<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->In NS2 the only measuring tool that matters is TEAMWORK!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> i agree scoring needs some tweaks, and it can never be really reliable, even if assists are added. it seems less random-influenced than K/D though. but you are right: in the end, people (hopefully) measure you by remembering your name in certain sutations.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I dont see the point in questioning k/d - if you are not interested in it - dont look at it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> what people are questioning is the amount of significante the OP is giving this stat. edit: as for me, i don't want people to only focus on this stat. it might have a negative impact on their priorities. i am also happy if i have nice stats, but i usually only look at them once, at the end of the game. the map is just more interesting. and this is not because i'm bad, i often end up on top of the list. usually with numerous deaths though :)
ScardyBobScardyBobJoin Date: 2009-11-25Member: 69528Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
<!--quoteo(post=1915118:date=Mar 19 2012, 10:13 AM:name=NecropsY)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (NecropsY @ Mar 19 2012, 10:13 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915118"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I just wanna correct this, beacon doesnt spawn any marines,
rather it simply teleports all marines to one location near the obs
alot of people missunderstand this<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> It spawns marines who are next in the queue for each IP. So if you have 4 dead marines and 2 IPs, a beacon will spawn 2 marines quicker than they would have. In practice, I don't find the difference to be that great (i.e. you spawns marines only a couple of seconds faster).
Guess usually those marines, spawning at ips are getting instakilled by ip camping (comms using beacon too late), maybe thats why ppl still havent realized that beacon does spawn some marines at ips.
At least i hear this statement way too often. (beacon only teleports marines back, which is false)
<!--quoteo(post=1915118:date=Mar 19 2012, 02:13 PM:name=NecropsY)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (NecropsY @ Mar 19 2012, 02:13 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915118"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->"B-b-but NS2 has mechanics to circumvent this! Yes. When you need all your players to spawn in a hurry, you use a beacon."
I just wanna correct this, beacon doesnt spawn any marines,
rather it simply teleports all marines to one location near the obs
alot of people missunderstand this<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I meant to also add that scans provide vision where players aren't alive, and stuff like that. Maybe I'll update it later!
But yeah, it does also spawn marines who are queued on IPs, which is how it's a way of circumventing death, so to speak.
<!--quoteo(post=1915209:date=Mar 19 2012, 05:52 PM:name=NurEinMensch)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (NurEinMensch @ Mar 19 2012, 05:52 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915209"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Who cares? Everyone already has a pretty good idea how well they do in a video game.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Not true. Tons of people delude themselves into thinking that they're carrying their team because they got a high score while being entirely uninvolved in combat, and they further delude themselves into thinking that their teammates who are fighting are useless frat boy halo players. This thread is proof enough of that!
That there's no agreed-upon measure for "how well someone is doing" should tell you<b> a lot</b> of people don't know how well players are doing. A lot of people have trouble judging how the 2 teams are doing (i.e. which side is winning), too, but that's another topic altogether..
<!--sizeo:5--><span style="font-size:18pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->Now here's something I wanted to elaborate on earlier:<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
When I say people should "strive for" a higher KDR, what do I mean? What if they're playing a pure welding/building/whatever role and they have no chance of actively trying to change their KDR?
It all hinges on how skill comes into the game. Skill comes into the game through the players. If every player except you was controlled by a rudimentary AI (and you learn to exploit that), the entire game becomes a series of repetitive tasks. In the current game, this much is true of things like 'building a resource tower' or 'powering a room.' What puts pressure on how you build/repair? Enemy players attacking you, friendly players calling for help, commanders giving orders and so on. Ultimately, most of the tasks in the game are simple and easy, until players become involved. Often, when players become involved it means <b>combat </b>- after all, the skill of "building something that someone else is building as well" isn't really variable.
Skill doesn't mean "aim" either. This is another thing that comes up a lot in game discussions. Skill includes how well you plan where to build, how well you talk to your teammates and a million other things. It's intimately tied to how the players are performing, how close their levels of understanding are and so on.
You can be the best builder/welder in the world, but if your combat, movement and map awareness are lacking you won't actually weld/build much more effectively than someone who is new and inexperienced. That is, if your opponents try to make it hard for you. You can play whatever role you like in this game, and if you pull it off it will be helpful to your team...but if you force yourself to never develop your combat skill (strive for a higher KDR), the rest of your gameplay will be given a hard limit too.
You can explore this by asking yourself some general questions: when I enter an area like crossroads to set up a resource tower, how much of the outside area do I scout before lowering my gun to build? How aware am I of the possibility of combat? Am I prepared to fight something effectively in order to accomplish my <b>main </b>goal of building the resource tower? How do I position myself while building? I play support roles too, and I usually end up having to get a few kills any time I 'support' something outside the safety of my main base.
the problem is, you can do incredibly well as marines in early game but still fail to get the 2nd hive down fast enough -> fades have such a big impact that even mediocore alien teams can comeback in k/d at this point and maybe even completely turn the k/d advantage around.
K/d can be some kind of indicator if a team does well at a certain point but doesnt always indicate if the team will really win. (also even if marines get horribly slaughtered after fades are out, but if aliens are not able to finish them in a certain timewindow, at some point marines can spam a lot of sentrys and arcs to push out and leave areas only defended by structures. i hope you get what scenario i mean, such a game might take 1-2h but it happens regularly)
I would be a little bit more careful only looking at kd. (especially since there is no rfk anymore)
<!--quoteo(post=1915245:date=Mar 20 2012, 01:30 AM:name=internetexplorer)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (internetexplorer @ Mar 20 2012, 01:30 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915245"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Not true. Tons of people delude themselves into thinking that they're carrying their team because they got a high score while being entirely uninvolved in combat, and they further delude themselves into thinking that their teammates who are fighting are useless frat boy halo players. This thread is proof enough of that!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--quoteo(post=1915249:date=Mar 19 2012, 07:38 PM:name=Koruyo)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Koruyo @ Mar 19 2012, 07:38 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915249"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I would be a little bit more careful only looking at kd. (especially since there is no rfk anymore)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The only people who think we're <b>only </b>looking at KDR are the high schoolers who need to argue with everything but don't know how.
TalesinOur own little well of hateJoin Date: 2002-11-08Member: 7710NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators
edited March 2012
<!--quoteo(post=1915257:date=Mar 19 2012, 05:54 PM:name=internetexplorer)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (internetexplorer @ Mar 19 2012, 05:54 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915257"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->The only people who think we're <b>only </b>looking at KDR are the high schoolers who need to argue with everything but don't know how.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> That or tired of the ones who harp on and on mindlessly about how important K/D ratio is, when there's a much larger game and K/D is an insignificant enough part of it to be discounted as pointless. Dying is bad. Personal ego-strokes like favoring your K/D ratio over playing for the team is also bad. It's the difference between a winning team, and a losing team with one high K/D prick complaining about how his team sucked so bad, who didn't bother joining in on any team-fights, defending anything so reinforcements would have time to arrive, acting as bait and taking a death to strip two or three enemies from an attack party off down a side alley (allowing the attack to be repelled later) and so on, in favor of their own superiority-strokery when they did more to contribute to the loss of the game for their team than anything else, all to protect that all-important K/D.
Disregard it. It <i>isn't</i> important, and if more people would stop ****ing off over it like it mattered, we'd have fewer Halo kiddies blaming their team for a loss instead of themselves, and better games overall.
<!--quoteo(post=1915245:date=Mar 20 2012, 01:30 AM:name=internetexplorer)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (internetexplorer @ Mar 20 2012, 01:30 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915245"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Not true. Tons of people delude themselves into thinking that they're carrying their team because they got a high score while being entirely uninvolved in combat, and they further delude themselves into thinking that their teammates who are fighting are useless frat boy halo players. This thread is proof enough of that!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Sounds to me like you feel others aren't recognizing your achievements enough.
ScardyBobScardyBobJoin Date: 2009-11-25Member: 69528Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
I view the aggregate team KDR more important than individual KDR (i.e. sum of total team kills/sum of total team deaths). If you have a team KDR > 1 then you're likely winning because of the mechanisms internetexplorer mentioned.
The easiest way to picture this is if the marine team is getting a high KDR, then aliens are more likely to get egg-locked and unable to defend/attack/do anything but sit helplessly in the spawn queue. The only way to fix this is to reduce the respawn penalty such that dying a lot is not significant.
I almost always have a negative KDR. I try to play on servers that have known good players. That’s an attempt at improving my skills. I think that’s working but sometimes I’m not so sure. The bottom line is to help your team win period. I feel better being at the bottom of the queue on a winning team than on the top of a losing one. Sometimes my play helps the team win other times not so much. If I distract a fade and get killed so my teammates can kill him that’s a plus to me. I have no problem jumping into a group of marines to keep them busy while a teammate kills a power node in marine start or allows my teammates time to get back to save the hive. I love the game and play it for fun. If stats are important to you, fine. Being on a winning team is what’s important to me. There are times when you know the game is lost beyond all hope. I never stop trying; only because it gives me a chance see what I can do under pressure.
I feel like the thread is more about miscommunication in teams.
And while it could be true that this high k/d player is not joining the teamfights, it could as well be true that he disagrees on the current tactic and even tho he spams the mic to get ppl assisting him with his plan, nobody cares/listens and keep fights over low priority stuff, he then gets lots of kills attacking weakpoints(his plan) alone tho because he doesnt get any support from other players in the team he often lacks the power to finish it/ exploiting the weakness to end the game.
Then suddenly there are fades, or bad tech choices like not getting armor upgrades and your team loses - and the guy is frustrated because he was at the edge of winning if ppl would have listened.
<!--quoteo(post=1915245:date=Mar 19 2012, 04:30 PM:name=internetexplorer)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (internetexplorer @ Mar 19 2012, 04:30 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915245"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->You can explore this by asking yourself some general questions: when I enter an area like crossroads to set up a resource tower, how much of the outside area do I scout before lowering my gun to build? How aware am I of the possibility of combat? Am I prepared to fight something effectively in order to accomplish my <b>main </b>goal of building the resource tower? How do I position myself while building? I play support roles too, and I usually end up having to get a few kills any time I 'support' something outside the safety of my main base.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What i think you're effectively saying is your K:D matters in respect to the success of the goal you're trying to accomplish. If you go to take crossroads, yeah you can build that tower nicely with holding that E button, hu-rah, but there is more of an emphasis on situational awareness, timing, and the ability to hold that position should confrontation arise from the oppositions goal of limiting your teams ability take strategic positions on the map. Certainly anyone can see the point there of having someone in position with the ability to accomplish those goals efficiently, IE, higher K:D. If you have the ability to achieve a higher K:D, you'll have a higher success rate of whatever role you're playing.
The emphasis of my point is that the ratio itself is meaningless without context. Putting a meaning to K:D itself without context minimalizes roles where having a higher K:D doesn't matter, I.E: the gorge healing the fades destroying the other team or the skulk who focused down an obs limiting the other teams situational awareness in a given area allowing your team to take control of an area or taking out a res tower. Though these actions alone don't award kills (unless you're a combat gorge...go go combat gorgys!), they certainly provide great benefit for the team.
What's more important than your K:D is what you did in between your deaths that make or break you as a good/great player. Certainly building the marine base then running to datacore, dying 10 times, and being 0-10 holds no value. You can definitively say that person is worthless, but there are actions in the game that add value to an individual, but it's not reflected in their ratio. When you're playing competitively and you eliminate skill factor by the nature of your competition being equally skilled, you're limited by your ability to work as a team and those non K:D adding activities are just as important as the one that do add to the ratio.
K/D ratio does have some effect to the game. Especially if your the offensive marine/alien trying to invade an area to take out marines/aliens. Getting more kills and not dying or having less death will make you to hold them out where they're trying to go. But for gorge, K/D ratio doesn't really apply to it because it just supports other aliens; gorge heals other aliens so that they can kill more marines. For marines, there's really no support. All they do is attack, attack, attack. Welder doesn't really do much of support. The supporter is the Commander of marines by dropping health ammo. K/D ratio matters to marines, imo, because they need to hold out the area and kill as much aliens as possible for them to be able to control the map.
one other thing to consider; the game isn't balanced around k/d, it's balanced around win rate. so, perhaps marines are overall getting a higher k/d rate than aliens, but the win ratio is even. because of the dynamics of the game (1 hive vs 1 ip, 1 hive vs 2+ ips, 2 hives vs 2 ips, 2 hives vs 3+ ips, etc) it's impossible to predict what threshold a positive k/d ratio will have a significant impact on the team's success. a team going 10-0 in the first minute of the game is often a fatal blow to the other team, but a team streaking 10-0 after 5 minutes of gameplay might not.
What a disgusting, thoroughly flawed thread. The whole OP just reeks of belittling the person who questioned the importance of KDR. The constant careening into "If you are dying over and over, you are not free to weld/build anywhere you need to" instead of acknowledging you actually might NOT die while doing so.
internetexplorer brings to mind the countless people I've encountered in Quake CTF, sitting in base with a railgun harvesting frags IN AN 8-0 GAME, convincing themselves over and over "no, no, I have a positive KD ratio, I am being useful to the team, yes, I'm not being a total d*ck, no, I'm defending the base..."
Go back to death match please. Your lack of sportsmanship might not ruin NS games, but your attitude is foul.
Disclaimer: Might be that I'm making an overkill, and the OP really had good intentions. But I really, REALLY doubt it.
EDIT: Oh, just for the record: my KD ratio is positive.
I always look at the "total" score and not the K/D. Higher score = big help.
Most of the times i see a player with maybe 5-12 stats but then his score is just the same as the 15-2. Its great to mix the teams with "Aimers" ( like my self ) and "teamPlayers". But sometimes ( like my self ) i play "Defending the base+nearest extractos". And ofc i end up with HIGH K/D then.
This is another problem semi-connected to caring about KDR; caring about being recognised.
Now people are saying that KDR isn't important, but that people should be awarded more score points for contributing, or their kill assists should be counted. When you put a value to certain contributions, people will strive to fulfil only those few criteria. The greatest contributions that can be made cannot be quantified, and you will not be directly recognised for them. That is the game of natural-selection.
People have become too influenced by the COD genre of games, where the "best player" of a round gets a massive fanfare and is heralded as saviour of the universe. Everyone wants to be known as good so they spend all their time accomplishing the goals that will get them the best score. So much so that people don't even realise they are subconsciously programmed to do it, like some people here exclaiming that KDR doesn't matter at all .... but that theirs is always positive. WHO CARES?
The scoreboard is good for only two things; checking your ping and checking how many of your team-mates are dead.
<!--quoteo(post=1915375:date=Mar 20 2012, 12:14 PM:name=Imbalanxd)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Imbalanxd @ Mar 20 2012, 12:14 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915375"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->When you put a value to certain contributions, people will strive to fulfil only those few criteria. The greatest contributions that can be made cannot be quantified, and you will not be directly recognised for them. That is the game of natural-selection.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Couldn't agree more with this sentiment. And I'm one of the people who thinks that kill/death counts should be stuck from the scoreboard and replaced with a more fine-grained method of scoring.
I still think weighted scoring would be nice, though. With assists, greater score for killing enemies who are engaging your allies or buildings, and score weighting when you're sticking close to other players, defending them.
It's a nightmarish thing to program, and that's probably why we'll never see such a pervasive score tracking system. Ultimately you're right; we should all stop obsessing over score entirely and just play the game the way it should be played, and for our own enjoyment.
Points should be awarded for more things. Like, when a marine welds another to full armor, they get points. I don't think gorges get points when they heal someone to full do they?
Res for kills isn't in the game therefore individual context trumps K:D ratio completely.
Sorry, but it's a pointless a posteriori indicator of performance that belongs only in simple TDM games or public team balancing mods.
To elaborate a little bit, if the hypothetical player has a negative K:D ratio they see it and think "oh I'm a bad player". This only acts to reinforce what they already knew: that they didn't triumph in the majority of their encounters and have lost all the upsides that come with that.
Obviously it isn't completely useless because you can tell if you're improving as a player but I would never recommend anyone to make in-game decisions based on their ratio of kills to deaths.
It's good that you effortposted about it but K:D is a red herring. The ideas presented by your post provide a good overview team FPS game's basic concepts but it's all wrapped in the Kill/Death Ratio talk which is no more use than saying "Get better at the game to get better!"
<!--quoteo(post=1915441:date=Mar 20 2012, 09:04 AM:name=Smug_Lobster)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Smug_Lobster @ Mar 20 2012, 09:04 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915441"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Points should be awarded for more things. Like, when a marine welds another to full armor, they get points. I don't think gorges get points when they heal someone to full do they?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Isn't the whole points-system useless though?
Points should be a general indicator of good teamplay. Points for destroying structures, assisting such as healing/welding and siege, tagging structures, doing a lot of damage to an enemy that someone else finishes off, things like that. We already get points for most of those things, but the system needs improving. Maybe make points useful, like gaining points will slightly add to your personal resource trickle - just a little bit though.
Such a scoring system would have to take into account every possible action that could conceivably benefit the team. I think we can assume that this is an impossible feat, and thus there would arise scenarios where a positive contribution would yield no score, making players loath to make said contribution, regardless of how necessary it is.
Imagine there's no score, I wonder if you can. No number to live or die for, a brotherhood of man/alien. Imagine all the people playing for the team.
For those who can understand the limitations of the scoring in question, any metric which quantifies performance can not hurt in helping evaluate a player's performance.
<!--quoteo(post=1915485:date=Mar 20 2012, 06:11 PM:name=Imbalanxd)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Imbalanxd @ Mar 20 2012, 06:11 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915485"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Such a scoring system would have to take into account every possible action that could conceivably benefit the team. I think we can assume that this is an impossible feat, and thus there would arise scenarios where a positive contribution would yield no score, making players loath to make said contribution, regardless of how necessary it is.
Imagine there's no score, I wonder if you can. No number to live or die for, a brotherhood of man/alien. Imagine all the people playing for the team.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Some players may remember the old SEK2000 server from NS1. They run a hughe and complex system on the server that calculated everything you did.
F.e. if you were walking alone (ramboing) without a WP order from your commander you got a warning that you were walking too much alone, and if you ignored it you lost points. Welding, building, reacting to WP, really everything was counted in. You could gain "ranks" or lose so many points that you were banned for 1 day. And if the teams were not even in the ranks, the system stopped counting, so that thus round won't give points.
I can't find the old 10 pages long Server FAQ, I only know it was alot of work to maintain and tweek, but it was the most accurate scoring system I ever saw.
Comments
i agree scoring needs some tweaks, and it can never be really reliable, even if assists are added. it seems less random-influenced than K/D though.
but you are right: in the end, people (hopefully) measure you by remembering your name in certain sutations.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I dont see the point in questioning k/d - if you are not interested in it - dont look at it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
what people are questioning is the amount of significante the OP is giving this stat.
edit: as for me, i don't want people to only focus on this stat. it might have a negative impact on their priorities. i am also happy if i have nice stats, but i usually only look at them once, at the end of the game. the map is just more interesting. and this is not because i'm bad, i often end up on top of the list. usually with numerous deaths though :)
rather it simply teleports all marines to one location near the obs
alot of people missunderstand this<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It spawns marines who are next in the queue for each IP. So if you have 4 dead marines and 2 IPs, a beacon will spawn 2 marines quicker than they would have. In practice, I don't find the difference to be that great (i.e. you spawns marines only a couple of seconds faster).
At least i hear this statement way too often. (beacon only teleports marines back, which is false)
:B
Yes. When you need all your players to spawn in a hurry, you use a beacon."
I just wanna correct this, beacon doesnt spawn any marines,
rather it simply teleports all marines to one location near the obs
alot of people missunderstand this<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I meant to also add that scans provide vision where players aren't alive, and stuff like that. Maybe I'll update it later!
But yeah, it does also spawn marines who are queued on IPs, which is how it's a way of circumventing death, so to speak.
<!--quoteo(post=1915209:date=Mar 19 2012, 05:52 PM:name=NurEinMensch)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (NurEinMensch @ Mar 19 2012, 05:52 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1915209"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Who cares? Everyone already has a pretty good idea how well they do in a video game.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Not true. Tons of people delude themselves into thinking that they're carrying their team because they got a high score while being entirely uninvolved in combat, and they further delude themselves into thinking that their teammates who are fighting are useless frat boy halo players. This thread is proof enough of that!
That there's no agreed-upon measure for "how well someone is doing" should tell you<b> a lot</b> of people don't know how well players are doing. A lot of people have trouble judging how the 2 teams are doing (i.e. which side is winning), too, but that's another topic altogether..
<!--sizeo:5--><span style="font-size:18pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->Now here's something I wanted to elaborate on earlier:<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
When I say people should "strive for" a higher KDR, what do I mean? What if they're playing a pure welding/building/whatever role and they have no chance of actively trying to change their KDR?
It all hinges on how skill comes into the game. Skill comes into the game through the players. If every player except you was controlled by a rudimentary AI (and you learn to exploit that), the entire game becomes a series of repetitive tasks. In the current game, this much is true of things like 'building a resource tower' or 'powering a room.' What puts pressure on how you build/repair? Enemy players attacking you, friendly players calling for help, commanders giving orders and so on. Ultimately, most of the tasks in the game are simple and easy, until players become involved. Often, when players become involved it means <b>combat </b>- after all, the skill of "building something that someone else is building as well" isn't really variable.
Skill doesn't mean "aim" either. This is another thing that comes up a lot in game discussions. Skill includes how well you plan where to build, how well you talk to your teammates and a million other things. It's intimately tied to how the players are performing, how close their levels of understanding are and so on.
You can be the best builder/welder in the world, but if your combat, movement and map awareness are lacking you won't actually weld/build much more effectively than someone who is new and inexperienced. That is, if your opponents try to make it hard for you. You can play whatever role you like in this game, and if you pull it off it will be helpful to your team...but if you force yourself to never develop your combat skill (strive for a higher KDR), the rest of your gameplay will be given a hard limit too.
You can explore this by asking yourself some general questions: when I enter an area like crossroads to set up a resource tower, how much of the outside area do I scout before lowering my gun to build? How aware am I of the possibility of combat? Am I prepared to fight something effectively in order to accomplish my <b>main </b>goal of building the resource tower? How do I position myself while building? I play support roles too, and I usually end up having to get a few kills any time I 'support' something outside the safety of my main base.
K/d can be some kind of indicator if a team does well at a certain point but doesnt always indicate if the team will really win. (also even if marines get horribly slaughtered after fades are out, but if aliens are not able to finish them in a certain timewindow, at some point marines can spam a lot of sentrys and arcs to push out and leave areas only defended by structures. i hope you get what scenario i mean, such a game might take 1-2h but it happens regularly)
I would be a little bit more careful only looking at kd. (especially since there is no rfk anymore)
Oh yes, the delusions run deep.
The only people who think we're <b>only </b>looking at KDR are the high schoolers who need to argue with everything but don't know how.
Gimme something for all the healing and building I do.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Have you met Gorge Clooney?
Gimme something for all the healing and building I do.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
+1 to this, the gorge support role is getting zero love. Sure it is very helpful in game but you get next to no recognition.
That or tired of the ones who harp on and on mindlessly about how important K/D ratio is, when there's a much larger game and K/D is an insignificant enough part of it to be discounted as pointless. Dying is bad. Personal ego-strokes like favoring your K/D ratio over playing for the team is also bad. It's the difference between a winning team, and a losing team with one high K/D prick complaining about how his team sucked so bad, who didn't bother joining in on any team-fights, defending anything so reinforcements would have time to arrive, acting as bait and taking a death to strip two or three enemies from an attack party off down a side alley (allowing the attack to be repelled later) and so on, in favor of their own superiority-strokery when they did more to contribute to the loss of the game for their team than anything else, all to protect that all-important K/D.
Disregard it. It <i>isn't</i> important, and if more people would stop ****ing off over it like it mattered, we'd have fewer Halo kiddies blaming their team for a loss instead of themselves, and better games overall.
Sounds to me like you feel others aren't recognizing your achievements enough.
The easiest way to picture this is if the marine team is getting a high KDR, then aliens are more likely to get egg-locked and unable to defend/attack/do anything but sit helplessly in the spawn queue. The only way to fix this is to reduce the respawn penalty such that dying a lot is not significant.
And while it could be true that this high k/d player is not joining the teamfights, it could as well be true that he disagrees on the current tactic and even tho he spams the mic to get ppl assisting him with his plan, nobody cares/listens and keep fights over low priority stuff, he then gets lots of kills attacking weakpoints(his plan) alone tho because he doesnt get any support from other players in the team he often lacks the power to finish it/ exploiting the weakness to end the game.
Then suddenly there are fades, or bad tech choices like not getting armor upgrades and your team loses - and the guy is frustrated because he was at the edge of winning if ppl would have listened.
:P
What i think you're effectively saying is your K:D matters in respect to the success of the goal you're trying to accomplish. If you go to take crossroads, yeah you can build that tower nicely with holding that E button, hu-rah, but there is more of an emphasis on situational awareness, timing, and the ability to hold that position should confrontation arise from the oppositions goal of limiting your teams ability take strategic positions on the map. Certainly anyone can see the point there of having someone in position with the ability to accomplish those goals efficiently, IE, higher K:D. If you have the ability to achieve a higher K:D, you'll have a higher success rate of whatever role you're playing.
The emphasis of my point is that the ratio itself is meaningless without context. Putting a meaning to K:D itself without context minimalizes roles where having a higher K:D doesn't matter, I.E: the gorge healing the fades destroying the other team or the skulk who focused down an obs limiting the other teams situational awareness in a given area allowing your team to take control of an area or taking out a res tower. Though these actions alone don't award kills (unless you're a combat gorge...go go combat gorgys!), they certainly provide great benefit for the team.
What's more important than your K:D is what you did in between your deaths that make or break you as a good/great player. Certainly building the marine base then running to datacore, dying 10 times, and being 0-10 holds no value. You can definitively say that person is worthless, but there are actions in the game that add value to an individual, but it's not reflected in their ratio. When you're playing competitively and you eliminate skill factor by the nature of your competition being equally skilled, you're limited by your ability to work as a team and those non K:D adding activities are just as important as the one that do add to the ratio.
internetexplorer brings to mind the countless people I've encountered in Quake CTF, sitting in base with a railgun harvesting frags IN AN 8-0 GAME, convincing themselves over and over "no, no, I have a positive KD ratio, I am being useful to the team, yes, I'm not being a total d*ck, no, I'm defending the base..."
Go back to death match please. Your lack of sportsmanship might not ruin NS games, but your attitude is foul.
Disclaimer: Might be that I'm making an overkill, and the OP really had good intentions. But I really, REALLY doubt it.
EDIT: Oh, just for the record: my KD ratio is positive.
Higher score = big help.
Most of the times i see a player with maybe 5-12 stats but then his score is just the same as the 15-2.
Its great to mix the teams with "Aimers" ( like my self ) and "teamPlayers".
But sometimes ( like my self ) i play "Defending the base+nearest extractos". And ofc i end up with HIGH K/D then.
Ps. Give us assists on the scoreBoard!
Now people are saying that KDR isn't important, but that people should be awarded more score points for contributing, or their kill assists should be counted. When you put a value to certain contributions, people will strive to fulfil only those few criteria. The greatest contributions that can be made cannot be quantified, and you will not be directly recognised for them. That is the game of natural-selection.
People have become too influenced by the COD genre of games, where the "best player" of a round gets a massive fanfare and is heralded as saviour of the universe. Everyone wants to be known as good so they spend all their time accomplishing the goals that will get them the best score. So much so that people don't even realise they are subconsciously programmed to do it, like some people here exclaiming that KDR doesn't matter at all .... but that theirs is always positive. WHO CARES?
The scoreboard is good for only two things; checking your ping and checking how many of your team-mates are dead.
Couldn't agree more with this sentiment. And I'm one of the people who thinks that kill/death counts should be stuck from the scoreboard and replaced with a more fine-grained method of scoring.
I still think weighted scoring would be nice, though. With assists, greater score for killing enemies who are engaging your allies or buildings, and score weighting when you're sticking close to other players, defending them.
It's a nightmarish thing to program, and that's probably why we'll never see such a pervasive score tracking system. Ultimately you're right; we should all stop obsessing over score entirely and just play the game the way it should be played, and for our own enjoyment.
Sorry, but it's a pointless a posteriori indicator of performance that belongs only in simple TDM games or public team balancing mods.
To elaborate a little bit, if the hypothetical player has a negative K:D ratio they see it and think "oh I'm a bad player". This only acts to reinforce what they already knew: that they didn't triumph in the majority of their encounters and have lost all the upsides that come with that.
Obviously it isn't completely useless because you can tell if you're improving as a player but I would never recommend anyone to make in-game decisions based on their ratio of kills to deaths.
It's good that you effortposted about it but K:D is a red herring. The ideas presented by your post provide a good overview team FPS game's basic concepts but it's all wrapped in the Kill/Death Ratio talk which is no more use than saying "Get better at the game to get better!"
Isn't the whole points-system useless though?
Imagine there's no score, I wonder if you can. No number to live or die for, a brotherhood of man/alien. Imagine all the people playing for the team.
Imagine there's no score, I wonder if you can. No number to live or die for, a brotherhood of man/alien. Imagine all the people playing for the team.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Some players may remember the old SEK2000 server from NS1. They run a hughe and complex system on the server that calculated everything you did.
F.e. if you were walking alone (ramboing) without a WP order from your commander you got a warning that you were walking too much alone, and if you ignored it you lost points.
Welding, building, reacting to WP, really everything was counted in.
You could gain "ranks" or lose so many points that you were banned for 1 day.
And if the teams were not even in the ranks, the system stopped counting, so that thus round won't give points.
I can't find the old 10 pages long Server FAQ, I only know it was alot of work to maintain and tweek, but it was the most accurate scoring system I ever saw.