Make player points for destruction of structures more fairer
DarkflameQ
Join Date: 2013-02-28 Member: 183451Members
Currently the reward points for structure kills appear to be awarded to the person who gets the last bit of damage in and not to the person / people who's done the most amount of damage.
For example, i can run in, pop half a clip of a machine gun into a alien resource unit that 2 of my teams mates have been grueling away at and steal the the whole 15 points.
This also happens with the cysts and pretty much everything that isn't killing the enemy related (which has recently been addressed with the addition of 'assist kills').
I think the current structure kill reward system is pretty unfair at the moment and i do feel guilty about it when it happens, maybe i've got it wrong, but the way points are rewarded for killing structures seems completely unbalanced.
The way i would envision it would be if 3 people are attacking a structure such as a resource unit and do similar damage, they get the 15 points divided 3 ways.
If dividing equally is a problem, at the very least the person with the most amount of damage should get awarded the points, not the last person that comes in and does the last bit of damage whilst another member of their team is reloading or using a weapon that does far less damage.
Comments
A better solution would be, instead of getting points for killing (players or structures), people get points for damage done. Works great in other games.
This would make point automatically fairer, for example, you'd get more points for killing a carapace skulk (more HP overall, so you did more damage) than a normal skulk without carapace.
This last part would have to be added into the game by the developers.
True to a certain degree, but then there are other people who ARE points hoarding and this will have an adverse effect on them.
"Why stop and take out that extractor? I'm not going to get 15 points for it any more."
If I could have thrown my keyboard through my monitor into his face, I would have
I'm fine with assists (but no + points) so say a gorge healing will get an assist, but it won't be mentioned anywhere but the scoreboard
K/D/A seems like useful info you'd want to see during a match, points do nothing besides promote individuality (if the player is really that stupid)
Points without time played is pretty pointless in my opinion though, so if they don't plan on ever including the 'time played' stats, they might as well remove points entirely.
That said i'm not against points, i just feel like they should be rebalanced. Such as getting points for healing allies as a gorge or for building gorge tunnels etc. Generally speaking everytime to follow a commander's in-game instructions getting points would be nice too.
Let's take RT killing for example in this situation:
Player A has killed 3 RTs when the aliens have 8. He is awarded 15 points for killing those RTs by himself (no idea how many points an RT is, just an example).
Player B has killed the last alien RT and has effectively res locked the alien team. He is awarded 5 points for killing an RT by himself.
Who did more damage? Obviously Player A by raw numbers. However, obviously Player B by context. You could argue that other people had to kill the other extractors up until Player B res locked them, but wouldn't that last RT also be the most heavily defended? Shouldn't that be worth more points to show the true value of that kill? If aliens have 8 RTs, you've got more problems than just RTs and aliens could care less about them. I'd gladly trade 3 RTs for your base. How can you ever factor in such context?
I understand that the points system is there to display how much contribution you're adding to the team's efforts, but the only true way to see who contributed more is based on what team won, hence the argument for removing points all together. I don't mind points being in the game, but I don't think they should be your focus (certainly your teammates hope they aren't, because they want a damned victory). If someone wants to point stack, let em! You know whats important and if you win doing that, that's the best kind of positive feedback you can get. I find that points are more of a "Oh hey, thats nice" after the victory has been achieved.
I don't think Payton Manning was more concerned about his stats than he was about winning a Super Bowl.
However, I'm totally fine with someone making a mod to rework the points system. I just don't think its important enough to focus on nor is it really interesting.
tl;dr If you need a points system to justify or explain your contribution to a team's efforts, you don't understand what's really important for a victory. Sometimes a zero points job is the most important one. Changing the points system should belong to a community modder and not take focus from UWE.
While what you say is true, generally, the person with the higher points is better than the person with lower points.
They need a system that might include factoring in how much damage you do to a structure. Say, 200 = 1 point.
I've been killing alien structures all the time, just running straight behind enemy lines and choppin dem harvesters and upgrades, wasn't even trying to shoot lifeforms. Ended up #1 by score with 3:20 K/D. And comm said "ZOMG NOB WE LOST BECAUSE YOU CAN'T SHOOT LOOK AT YOUR SCORE".
Points for just damage is not fair actually, it should be points for damage to killed structure. Because otherwise you can find lone crag and farm points whole round.
1. "I dont give a s**t about score"
2. " Scoresystem isnt fair/efficient/whatever"
= Scoresystem have to be changed and everyone is happy :>.
I dont get why UWE implement such a strongly luck-based system. Bad design @ this point.
Gorges are able to leading the score. I saw that several times and achieves that myself. And the meaning of a scoresystem is fun/self-assessment/motivation for a lot of peoples. To say they have to remove this...well...would not be a smart move by UWE .
If someone is such a bad player that they let score determine how they play, taking away score or changing the way score works won't make them any better.
(Note that I don't care much about points, but *if* they are there, they should be awarded properly. People pay too much attention to K/D already, so it's good to have a counterweight that rewards structure damage, healing etc.)
As @xen32 has pointed out, awarding points for raw damage dealt is not a good idea. What I would suggest is only awarding points on a kill, but splitting them in proportion to the damage dealt. The same would work for marine building: if I help my teammate by building the last 25% of a structure he started, I get awarded 25% of the total points, and he gets 75% (even if he's already dead). Simple and fair.
(Implementation note: To calculate the correct proportions when entities heal during combat, the game can simply keep track of damage dealt between each pair of entities. When an entity returns to full health, reset all damage counters that target it. As each player can only damage a few targets at once, the counter lists shouldn't get too large.)
Many thanks!