I beg you to remove KD so we can see what the game is like when everyone plays it

It is amusing to see how many people downplay the psychological effect of numbers on human behavior.

Tribe's Ascend was an excellent test to see just how big a role KDR played. Or early WoW, how simply calling something "Unrested" instead of "Normal" could cause a small riot in the community.

K/D is for scrubs, if people realize how terrible most players are they wouldn't hide behind rocks and spawn rooms, i can't count how many times i've run across open terrain solo with a shotgun as a God damned heavy assault, and making it to whatever cover all the idiots shooting at me are using then come around the other side of it and killing a bunch of them. Its no different inside the bases, i charge out of the spawn room and almost always get 2-3 kills unless we're outnumbered by more than 5-1.

Ignored K/D and you will get far more certs, i am regularly at the top of leaderboards up there with the support classes and maxes for experience, in local fights, and i don't give a damn about K/D.

Remove it.

Keep KD, but make it something only the person can see. This way they can only wag their epeen privately.

I'm fine with it being removed, but we need other more meaningful stats to replace it, especially for support. K/D is relatively useless in PS2, but if I'm not playing support it's the only thing I have to go on besides SPM to determine how well I'm playing, and what kind of impact I have on the enemy. And the fact that SPM is affected by boosts/bonus xp that makes it an equally useless statistic.

The meaningful stat is Experience, if you're getting 10k exp an hour you're doing horribly, if you're getting 30K+ you're doing pretty good mang, adjust for boosts obviously, but really who cares.

Problem is that there's no stat that can really represent a player's worth.


KDR: Doesn't work because we have MAXes, vehicles, infantry and tanks in the same game, not to mention support roles.
Kills per minute: Doesn't do support/logistic players justice. Is also bad for teamplay because kills aren't shared.
Score Per Minute: Can be affected by boosts. Does not account for time spent in warpgate/idle/AFK.

FYI: you can play the objective and not have a terrible KDR. KD doesn't impact the game, people hate dying regardless of the stat being tracked. People that "don't care" about KDR don't petition for its removal like its the worst thing to happen to the game, that's the opposite of not caring.

Any stat is meaningless by itself. Forunately we have the tools to look at them all collectively, and that does a pretty good job of telling us not only how someone plays, but how well they play that way as well.

I have a rubbish K/D ratio but it is slowly improving. Correction, very slowly improving. So I would hate to see it go, its a decent enough progress indicator.

The problem is that it's almost pointless to try to find the better players by looking at statistics, even all of them, because they'll leave us with an incomplete picture, and they can be modified by too many variables.

Planetside 2 is a huge and massive world, pretty much the only way to get a proper impression of a player's actual skill is by observing said player directly when it is in action.

No doubt actual performance trumps any stat, but speaking from the experience of an outfit that gets a large number of applicants, we have to find a way to trim the heard a bit. And that said, we've found that nine times out of ten, the players that perform to the level we expect have the stats to back it as well.

Actually they're right, it's very hard to get a good K/D ratio while really playing the objectives. Sometimes when DA does point holds against 10x our numbers I actually go down to 4 or 5 k/d...

<- Invalid Target/Synna Stonecove

I just can't do unholy wars, played through the beta but was one of those that rage quit when they first nerfed transfers, tried it for a month here and there since then but just can't get myself to play it

Theres actually a pretty surprising amount of df1 people around here thats pretty active though.

We need more stats not fewer. Plenty of people enjoy using Kd (for whatever reason) - and that's fine. This is a game, and people enjoy it in many different ways.

If you personally don't want to look at the stats, then don't. But don't try to take away things that people already enjoy using when they are such simple things that don't hurt anybody at all.

I really don't understand why this is an issue, because it's not really a Problem, as much as it is a Symptom of a larger problem.

I don't really give a rosey scented **** about stats, they are these things that happen somewhere off to the side while I play. They just aren't that hard to ignore. If someone wants to see how they are doing, and measure it via all that mess, it really isn't my place to tell them that they shouldn't, because... well... I'm not here to be the fun police. If you find stat tracking fun, well then shine on you crazy diamond. If you despise stat tracking with every fiber of your being... get some perspective here:

I'm pretty sure the game's problems are things like: A lack of meaningful objectives to accomplish, and a lack of tools to disrupt the enemy... not: Easily trackable kill and death numbers. If someone is sitting there, obsessively tracking their K/Dr or SPM, it says to me that they just don't have enough to do otherwise to keep them occupied. The game right now has reached the stage 1 it wanted to get to, it wanted to be Battlefield: Auraxis, and because of that all there is to really do is farm certs and watch your KDR. If Stat Tracking has become the big thing that people have latched onto, to measure their success when it should be about territory acquisition or whatnot... this doesn't mean you take away stat tracking. It means that the things that they -Should- be focusing on, are meaningless to them, and thus either underdeveloped or too shallow to warrant them paying attention to it. The way to fix this is to get things like: Resource Revamp, Continental Lattice, Outfit advancement, etc. up and running so the people who focus on stats because there is nothing else... can focus on a more interesting Something Else.

You usually can't pick much more than that the player is average from stats though. Even a 20kdr is pretty easy if you tweak your playstyle.

Outfits generally use the trial period to evaluate a player's actual performance.

Pretty much then only real thing you can deduce from stats is whether or not a player has a working mouse alongside a functional W button. The rest is just big assumptions and loose theories.

But I think I should also highlight my standpoint, as I judge stats first not for what they represent, but what gameplay they promote, because petty numbers and meaningless titles can have a huge psychological impact on the players.
Just like Achievements make RPG players jiss their pants, battlefield stats can do the same to shooter players(and the two groups are not necessarily exclusive either).

Regardless of whether *you* didn't like Brink or not, people weren't scared of dying and people attempted to complete the objective despite having a period of time during death where they couldn't do anything. I'm unaware of any FPS where death didn't take you out of the game for at least a short period of time.

Ultimately it's a moot point, can't see K/D being removed. It did seem to help foster teamwork in a game that relied on it. I would wager that if there were a global stats site for Brink prominently displaying your K/D, it would have been a completely different experience.

INVALID! WHERES MY MOTHER ******* 20k!!!??????

<-KingHussien

Oh sweet. What server you on ? Waterson here.

It's hardly assumptions and loose theories. Given the amount of info we can pull from the API, I'm more than confident I can judge the quality of just about any player, including their play styles and how well they do them, off of their stats page. I've said it countless times in the countless "omg KDR" threads on these forums, but stats are only as important as you make them. If you don't care, then that's that. But it doesn't mean they don't mean anything and can't be useful.

Regarding the psychological impact, I don't think it's as big as most people make it out to be. PS1 had a session tracking KDR bar implemented after release. There was spawn camping and farming and people playing to avoid dying from day one. A tangible metric being introduced didn't change anything.