play for them. They can play the game however they’d like without worrying someone’s going to look at their crappy kill/death ratio or something. hell, give them a snappy armband or something they can wear in-game to proclaim they don’t give a crap about stats :slight_smile:
  2. The owners of the stats sites can restrict them to just people they trust (be this members of their clan or a broader swatch of the community) or otherwise police them however they would like, up to and including banning any players who are stat-padding (maybe along with a link to picture of said padder engaged in the activity or something).

The web services would have to be written in such a way that a stats site can pull the stat info just for players who have joined their site, so there would need to be some way for the stats system to keep track of which sites each player has opted into, but that would be just another table in the database, very easily done.

Bottom line though, however they are done, i think stats should be an “opt-in” option, off by default.

(Apoc) #2

Maybe it would be easier if they used the official stats page, but there was an option in the menu (tickbox) saying “record stats”, so you have a choice. Since your idea is ok, but it would mean stat lovers probably wouldnt buy the game initially since, the sites wont be up straight away or even soon.

Also could be a nightmare if a stat whore made the stat site…

my 2 cents anyway

(Cankor) #3

[QUOTE=Apoc;207561]Maybe it would be easier if they used the official stats page, but there was an option in the menu (tickbox) saying “record stats”, so you have a choice. Since your idea is ok, but it would mean stat lovers probably wouldnt buy the game initially since, the sites wont be up straight away or even soon.

Also could be a nightmare if a stat whore made the stat site…

my 2 cents anyway[/QUOTE]

Well, the players would still have access to their own stats (either in-game or via a web interface, or both), and these could even be comparable to the entire population so you could see where you fit in. i.e., your revive/death ratio while playing medic is .82, this is better than 55% of all other medics. There just wouldn’t be an “official” leaderboard out of the box. So in that respect the game could ship with your stats comparable to other players, you just wouldn’t have the opportunity to view other individual player’s stats unless they joined a stats site.

In addition devs could work with 3rd party site developers ahead of time to give them the web service functions (linked to actual sample data) so they could have their stats sites up and running when the game ships.

(SockDog) #4

I think rahdo has said he’s aware of the pitfalls of stats and such so I hope that translates into methods of sharing stats which don’t promote the sort of whoring we saw in ETQW. Public leaderboards are imo just poison and send out totally the wrong message.

That said, I quite like stats on a personal, private level, they can be good for me to view my abilities over a period of time. Having an option to compare myself to certain averages would also be nice.

Not sure who it was here but they suggested also a rolling stat system, so that you have no more than a few weeks or months worth of data in there. Or at least for a public version.

(tokamak) #5

Public stats are okay as long as they’re celebrating this right kind stats. Nobody is interrested in the total amount of xp one has gathered, it’s totally meaningless, and indeed, making a ladder out of this set is just a really bad move in many games.

(Cankor) #6

[QUOTE=SockDog;207638]
Not sure who it was here but they suggested also a rolling stat system, so that you have no more than a few weeks or months worth of data in there. Or at least for a public version.[/QUOTE]

Give the stat site developers an easy way to download the data and they can store it themselves and keep as much as they want in their own databases. This is what I did in my short-lived ETQW stats site and I was able to produce charts such as this:

accuracy.JPG920×553 84.7 KB

Exactly. Total XP is worthless. Again, give the users the base data and they can make whatever kind of stats they think will be worthwhile. One of my favorites on The best Medic was the Revive/Death ratio (I was trying to come up with stats which promoted positive activities). I had charts like the one above based on it. There’s no such stat available in the base data, so to create it I took total revives vs total deaths while playing as a medic.

I couldn’t have made that stat if deaths as a medic weren’t available. So assuming dev’s give us access to the info like they did in ETQW (but hopefully much better organized and complete) we can come up with all kinds of cool stuff.