Kill the K/D Statistic. It's killing Planetside. Seriously. It's time to Reevaluate The Effect.

+1
Yep, remove it.

excellent point. i think buzz is ego-tripping coz his other post got mentioned in pcgamer website.

more needs to be done than minor changes like that. i think buzz is scared to create radical changes, like massive game changing ones, to help regain all the ppl who stopped caring about ps2, like i almost have.

I dont think K/D is even remotely as big issue as you think, as long as the issue is backed with cert-farming.

Dying less = better cert/minute

I won't take risks if I'm getting a streak bonus which means more XP, which means more stuff for me to buy.

Nothing will change even if they removed the K/D stat, they can remove it if they want though. I don't care.

Nobody goes for the objectives because they don't give much XP, and Teamwork overall atm gives you much less certs than farming with zerg.

I fear SOE will just do this and be done with it, then we whine because the issue were the certs all along...

Kills to death ratio, is the only viable measurement of effectiveness a death dealing class can be measured by. Anyone can stand on a point, but how well is the damaging classes doing?

Stupid comment. Score accounts for more than your kills.

And for a heavy, how are you going to raise your score?

Stupid comment is the one you made. Several classes can only do damage, meaning kills are the only way to add points to the "score".

By several you mean the MAX and HA, right?

I'm pretty sure that even without visible KDR will stat obsessed players still play the same. I'd rather see them add MORE stat tracking, especially for support roles and objectives.

There is so much wrong with your Comment, that i dont think you can even understand the whole Issue.
Aside from that Point.
Which K/D Ratio shows more Effectiveness?
10/1, killing 10 average Players standing near their Warpgate while AFK.
1/1, killing a really good Player, wreaking Havoc while your Team tries to defend a Base.
Forget about K/D. It has nothing to do with Effectiveness.

So? You remove KDR and track the right stats. Namely OBJECTIVE BASED ONES.

KDR was in Planetside 1 and was fine.
It's in Planetisde 2 and is fine.

The problems are elsewhere Buzz. Just because you want to know how you are doing, doesnt meant that everyone is just maxxing kill death ratio - they are trying to maximise xp/cert gain anyway and not k/d ratio.

Focus on something that will make a difference. Hide the Kill Death Ratio and people will still spawn camp a spawn room. People will still just zerg in libs mags and vehicles.

It is the gameplay not the game mechanics that are broken.

When you pick a fight - pick the right thing to fight for.

And Infiltrator, and Light Assault.

Removing death stats and KDR has been done in other shooters, its not going to change how people play the game.

Infiltrator can hack and use motion sensors. I'd even argue that the MAX is more of a vehicle than a class since it has a timer and costs resources so in reality we have two true classes which benefit solely from kills and that is the LA and HA.

Just add better stat tracking. Instead of just kills and deaths, add how much you repaired or healed/revived someone, how many times you've killed someone repairing or healing, how many people you spotted for your team to kill, etc. Even those don't account for all the ways you can help your team.

Actually PS1 didn't track KDR until over a year after it's release. A year after it's release the game also started to go way down hill.

It also never tracked death on the leader-board. Ever.

(I posted this back in tech test, going to re-post it since it's still relevant)

Stats Promoted by the game prime player behavior

The study of priming teaches us that passive stimuli can shape our behavior. Things like which stats appear on your character sheet will prime players to improve them, even subconsciously. For example, if you constantly reinforce that "captures" are important in the game, and put capture stats front-and center on the stats and have the default leader-board show captures then you will see a change in player behavior as they are subconsciously primed to play for captures.

(More on priming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29)

The good side of this is that the developers can significantly and subtly influence the behavior of players by carefully choosing the stats which are promoted. The bad side of this is that if they don't carefully choose them with the understanding that their choices will affect player behavior then they can introduce ruinous game-play.

K/D is Ruinous

The primary motivation for this post is to highlight K/D, which is a particularly ruinous stat which is currently being promoted by PlanetSide 2. The gaming world has a terrible culture precedent where the barometer of player skill is by default kills-per-death. Try this trick at home - play a session of PS2 or just ask another player how well he did. The vast majority of the time players will read their K/D stat. They will rarely read their score, and almost never cite how many bases they captured/defended. Years of early session shooters have erroneously trained us that the K/D stat is important. Some people think it needs to be present. It does not, and the game will be better off without it.

The danger K/D poses for PlanetSide 2 is that it discourages risk-taking which leads to derisive game-play. Taking risks increases your chances of incrementing the death stat, which sends the K/D in the wrong direction. Taking objectives, helping other players, being the first man to assault a defended position - these are all behaviors that are discouraged by the promotion of K/D. This is one reason many players will resort to being relatively useless and sit back and snipe so they can preserve their stats rather than assault a well-defended position. If it's a good farm they will have no interest at all in advancing objectives, preferring instead to sit back and rack up stats.

If the "death" stat were not shown on a score-board or leader-board then you would see significantly more teamwork and objective-based play in PlanetSide 2. It is as simple as this - when there is no perceived penalty for taking risks you will see more risk taking. Risk taking is good in games and especially so in a teamwork environment to keep the game from stagnating. The only thing K/D teaches players is that they should avoid risks. It is a selfish stat which when promoted leads to poor game-play and derisive player behavior.

Developers have a huge opportunity

The developers of PlanetSide 2 have an opportunity to leverage the priming to influence the game by promoting stats that encourage the behaviors they want to see in game. But choosing any simple stats is meaningless and squanders this opportunity. The best stat for developers to promote is score because it is abstract, defined by the developers, and they can directly control what influences it. Simple stats like kills, captures, and K/D cannot be influenced; they are crisply defined constructs. Score is malleable. For example, if the devs which to encourage more captures, they can increase the score value of a capture. If they want to encourage more kill streaks, then they can increase the kill streak score bonus. If they want to encourage more ammo dropping by engineers they can add score for kill assists from people who were recently given ammo, and/or the score value when ammo is received.

Score is a universal stat that is defined by the developers and can therefore be controlled by the developers. It is a tremendous opportunity not only to create a universal calibration of how effective a PlanetSide 2 player is, but it also allows the developers to change the impact each action has on it. Playing with medics and utilizing squad spawn and teamwork would be the best way to maximize score.

The possibilities are rich here for PlanetSide 2 to influence what players perceive as important and aggregate many similar types of game-play together.

Recommendation

Deaths as a stat need to be gutted from the game. It is a negative thing that discourages risk taking; just get rid of it. With it goes K/D, and in its place a universal developer-controlled stat can exist.

Please understand the power that stats have on player behavior. It isn't simply information; it influences the way the game is played. Don't blindly follow tradition and squander an opportunity to set the tone and influence player behavior in PlanetSide 2.

Omg...

(Whoah, glitch in the Matrix..?)

I wouldn't mind that at all, I'm just saying getting rid of KDR still wouldn't really fix anything. KDR wh*res would still play like they usually do so what's the point?
You can't control players by simply choosing what stats to show them. Sure, you can encourage a certain behaviour but still it's all down to how rewarding and satisfying a task is to get players to do it. E.g. hunting kills at an overrun base is much more fun and rewarding than standing at a cap point, basically doing nothing 'til it flips.

If they hide K and D.. I would be personally fine with it, but so long as it is there, I have to look at it and get mine up atleast in inf fights.. vehicle kills, don\t care about those at all as their so easy to get by patience and good positioning.

I like this a lot. There's nothing wrong with tracking KDR, but since there are other, more important stats, we should track those as well.

For one, I am proud of the fact that despite hearing "no one defends" I have 3 times as many "facilities defended" than I do "facilities captured." That is a statistic that matters to me more than KDR, though I do understand what OP is saying because I check my KDR more than I should.

What we should be doing is tracking more stats, and giving people more things to hang their hat on. Maybe someone can be proud that they're near the top for most teammates re-supplied, or most revives, or most troops transported in galaxy...