More XP for killing higher ranks, less for lower ranks

(jerryku) #1

This is an aspect of many RPGs I’ve played, and I think it would greatly enhance the RPG skills aspect of Enemy Territory and encourage players to make teams well-balanced in regards to skill and XP. This in turn would make the game more fun for everyone involved, as the games would be more competitive

Players should gain more XP for killing higher ranking players, less for killing lower ranks. So if you’re a General, you’d score almost no XP at all for killing privates. But if you’re a private and you kill a General, you score even more XP.

In RPGs, this system is implemented so that high level characters are strongly encouraged to challenge themselves to progress at a faster rate by fighting monsters near their level, instead of merely butchering the easiest monsters around.

Right now, ET encourages people to achieve higher ranks and higher skills by helping your team, and all enemies you kill are treated the same when it comes to XP gain. A problem arises when one team consists of much better players, or people with more XP/skills, so that it totally dominates the other team. XP shuffle votes can be called, but usually fail. Why? Because the dominant team wants to get XP, wants to get skill, and wants to get higher ranks. And fighting a totally outmatched team of newbies is the easiest way to do this.

But, if player rank was taken into account in regards to XP, then people would naturally want to balance the teams by rank on their own accord, or use the XP shuffle feature more often. This way, to speed up their own climb up the ladder of power, they’d have to kill people closer to their higher ranks.

Another great feature of this would be that people might specifically hunt down certain high rank targets, which is pretty realistic… not to mention FUN! :slight_smile:

I should also add that you shouldn’t be punished too severely for killing people who are merely lower rank than you, but who are MUCH lower rank than you. The farther away they are from your rank, the higher/lower amount of XP you’re getting. Just like in RPG games. Just to clarify, folks!

(Kendle) #2

Good post, but there’s 3 counter arguments that I would like to put forward:-

  1. This isn’t deathmatch. The pursuit of XP is contrary to the objective team-based nature of the game. XP should only ever be considered a bonus, and it’s original purpose was to reward players for performing a function, supposedly in the interests of the team. Once you make attaining XP a goal in itself you’ve changed the basic nature of the game into something that it isn’t, and never was, intended to be.

  2. Players on public servers join at different times, so some have more XP by virtue of being on the server longer, not because they’re bettter players.

  3. XP is not an indication of skill. You can amass XP doing things that carry little risk and indeed are likely to be of no value to your team. The most obvious being Engineers who build things that don’t need to be built (Truck Barriers in GoldRush before the Tank has even been stolen) and Covert-Ops who just steal uniforms.

So, good first post, but I’d personally be against anything that makes XP even less of an incentive to work for the team than it already is.

(Cyber-Knight) #3

I’ll say this again (also see the thread i started about gameplay vs xp trend)

good players are just as dangerous with or without the xp.

if you seriously need the xp to actually do well in this game, you suck. period.

(Dawnrazor) #4

First: I like the idea in general, but I will put a few more comments below…

Agreed, but I think the idea jerryku posted can support this idea of XP.
If killing ppl. with lower experience will not give you any XP, there is no more reason for XP-whores to focus on fragging. Instead they need to find other ways of gainig XP.

Thats a point.
But if I join a server late, due to “dynamic XP” I will have the chance to catch up more easily. So dynamic xp will minimize the effect of just beeing rewarded for longer play.
But theres a downside to this: Such a player might go for fragging instead of doing some more useful stuff like completing objectives…

Good point.
But in reality some ppl seem think high-XP == good player.
In my opinion “dynamic XP” can minimize this, beacuse at some point there is no use in pure fragging for XP, 'cause you get none.
It might even help minimizing spawnkilling (the longer you spawn kill, the less XP you get…)

Agreed.
But I think, if well implemented, dynamic XP can help against xp-whoring.

(Kendle) #5

Without getting into even more arguments with people over XP (all I seem to do these days), this still doesn’t address the problem with XP. Most XP-whores don’t get XP from fragging, they get it by doing easy stuff that doesn’t involve too much risk (like Covert-Ops who get uniforms off dead bodies. The guy who takes the risk and uses his skill to make a kill gets 3XP and the guy who comes along after and scavenges a uniform off a dead body gets 5XP, where’s the logic in that?)

Whenever anyone does something for the XP as opposed to for the team he’s lost the plot and is now an XP-whore. Tell him he can kill a General and get loads more points than a Private and you introduce an even more disturbing element into the game.

Example: An Engy attempts to plant at the objective, he’s accompanied by a Field-Op. The Engy is a Private, the Field-Op is a General. Now the XP-whore has a positive incentive to kill the Field-Op (for the greater points) as opposed to the Engy, who might end up winning the game for his team if allowed to plant. At least as things stand there’s a 50/50 chance the XP-whore will do the right thing and kill the Engy first.

(Wraith2k3) #6

At least as things stand there’s a 50/50 chance the XP-whore will do the right thing and kill the Engy first.

Unless he’s an engineer himself in which case he’d wait for the enemy to plant first so he can get XP for defusing :smiley: Crazy monkies.

(Warskull) #7

I see it this way the exp system may make XP whores, but I am getting medpacks/ammo out of players who would normally never hand it out.

(jerryku) #8

yeah what I’m trying to get at is definately not to make XP more of a focus, so much as it is to make sure people are encouraged to bring about very competitive teams. Obviously people with high XP and rank aren’t necessarily the best players on a team, but certainly spreading them out evenly on both teams is a good easy step towards a more balanced server. If there are 4 high ranks on one team because they just kick a lot of ass together, and the other team is full of fresh newbies… the high rankers will just want to stick together forever so they can keep focusing on XP. And usually the new team will get wasted. I think the current system rewards XP whores a lot more than dynamic XP would. A dynamic XP system would naturally push XP whores to at least divide themselves up more fairly.

Also, while i agree that the game is supposed to be about completing objectives, I personally don’t take winning or losing in ET seriously… which makes me goof off and just run around for the heck of it sometimes. That being said, I do take diversity of gameplay experience seriously, and I have a much easier time having fun with a game if the combat between the teams is very competitive… with lots of back-and-forth through the map. :bump:

So if I’m in a server where the teams are extremely lopsided, I’m not having fun, whether I’m winning or losing, simply because my surroundings and actions are very repetitive. Call me old fashioned, but I like to see the sights and sounds of the world instead of just bludgeoning my foe to the ground. :bash: This is a serious problem for me in many ET maps because chokepoints can be so common and central to the gameplay of ET.

Plus I think it’d be great to see both armies on a server have pretty similar amounts of officers.

(petlion) #9

THIS ISNT AN RPG

(Kendle) #10

Jerryku, I hear what you’re saying about evening up the teams, but I still don’t think it would work, for the same reason it doesn’t already.

The 2 servers in my sig use auto-shuffle, the Pro server auto-shuffles between Stopwatch rounds, and the Campaign server between Campaigns. But people still swap teams after being shuffled if they don’t agree with being shuffled in the first place. Forcing team balance (which we do) helps, but there’s no real solution to reliably ensuring that one team is not overly dominant of the other if thats how the players on the server want to do it.