Rating and Incentives

[nn_]

First observation: transparency. A casual glance at the game or the stats pages will not yield any explanation on how advancement is calculated. I found it in the PDF manual and the patch notes.

Secondly, rank is simply determined by player_hours*effectiveness.

As an incentive, that is insulting. As an aid, it is almost useless, but then, nothing in the game (e.g. matchmaking, team balance) seems to be using the rating/ranking anyway?

Somebody coined the phrase "benchmark for skill" to describe what attracted him to SH. It's a good selling point, and a worthy objective.

But that means you need a good skill estimate. Such estimates exist:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trueskill/
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/...l/details.aspx

The basic idea: your existing rating (skill estimate) will predict the likely outcome of a match against any opponent. The more certain the estimates, and the larger the difference in skill estimate, the less surprising the outcome should be. Surprising outcomes make large corrections to skill estimate, expected outcomes make for small or no corrections. The more often an estimate has been corrected, against well-estimated players, the less it is seen as uncertain.

Now obviously, crowded MP matches do not make for clean pairwise comparisons. SH does not have a tourney mode (why not? - it certainly has servers to spare). So estimates are going to be messy.

That's OK - if you really need a number to tell you how good you are, that does not invalidate the basic idea. Usually, there is a lot of debate about the details, but the math is straightforward, and you can do skill estimates without throwing away straightforward stats and counting.

Now let's say you have a small user base that plays frequently, and you can accumulate a lot of data of who scores and caps, who damages whom, who kills whom, and how effectively and quickly. If need be, take into account how crowded or empty the server.

I.e., just for discussions sake, let's assume it is possible to estimate skill in some meaningful way under less-than-perfect circumstances, and get somewhat useful results.

What then? Matchmaking, team balancing, handicaps.

Or, most interestingly - move away from counting frags, and show who gained and lost most in the skill estimates. Why? Because now it pays off to go after the stronger players, instead of preying on the weak. If the skill estimates are essentially worthless - or if individual skill varies a lot from map to map and mode to mode - you will see wild swings instead of steady convergence. But the basics - movement, aim etc. - should show.

On the other hand, you definitely want to learn from Halo2/3/Reach and make sure that matchmaking is guided by skill estimate last, and desired map, mode, group, friend etc. first.

If you want to push this all the way, make the HUD markers indicate risk/payoff: the more of a proven threat a player, the more he stands out.

Maybe the prospect of collecting match points is what keeps you playing, but as a benchmark for skill this is completely useless. We can already count hours played, and points/match. I'd be much more interested in something that tells me about raw ability, no matter how few hours were spent on the game.

Right now, we seem to have only the "Experience" part, not the "Skill" part, of the Halo3. Granted, even Bungie is still fiddling with their system
http://www.bungie.net/News/content.a...ink=BWU_043010
http://www.bungie.net/images/Inside/...atchmaking.ppt

But however you use it, having a skill estimate as part of your stats is crucial if you want to be seen as a "benchmark of skill". What we have is epxerience-only:

The aim of the new ranking system is to provide better rewards for all players from people new to the game through to our seasoned veterans. The new system uses the same 10 rank titles from Recruit through to Commander but each title now has sub-ranks named Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. This system creates 50 ranks in total allowing lower ranks to be grouped closer together and experienced ranks to be spaced further apart.
http://futuremark.yougamers.com/foru....php?p=1318583

I for one would prefer a system that uses the colors for experience, and the ranks for skill, instead of introducing sub-ranks for experience and no score at all for raw skill independent of hours played.

[AnthonyDa]

Anyone who managed to scroll so far, please sum the first post in 2-3 sentences plz. Thx.

[nn_]

1. Skill and hours played are not the same
2. SH stats combine both into one rank
3. That should be changed

Hope this helps. Now you are going to take my word for it?

[AnthonyDa]

Tokamak will gives you a nice link to that ...

And BTW, regarding the number of servers using point restriction to join them, the number of total player online, and the resources who should be spend into "fixing" a feature that none is using, I think this should be on the lowest priority on FM roadmap.

[nn_]

FM_Antti:

replied 6 months ago
Thanks for the suggestion. We're planning to make player rank more visible during rounds. Currently however those plans don't involve the radar

From http://getsatisfaction.com/futuremar...hance_teamplay


Care to elaborate? Judging from the amount of friendly fire one receives coasting or silent running, there are a lot of players that cannot even distinguish yellow from blue suits, so if you are thinking of suits matching rank, that wouldn't really work. If not HUD/radar, what else is left?

[Amaroq]

The 'skill benchmark' attitude is what almost killed the game, IMO. It's not a healthy mindset, unless you are playing pure deathmatch (not TDM), a game mode that is not offered in SH.

It's a team game and the whole ranking thing detracts from the team idea. It rewards letting others do the dirty work and laying back for the easy kills. It rewards spawn camping even when that's not in the best interest of your team's win. It supports a body count mentality even in game modes that are not about killing as many as possible.

Stats should be toned down, if anything. At least, incentives and ratings should reflect the game mode being played. Right now, you're always better off just trying to kill as many as possible, from a stat point of view. That's detracting from the quality of those games.

[Spanner_]

BFBC2's skill rating seems to work on squad and objective points only which works well... EXCEPT no one seems to care for the skill rating at all and it is not displayed in-game.

[Tokamax]

How about a 'most xp during one match' and a 'most kills during one match' ranking added to the statistics?

Simply your highest score during one match counts, would be fun for the weekly rankings as well.

[nn_]

BFBC2's skill rating seems to work on squad and objective points only which works well... EXCEPT no one seems to care for the skill rating at all and it is not displayed in-game.

Yeah, that's the usual problem. If you want teamwork, never score or show kills or accuracy etc., score captures, defenses, assists. If you catch a bullet that would have hit the person trying to capture, that counts more than killing five guys off at the spawn.

[nn_]

The 'skill benchmark' attitude is what almost killed the game, IMO. It's not a healthy mindset, unless you are playing pure deathmatch (not TDM), a game mode that is not offered in SH.

Depends on how your game defines "skill".

I agree though - the standard definition of skill everyone intuitively uses is based on who-kills-whom, and that is best done and measured with 1-on-1 tourney mode, followed by FFA deathmatch. And FFA is already polluted, depending on how you account for damage vs. kill - do you count the finish, or do you evaluate every single hit?

It's a team game and the whole ranking thing detracts from the team idea. It rewards letting others do the dirty work and laying back for the easy kills. It rewards spawn camping even when that's not in the best interest of your team's win. It supports a body count mentality even in game modes that are not about killing as many as possible.

You don't want to count kills, and/or display them, at all in a team game. Again, I agree with your point, but I think that this is not a property of skill estimate and rating in general, but of the flawed way it is used in most games. You skill estimate is based on events, and the game defines which events count: capture/defense etc. vs. kill.

What team games need is MVP ratings, and if there are kills that are irrelevant to the game (who cares if you can pitch on the parking lot), then they should not count towards the MVP rating at all.

Stats should be toned down, if anything. At least, incentives and ratings should reflect the game mode being played. Right now, you're always better off just trying to kill as many as possible, from a stat point of view. That's detracting from the quality of those games.

I would be all in favor of a game mode that does not show stats at all and is focused on simple outcomes (objective capture, one-life survival). Let the kills go uncommented as well (except friendly fire).

I would also favor visible beacons (rotating/flashing red lights) to mark relevant objectives, because frankly, the maps are hard to navigate, hard to memorize, and if you are in silent running you get no "relevant objective markers" except the thruster light of other players flocking towards them. Nice challenge if you are getting the hang of it, but not helping new players.

IMO the best game modes have intrinsic rewards. All variants of tag (one player is "it", everybody else tries to get him) have that - you kill the focal player (or did the most damage to him), you are "it" in the next round.

However, my comment on "benchmark for skill" was not meant to say that that is my dream game; I took it as a good read as to what the "Classic" game was all about, it has its supporters, and in its (possible) purity it makes sense as a plroduct/pitch even if I don't favor it. FP diluted this a bit IMO (adding generic weapon selection skill), but no matter what your take on it is, a benchmark needs decent ratings.

If SH is a benchmark for 6 DoF DM, it's kills or damage. For SH to become a vibrant team game, other issues (ability to tag landmarks, pre-defined landmarks for communication, spawn waves etc.) have to be addressed first, but I fully agree: if the scores and incentives are biased towards kills and not captures, then you get kills, not caps. The funny thing is that that isn't even true: caps count for a lot, but somehow there is less visceral drama in capturing. Human beings are biased towards kills, if you want them care about caps, you need to remove the kill-for-kill's-sake counting entirely.

Maybe a capped objective just needs to start a countdown timer towards the Mother of All EMP MPR Flare events ("self destruct initiated"), so you get a satisfying boom for it, and maybe some accidental "kills". And maybe the game also needs a single objective mode/map, to ease players into teamplay.

I have been playing this game for quite some time now, if not sustainedly, and because I spend most of my time in silent running simply to stay alive, I keep planning on going on the training servers to just track down the goddamn objectives and trying to memorize their locations, because, without the HUD, you sure won't find the damn things. The sameness of the various rocks (Arc is the worst) and the scarcity of reliable landmarks (there's the sun - look for it and you are blind) lend themselves to just follow the thrusters of the other players - and the players that are hardest to kill can use those thrusters more freely than the rest of us. Unless those that are best at shooting focus on caps instead, the game is just going to drift away from the objectives, more often than not. The ojectives become the "waterholes" for the flyby lions and the sniper hyenas to take out the rest. Yes, sniping takes skill, but you could use target drones and cardboard cutouts for that - it does not make for a fun game, esp. if seeing the sniper in a killcam still does not help you locating him, and the spawn boost through open space still gets you killed before you can reach him. Sniper suppression is a second-order game: it might be necessary so that somebody can get on with the caps, but if the caps did not end the game, the sniping would go on forever, without a purpose.