/r/gaming K:D vs W:L

[FROST1]

I agree that I haven’t come across anyone yet that felt like a K/D whore, but then again we’re either here by invitation or because we decided to invest our hard-earned cash into this game, hardly the right breading ground for that kind of behavior. Am I afraid it will change after launch? I sure expect the odd dumb ass in pubs, but I don’t think it worries me that much. The main thing I was trying to get across is that K/D by itself is meaningless if it is not backed by a decent XP/min to show it’s not farming but good ol’ domination of the battlefield. For equal play time, 30:10 is much more meaningful for me than 15:3.

Yeah true, there might be a rise of guys* trying to rack kills in the seemingly safest way possible, but I think they’ll learn in a realtively short amount of time, that they won’t get where they supposedly wanna be. They’ll learn, how different DB is from your average Call of Battlefield, and that there’s no convenient way to polish your k/d, AND have a high kill-count. I mean, even for the noobiest camper it must be clear, that 30/15 is better than 4/1, even though the k/d ratio is better in the latter one. I think most would agree with that, and that means in essence, it’s not only about the ratio alone, it’s also about your total kill-count. If that’s now better or worse in the eyes of the “no k/d faction”, I can’t tell, but I think kill/death numbers are important, no matter how you read them. And k/d whoring won’t work, at least not if you’re also striving for a reasonable kill-count, and if you do that, you are basically “forced” to help your comrades by accident.

And again, try not to picture killing as killing, try to see it as time stealing, stealing time from a limited time-per-player -per-match-account. You are a time-thief and your weapon is a time-stealing device. The more time you take from the enemy account, and the less time your team loses to the enemy, the more likely your team will win. And the k/d ratio is the best indicator for the time you’ve taken from the enemy and the time that was stolen from you from the enemy. And to get better in the ol’ time-stealin craft you have to have those numbers visible, to improve them.

*at release

[Djiesse]

XP at its current state is pretty bad. If you are escorting the EV you get extra XP. If you are covering the XP from far as sniper, you get 0 extra. If you clean the street before the EV, so they cannot even build the barrier - you get 0 XP. But SD wants to make this a competitive element - collect XP.

Someone cowering behind the EV will collect 2 XP once in a while (not sure what the interval is, but seems fairly long to me), a single kill from your sniper will score him 50x that, XP/min will favor the sniper in this case. But on the other hand, if the guy with the EV kills the same number of enemies as your sniper AND pushes the objective forward at the same time, shouldn’t his score be higher to reflect that? That seems only fair to me.

So that it influences the next map. Now will it be smarter to let the enemy build the barrier, so we can destroy it again?? Both sides will get XP for that though.

We don’t know yet what XP and levels we do in the game, so we can’t comment too much on the eventuality of XP farming. But if there are any sort of persistent stats, XP and/or others, then it’s quite likely that farming and stats padding will exist in one form or another

Does it mean we should remove all that for those of us who want to use it in a legitimate manner? I don’t think so…

And the k/d ratio is the best indicator for the time you’ve taken from the enemy and the time that was stolen from you from the enemy. And to get better in the ol’ time-stealin craft you have to have those numbers visible, to improve them.

I get the feeling we agree on most of what we’re saying here… I certainly agree that K/D is an important stat, even an essential one for improving that aspect of your gameplay. But since it only reflects one aspect of the game (even if it is a key one, it’s not the only one), I feel K/D is just not the most defining stat overall…

[tokamak]

So a player who is outside, far away from the actual objective, searching the last turrets which absolutely can’t harm your team anymore should be more valuable than a player who kills the entire team at the enemy spawn? Please… :rolleyes:

That player isn’t going to get a very high s/min now is he?

[stealth6]

There isn’t one deciding factor when it comes down to how good somebody is, even s/min is dependent on multiple factors. To give some examples some classes can earn xp faster or server size makes a difference, or even playing a small map 24/7 vs playing a larger map…

If we’re talking about ranking then imo ELO is the best way to go about it (or a modified ELO algo).

I’m fairly certain CS:GO uses ELO - so there are already FPS games using this. Although even ELO can probably be gamed if every match is recorded. (I mean also pub matches)

[tokamak]

There isn’t one deciding factor when it comes down to how good somebody is, even s/min is dependent on multiple factors.

S/min is also the only one that includes multiple factors, ideally all the measurable ones.

An unmodified ELO has not enough statistical significance for a player that will only account for 6.25% of each maps. You’re going to need an impossible amount of matches before that number starts to have any real power.

In the main forums I once came up with a modified ELO but I can’t really remember what I did with that. I believe it was comparing the average xp/min of both teams to modify the rating change further to make the ELO require less matches before it means something.

I need coffee.