"Super" Players Edge (advance timing?)

(ouroboro) #21

make sure you read me carefully before responding. i didn’t say i wanted spam, in fact i said i don’t. what i said was that i am at the very least man enough to call a spade a spade, and not use all kinds of limpwristed excuses for why i don’t like the spam - the simple truth is that i don’t like it because it lets a newbie have a fighting chance against me, whereas if we faced off 1v1 in an SMG duel i would wax the floor with his hiney.

but again, ET was never intended as a purely SMG/aim contest (as much as i’m glad that it’s become one). it was in fact intended to incorporate a ton of weapons which don’t necessarily require aim, but do in fact require different skills to use (as well as avoid) effectively. although i am happy to see the constant “finger of god” artillery more or less gone in etpro, another part of me is a little sad to see the game changed so drastically. it’s almost as if the competitive scene looked at all the hard work and fresh ideas from Splash Damage and dismissed them outright, without even bothering to give them an honest chance and try to adapt to ET as a new game, rather than assume it should be as near rtcw as possible simply because it resembles it. it’s like the clans said “cool, a free version of wolf. let’s gimp it into submission and get fraggin’!”

i’m also aware of the other side of this debate which is the rtcw players who loathe ET - but i’m also able to see through their smokescreen of weak reasons why, and see the actual reason: they can’t stand the spam in ET. they tried ET when it was new, got served up on a silver platter by new ideas they weren’t used to in wolf, labelled it a n00b game and went back to wolf. the ones who dabbled in ET long enough to see the changes etpro made have switched over to ET now, because ET is now “safe”.

there’s no hard rule of gaming which states that a spammy game can’t be played competitively. it just requires a different mindset that the standard Quake 3 Arena “aim is everything” mentality.

i understand full well that this is annoying, but we need to look in the mirror and point at our own blemishes sometimes, it’s healthy :slight_smile:

(SCDS_reyalP) #22

Why ? You already admitted that you post just to get a reaction*. So why should waste our time reading your drivel ? :banana: We can react without subjecting ourselves to the content of your post. Here, for example, is my reaction:

http://www.splashdamage.com/index.php?name=pnPHPbb2&file=viewtopic&t=10379

i actually agree with you guys. i just like to debate a point which it would seem i couldn’t win, to see how far i can take it

hope nobody’s mad at me but was i convincing?

me == troll

(ouroboro) #23

lol, touche. you cleverly(?) dodged the point, as usual :clap:

so i cried wolf once out of boredom, lol. i don’t ALWAYS post lies :wink: :banana:

(EvilBaga) #24

ETpro has made the game less interesting in many ways. But it has also helped in many ways.
Overall, if I could get hitsounds in ETmain (yes, Im addicted) and limited xp (aka 3 map campaigns) I wouldnt touch ETpro.

(Sauron|EFG) #25

Wtf? Editing my post resulted in a double post?

(Sauron|EFG) #26

Even with ETPro it can be extremely spammy on a pub wilth 10-10 players or so.

No, you did it twice*, which means that even this post is a lie. :slight_smile:

  • From the thread reyalP linked:
(SCDS_reyalP) #27

More than that, because long before he “admitted” that his posts in the screenshot thread were trolling, he made a number of posts similar to those on the etpro forum, without any indication that he was just “joking”. :moo:

(ouroboro) #28

i’ve never joked on etpro forums. i was partially joking here, then when i got the rise i did out of all you gaggling hens, it became entertaining so i stretched it into extremes, lol. don’t be sad, i’m a nice person :slight_smile:

sheesh, relax those sphincters or you will all get piles! <3

the truth is (no really, i mean it this time!), reyalp, that i love you and want to give you beautiful children :blah:

(mendicant) #29

So lets leave the clans out of it. Why do you want excessive spam? I have zero fun on XP-save shrub servers where mortar rounds are falling like rain into the rear axis spawn on Goldrush. I have zero fun running like a mad little lemming on Fuel Dump, thru panzer, arty, and grenade spam, only to get caught by fresh axis respawns that happen to pop out right next to the objective. Yeah, it’s a blast on maps like Temple, where the axis can just spam the tank and reduce the game to 30 minutes of axis shooting allied fish in the barrel. Yeah, bring on the spam, I’ll just leave

has anyone read this guys comment??
if u’ve read it and are still playing etmain/shrub then ur a v strange individual, or… a mortar,spammyFO,noobnading chokepoint camper,panzerwhore etc :twak:

(petameta) #30

Yes, you can use mathematics, or better said statistics to prove something. However, you refer to the bell curve. Is there any good reason why the aiming-skill should be distributed normally (= like a bell curve).

A bell curve would mean very few low-skilled players, many average-skilled players and very few high-skilled players. I’d say there are many low-skilled-players, many (maybe a bit less) average-skilled players and fewer high-skilled players.

These are just two opinions. Is there any reason not to believe that there are some Super-Players, maybe the curve raises at the end. Who knows ? The only way to approximate the answer is to gather data and look at the resulting scatter plot. Then, the next question is: How do we measure skill ? As mentioned before, XP isn’t a good indicator for skill. Maybe death/kill ratio is better, I’m not sure about this.

(ouroboro) #31

most stats parsers tend to sort the results by efficiency (kills/deaths), implying that’s the most important thing. i suppose at the end of the day, it is. altho many things are important to your team winning, if you kill more than you die, you will be helping regardless, because dead players don’t complete objectives and living players do.

it would be interesting if someone were to take the time to carefully and objectively (does anyone in the gaming community actually know what that word means though?) create a formula which would determine your actualy value as a player. i remember years ago i had a baseball stats book which contained the entire record of all ~15,000 players in the history of the major leagues. a large portion of the book was dedicated to an extremely intricate calculus formula or some shit (i’m not great with math) which took every stat of a player, punched it into this formula which weighed everything a player ever did on the field according to it’s determined importance to winning games, and thus ranked every player in history. even someone like me whos eyes glazed over when i looked at the math formulas and charts could tell that it was irrefutable. this formula was so perfect that pitchers and hitters could be judged on the same scale, because the skills of each were taken into account and given an honest valuation.

as you may have guessed, Babe Ruth was on top, proving that what everyone already knew was in fact mathematically true (he had been a fantastic pitcher early in his career, well before his hitting prowess was recognized). there were, however, a few surprises.

very neat stuff. somebody should do it for ET - a program or script to parse a logfile and give each player one simple number - a weighed rating of that players value to his/her team. even tho i tend to hate stats in this game since it seems to give ppl an inflated e-ego, it would be cool to determine the value of the various skills in ET in regards to winning clan matches. i suppose that would require a bit of mathematical comparison as well as a bit of opinion (polls, surveys, etc)

(petameta) #32

This is a very interesting idea. Some thoughts about it: Maybe it’s good first create a theoretical background before creating a formula. For example, you could create categories: A good aim doesn’t mean the player is a good team member. So you could create two skill-categories: aim and teamplay. This maybe betters “fits” reality. Of course as you said, someone who keeps the other team dead does help his team, even if he doesn’t care for objectives.
In your baseball-example, does it make sense to compare pitchers and hitters ? Aren’t these different skill which can’t be compared ? Also, putting everything in one single number will make much getting lost. On the other hand, it’s easier to handle one number.

Another thought: You can measure quality and quantity. Quantity (that’s a number :slight_smile: is usually easier to handle, so the common practice is to “transfer” quality to quantity. This maybe sounds complicated, but it’s not: For example, how much does a revive count ? Or solving an objective? By doing this transfer, you gain something (easy to interpret number), but also lose something (information about quality).

An example (just fictious numbers):

  • a team revive gives 1 point
  • a certain objective gives 3 points

If a player has a skill of 10, he maybe

  • revived 10 people
  • completed 3 objectives and revived 1
  • completed 2 objectives and revived 4

This is something you can’t read out of a score of 10. Anyway, a plain 10 is a nice and easy thing :).

I think this is nothing easy to do, but interesting. As you wrote, there would be a lot of math involved.

(]UBC[ McNite) #33

You simply can’t measure “teamplay” or “progressing the teams win”.

Example:
Have a team of medics on gr as axis. They get immense first-aid-xp and will probably win the map by blocking allies completely. So they have lots of kills (efficiency), lots of first aid (teamplay?) and win the map (teamwin).
Have a team of medics on GR as allies. So they will have lots of kills (efficiency), lots of first aid (teamplay?) and loose the map.

Now evaluate an eng in this setting…
as axis he gets considerable eng-XP from simple building and mining. But he didn’t add much to the win of his team cuz the medics wiped out the allies before they even were able to get the tank.
as allies he gets a horrible kill/death-ratio (efficiency). He gets few XP from some mines and a bit of destroying barriers (which is of not much use with regard to teamplay in that setting). And he dies all the time trying to repair the tank, being the only one actually trying to get the game going for them.
So which eng is more valuable? And how would u compare these engs to the medics in their teams?

Just in case u think about hit-percentage… which percentage with a flamer/panzerfaust is worth as much as a mp40-percentage? And what if you have a player who gets 35% with a mp40 but nevertheless doesn’t have many kills?

I think you run into the wrong direction when trying to actually evaluate the skill of players.

(petameta) #34

I didn’t say it’s easy, but I say it could be done anyway. I would not take any XP into account, I think this does not accurately reflect teamplay.

I’m not sure what gets into log files, but putting technical aspects aside, trying to repair the tank could add a lot to the “teamplay-score”. Also, I think you can’t look statically at the problem: As you said, the same “play” on axis side may help much, but on allies side is worthless. That’s because axis are usually defending, while allies are usually on offense. But, one thing that makes a good player in my opinion is that he adopts to the game situation. This means he’ll play different when playing allies than playing axis. There are much more things to adopt: The team is 90% FieldOp ? Take some other class. The other team uses mines ? Go CovOps and spot them. And so on …
You could give different “scores” (or whatever you call it) for certain actions depending on which team the player is in. I know this still is quite simple, for example an engineer on goldrush who keeps repairing the truck barrier when he should repair the tank doesn’t do anything for his team. Yet another differentiation: Only when the gold is on the truck, repairing the truck barrier gives score.

This may result in a neverending if-then-if-then-logic. What maybe is good to some degree, but driving this too far will make things too complicated. I’ve thought about this and maybe there’s a simpler solution: There are possibly some simple variables which predict a win. Maybe I’ll do some research about this topic: Any statistics-program can tell you how good a specific variable predicts something, for example a team win. This could be any variable: death/kill ratio, XP, hit percentage (no, I did not think about this :slight_smile: and so on. For doing this, I need data. Is there any server admin here who is willing to provide some data ? I know these variables might not be good, but I’m curious how well these predict a win.

One thing that’s sure: Such a complicated question won’t be fully answered. There’s only a probabilistic answer, which doesn’t explain 100%. But explaining something is better than explaining nothing. And, maybe there’s a better (yet not perfect) explanation than the usual variables.

(Sauron|EFG) #35

There’s lies, damn lies, and statistics.

The vale of a player simply can’t (objectively) be measured by parsing a log file.

(ouroboro) #36

there’s also cliches.

as long as an action can be given an accurate assessment of value in regards to the completion of a goal, one could certainly rank the value of the actor(s).

the question isn’t whether or not math works, it’s whether or not the actions of an ET player can be given an accurate value.

i suspect they probably cannot, with any degree of certainty. it would involve too much opinion and conjecture, which would only lead to disagreement.

for the purposes of ET, i guess i’m happy enough to let K/D ratio be the deciding factor of skill. accuracy doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t lead to kills (although it usually does), and killing doesn’t mean much if you die doing it. we can assume someone with a high k/d ratio is sufficiently accurate, although he/she may also be scoring kills by other means. but that only stands as evidence of their wide skill range, so again the k/d ratio shows it’s importance.

the only problem with such a stat is that the anchor medic and engineer will likely not look so hot in the final analysis. the value of a non-offensive medic could probably be fairly judged by how many revives he made divided by how many times a reviveable teammate was within his immediate range (as determined by whether or not he saw the revive icon in his compass).

as for an engineer, now that i think about it, that’s probably the only class where XP (in engineering) would be a fair judge of value. because a good engineer builds/repairs/destroys more than he kills, and the more he does those duties, the more XP he will get - whereas a class with “boxes of candy” for their teammates, like medics/fdops, can whore for that XP, making it an inaccurate way to judge.

(petameta) #37

I’d go one step further: There’s no objectivity. This gets rather philisophical. One step further, there is no truth. The best science won’t give you the “real” answer. You can believe in science, or in god or Allah, Buddah, the four elements or whatever. Everybody has his theories about life, and none of them is more true than those of someone else.

Doing such kind of math or statistics, you can believe it or not. You question much of the scientific world (this is not good or bad, it’s your choice).

(]UBC[ McNite) #38

I d rather not to as far as petameta goes, and I especially disagree with this:

Everybody has his theories about life, and none of them is more true than those of someone else.

While it sounds nice, I d say those theories are more true which explain or make you able to predict something happening more accurately than other less reliable theories. This counts both for science and real life.
I see another problem: to measure the value of a players action on a map you first have to define what the good actions on that map are, ie define the goals for each class on a map and rank those goals (to get a goal-system). But this is usually where the debate begins and never ends…

(Akilae) #39

Statistics are usually funny, so we might aswell give em a try. For the magic ownage formulae, I, for one, wouldn’t take the number of death into account. Say for instance a mine sweeping Fieldops runs into the tankyard through the main gate in Goldrush phase one. tosses an airstrike not killing anyone, sets off four mines and dies: best teamplay action available for his class at this phase of the map on offense. 0/1 KD ratio. Heh would be quite trick to put that into a parser.

(petameta) #40

For myself, I see it the same way McNite does. An accurate prediction, wether in science or in real life, is an indicator of a good theory. But, I don’t think people believing in (for example) god will say their theory does a bad prediction. For example, if you behave morally bad, you’ll go to hell. If not, you may go to heaven. The problem with this theory is that noone can prove it, so in a scientific way it’s absolutely useless. In the medieval age people believed that strong in this theory that they killed people not believing in god. But if you choose to believe in god, it’s true for you. And, as I said before: My “true” is not any better or worse than your true. Who should decide which true is better, in whatever way ? It’s all man-made :).

Well, this thread has gone a long way. Maybe we can agree to do some statistics for sake fun. I neither think death/kill ratio is a good predictor. Also, it’ll be hard to put something like voice chat into the equation, which in my opinion drastically improves teamplay.