[Guide] In Defense of Statistics

We like playing with people who aren't bad at games because we're almost always fighting higher numbers? We've never had more than 20-30 people on at once in either game. It's not an issue of 'command structure'.

Edit: Also I love that this Alpha guy is just liking every post against stats after he made a pretty silly comparison to Salary and got shot down.

Yes, I read your entire post. Even looking at everyone's stats, one does not get a true account for anything outside of facilities captured/defended. All others are suject to forces that inflate/deflate perceived values. One can get a general idea of a person's performance, but not actual player skill.

I'm not a fantastic player. I'm not horrible. I could have a lot higher stats if I'd :
1. Played more vehicleside
2. Not been the point man
3. Not had kids for less AFK time

The only meaningful thing anyone can take from my stats is that I don't play medic or MAX and rarely use a vehicle.

You can get into specifics for everyone, but there are really just three main tiers. Bad, Average, and Good. It's a rare case for someone to inflate or deflate every relevant stat to a level that majorly distorts it. If someone has a really high K/D, I'm going to look at how many vehicle kills they have compared to infantry kills. Your accuracy, for instance, is pretty high for someone with your K/D and SPM, neither of which are bad, as light assault. This points to those two stats being artificially lower than they could be.

A guide? How so? anyway...

Here's my opinion on these stats:

K/D:
This simply isn't a game where you can take KD all to seriously. You can look at other stats to put it into context, but in the end you'll end up with an extremely skewed view of someone's "usefullness". You can try to take out a sundy with a suicide run and get no kills but be very useful to your team or you can land on it and kill some of the people who spawn until you run out of ammo to get a higher KD. You also have vehicle drivers (libs, gals, harassers, sundys) that will get no kills (well, harassers will get a lot of kills but that's another story =P ) or classes like engis and medics that will find themselves with their medic/repair tool out when getting attacked.
You'll also find yourself in a lot of unfair fights, for example if you're flying and dogfighting a reaver, only to get instakilled by two more reavers that just appear. Or if you're desperately fighting a large zerg trying to delay a capture.

And you have people who had FPS problems for a good amount of time (aka me =P) or still do.
As for revives, we'll I sure as hell won't wait for a medic just to boost my KD ratio if there's something better to do.

SPM:
Boosts, downtime in warpgates while chillin', doing something like protecting a sundy... all valid but reduce your score per hour.

KPM:
Chillin' at warpgate, doing stuff that doesn't get you kills, fighting when it's not primetime...

Accuracy:
Well, someone who uses an MCG and someone who uses a TMG certainly won't have the same accuracy stat. It's wildly affected by the actual weapon, since a lot of TR weapons trade accuracy for ROF and NC do the opposite. Also, suppressive fire.

Time played:
Pretty irrelevant, just tells you how much time the person played.

Facilities capped/defended:
Actually one of the more useful stats in determining someone's playstyle. A biolab camper will have more defenses, and a dedicated attacker will have more captures.

Class played:
Same as facilities capped/defended, shows your playstyle.


Overall, if I'm gonna really see if someone's a good player, I'll look at:
-weapons used and the amount of kills they have with them
-killboard (but that can be very inaccurate, for example how my current one shows what I did when there were only 4 guys from the outfit online and we were farming =P)
-class played, facilities captured, vehicles etc.

But the best way would be to actually play with them or against them; everything else is just speculation.

In a game with as many layers of activity as this, success and victory are measured in degrees by factors which aren't easy to mathematically track. Because of that, the measure, and even sum of the various stats that can be collected often fail to tell how well a battle went.... especially in relation to other battles that are impacted by it. An empire could spend an hour defending a base, then lose it, but still come out ahead elsewhere due to the distraction it caused.

Maybe at minimum, a bullet map + timeline can give you an idea of battle flow. But then again, any person can measure success differently based on what goals they set. Like camping the Indar Canyon gate with a platoon of AA MAXs.... not very influential on the front, but the rage it induces is almost priceless.

Player stats don't tell you how a battle went at all. They tell you how that player functions across it's whole lifetime of battles. I'm not sure I see where you're going with this.

Why, I would never do such a thing (joke).

My accuracy is pretty terrible for my infantry weapons. Polaris is the most recent weapon that I've used on my heavy, and its accuracy is at 26%. I have no idea why my other LMGs are so low. I can only guess is because I used to spend a LOT of time screwing around and wasting shots or shooting at things in the WG. I can also guess that I've just gotten better at shooting. As for maxes, my basic strategy is to just never stop firing; awful accuracy but I like to keep people's heads down instead of charging at me.

Anyway, as for the arguments about stats...The great thing about Planetside is that you can make your outfit the way you want. DT looks at stats and looks for players accordingly. Some outfits let anyone in. Some people play lone wolf. My outfit is a very small outfit that just plays for fun. I do think it's funny that so many people on the forums seem to have this odd idea that, "You have a high K/D and good stats. You must be a bad player because you don't help your faction." Ugh, silly.

Players that make this argument have nothing else than the ambiguous idea of 'helping their faction' to keep their egos going and don't like that other people can 'help their faction' more efficiently.

Anyway, the post wasn't really about 'how to recruit' (although I think INVITE ANYONE AND EVERYONE NO MATTER WHAT makes for a poor outfit)... it was more about how to look at stats in a meaningful way, rather than tossing them aside as useless numbers.

This post is hilarious. Your ignorance is delightful. Some people play games the way they do every other thing in their lives; they win. I don't get much of a chance to game due to my Victoria's Secret model girlfriend being perpetually horny and my Ferrari needing to be driven as much as my Lamborghini but I can assure you that, given your attitude - even if I could play as much as BCP - you're the last kind of person I'd ever choose to game with.

All I want to say about this topic is:

- If you are looking at someone's stats to decide if he/she is a good player for your Outfit, then all that time browsing stats is wasted playtime. Every outfit I have looked at applying to (prior to joining the one I'm in) had a trial period, where "how good" a person is at playing is evaluated before either the applicant or the Outfit decide if the fit is good.

That being said, evaluation of stats is usually a forum warrior thing that has nothing to do with playing the game itself. It is just a thing for people to slam others or to **** up their own egos.

I got a kick out of it as well. It's almost as if some people find enjoyment in different things. If someone wants to screw about and giggle across the battlefield, more power to em. But some people want an uphill battle and love the competition. #MLG

There is a lot of wisdom contained in this post. In fact I'm concerned that by quoting it I might break the forums but what the heck, it's hardly the Library of Alexandria!

We used to get the same flawed logic thrown at us all the time - "you get lots of kills, while I repair generators, therefore I'm more useful". Of course bad players can't know they're bad players, so it's impossible to explain this to them but we'd repair generators too. And secure empty bases and run ANTs and do all of the support things they did - usually faster and with greater efficiency. Then, we'd attack somewhere and draw 4 times our number in enemy; thereby netting plenty of kills while we frustrated our enemy for several hours as the rest of our Empire went round and captures tons of land. And at the end of that period (which was what we did for most nights we played PS1) we'd invariably get some idiot who had no idea what he was talking about say "Where were DT while we were capturing all this land?"

The moral of the story is efficient players & Outfits are capable of being better at every facet of the game. If you dispute that, you're not an efficient player and have no idea what I'm talking about.

I disagree. I am a well below average player and my stats show it compared to good players like Murda, Mirror, Doc, Sock. My fav place to look is actual weapon stats for accuracy and kills per min. Of course I review all the stats to look for anomalies, but in general I feel the weapon stats are the hardest to inflate without getting caught (aimbot & stat padders).

I agree (almost) entirely. We also have a trial period - in fact we have since the inception of the Outfit 9 years ago - and evaluate applicants during that process. However in PS2 we are now availed of all sorts of statistical information which, as Tristen said, can be used to gain an insight into the suitability of an individual to our playstyle (fast, resecures, usually outnumbered). Am I able to look at someone's stats and say they're a bad player? Of course not and honestly, what kind of person would I be if I did*. But I can look at your stats and notice you've got 5% infantry accuracy, a .5 K/D and you've spent 70% of your time as an Infil and say you're probably not the kind of player who'd thrive & enjoy my Outfit. The selective/elitist Outfits aren't necessarily bad guys - some simply recognise that not all gamers value the same things.


*I'd be as bad as the people who look at our stats and say we don't help our Empire!

so really the guys who stand around waiting on resources and timers , are the most correct people on the forums ? **** i havent stood in the warpgate enough i guess, i only got 11 days in game

Hey Dart did you finally get a PC worthy of of some **** ?

These guys are jsut a bunch of trolls and wannabe MLG-allstars. I find it hars to believe that they have any sort of strict screening process for recruiting when I found this on youtube...

My point is, if you have the time to be browsing stats, it is wasted playtime. You can evaluate someone much faster and much more reliably by playing the game with them.

Most people browse and compare stats to belittle others, or to stroke their own egos. And that is why stats are bad.

Who's this? I've had various gaming rigs since about 2006...

You can evaluate someone in 2 minutes?