This is a repost from Steam forums where I got some reasonable feedback and most seemed to like the concept. Just curious what people here have to say.
Introduction
The main arguments I see against scoreboards are that they encourage “toxic” game play, allow for name and shaming, and don’t encourage team play.
Now while these can be true at times I believe a well implemented score tracking system can actually do the opposite, and the lack of any sort of score tracking can significantly impact a player bases skill. Having zero feedback on how well you preform makes it difficult to improve as a player, and it is pretty easy to see that a large amount of “toxicity” stems from a lack of skill and understanding; nothing causes more anger then loosing.
“If you win you did well, if you lost you did badly” isn’t a very constructive form of feedback, imagine if you went to school and instead of being graded on individual tests, you instead had to wait until the end of the year to find out if your entire class failed or if your entire class passed, with no middle ground. Needless to say this would be a system that would make learning anything very difficult.
So what would? I think a system that constructively gives you feed back and encourages you to play well, and ideally with your team. like a good teacher who gives their students guidance on how to improve and learn better.
Yes I know the scoreboard mod exists however I think we could do a lot better with a improved and constructive system built into the game
How could we limit the negative elements of a scoreboard?
Problem:
Firstly having personal statistics is pretty important as a basic form of feedback, seeing just your own statistics at the end of the game without any “green circles” would remove a lot of the negative elements, however without context just your own stats are near useless when determining how well you preformed in a given game.
Solution:
One way to solve this is to have a team total to compare one’s stats against. This way you could still see how much you are contributing to the team, however you wouldn’t have the same psychological effects of seeing other people to “compete” against. Things such as “green circle chasing” would be effectively removed as, as long as you aren’t doing over half the team’s worth of anything you wouldn’t have any real way to tell if you are better then any one person on the team.
How could we encourage team play focused game play
Problem
Some people get distracted by chasing stats to the point they may neglect team play, even with the above
Solution
The first and simplest solution to this is to only display stats at the end of the game. However this doesn’t encourage team play, this only negates some of that distraction. We can do better.
We could actually use a scoreboard to encourage team play by giving bonuses in certain team focused fields. These could be displayed to everyone at the end of a game and then could be voted on by the other players for an additional reward similar to the commendation system in Overwatch. Giving a small bonus for casting a vote might be required to encourage players to engage with the system.
This would also allow for more penances to be added that reward team play as many of the current penances are very anti team play. Such as “receive X commendation for Y” “help boost friendly damage by X” and etc. Many experienced players would see little need to engage with the system since they will already have more resources then they know what to do with. Tying this new system into the penance system would make it possible to lock cosmetics, titles, frames and emotes behind it. Titles like “Team Player”, “Savior”, “Blessed”, “Virtuous”, etc. Might be desirable if they are sufficiently difficult to get, and would serve as a good way for people who are proud of being team focused to show that off. Ideally this would help to steer the general culture of the game towards team play as well, also offers some more self expression then just equipping the most impressive title you have.
Some examples of stats you could track to then display at the end of the game to the whole team:
- Most Revives (revive “assists” would also be nice where players near a reviving player also get some bonus, such as a revive assist counting as 0.5 revives)
- Most Rescues (nets, dog pounces, mutant grabs, maybe also if a sniper is aiming at a different team member and you kill them)
- Enemies staggered
- Coherency efficiency
- Toughness generated
- Enemies Marked First (It will have to be only for specialists and/or “high priority” targets such as reapers, to avoid spam pinging, and likely either a cooldown or only once per group of specialist spawns for missions where numerous of the same specialists spawn at the same time)
- Attacks/Damage blocked (not just blocking melee attacks but also things such as psyker bubble and ogryn shield)
- Resources shared (this would require a small rework to the current pickup system, but say you could “store” ammo packs and then gift them to other players like you can give players stims. This means that mobile/stealth classes who can run forward can also pick up resources and then have a incentive to return to the team to share them. Limiting this to something like 4 small ammo packs and 1 large ammo pack in your inventory would prevent this from just being just infinite ammo capacity)
- Team damage increased (Such as veteran tag target)
- Cool downs reduced (Could go with a tweak to some of the classes to make cool down reduction a team thing in more cases as this would be a very solo focused one currently, A talent to spread some amount of cooldown reduction to the team specifically for zealot on the left side of their talent tree would be helpful as currently charge zealot can at times be a little solo focused, this would encourage people to stay closer to the team. Perhaps replacing “The Masters Retribution” As that seems rarely used, or as a addon to “Fury of the Faithful”)
How could we make statistics useful to the average player
Problem
If we do add a scoreboard many people will struggle to read it and thus wont actually gain much benefit from it.
Solution
Make a in game statistics page that can provide accurate feedback on how your build performs. Ideally it would record your past 10 games with a given build, record when you make changes to the build and so on. An example for how this could work:
Imagine a page in game where you can look at your average damage per game, what percentage of that is ranged/melee attacks, how much each talent/blessing effects it. So you could see you have an average 600k damage and of that 55k comes from duelist, 80k comes from blades of faith, etc.
If we want to be even more accurate about this we could further refine the actual averages into sort of “refined” averages by modifying the data. Mainly
- Calculating a average damage per minute DPM, rather then damage per game.
- Not record DPM while preforming tasks (any of the minigames or carrying objectives)
- Not record DPM while during downtime (a simple if less then X enemies within Y distance on Z difficulty then do not record stats. This will likely need to be slightly tweaked per mission and per difficulty)
- Record stats separately for each difficulty (obviously the variance between difficulties is too big to accurately apply stats between them)
- Use a hidden ELO like system to estimate a players expected performance and modify their stats from that game accordingly (Yes this is a system that mostly applies to PvP games however, in this context it would be useful. For instance if you get into a game with 3 people who consistently deal very high damage then we would expect you to do less damage in this game, therefore reducing the negative impact this game has on your averages)
Of course we could also allow people to disable these modifiers to see raw stats if they prefer that.
This uses damage as a example however this system could also be applied to say toughness generated, cooldowns reduced, dodge efficiency, damage taken, damage negated, accuracy and so on.
To elaborate on a above point, having a page where you could see how much of a impact each talent and blessing is actually having in a game would be extremely useful. For instance if you look at your average crit rate, having that broken down by how much each talent effects it; especially variable talents, would be extremely useful. Seeing that your crit chance is on average increased by +12% by scourge would be extremely useful information. Or maybe your total ranged and melee damage and how much of that is done by bleed and how much of that bleed is added by each of your abilities that applies bleed. Or any number of different examples.
This would all be EXTREMELY useful and likely help the player base improve a lot in general, as currently people really just need to guess and go off of what seems to work. I mean I run scourge on my dueling sword zealot, but I couldn’t tell you if its actually worth it or not over blood redemption, and anyone saying they do know for a fact is lying.
If we wanted to go even further with this we could have small training missions related to each variable talent/blessing, such as if say you noticed that you didn’t actually get that much of a effect from Dance of Death, there could be a basic small scenario in the Psykhanium where a enemy attacks you so you can dodge and then use that increased accuracy to shoot elites placed further away. Similar to the training missions in Space Marine 2, these could also give small bonus resources or perhaps be tied to penances.
Closing Statement
Now of course some people will never bother using tools such as this, however it cant hurt to provide to people the tools required to improve. There will always be a portion of any player base that just doesn’t care, but I think most people would rather improve if given the opportunity. There is a reason why the scoreboard mod is the most popular mod, even above mods that are basically core features of the game to basically anyone playing at a high level (dodge count, numeric UI), even despite all of its flaws and not actually being that helpful to improve by itself.
In general I believe everything I wrote here could be implemented into the game and have a noticeable positive impact. Certain elements may be more difficult then others to implement. I have no experience with stingray I have no idea, but from experience in other engines this cant be that hard. Anyways I would be very interested to hear what people here think.
PS: Special thanks to CopperBack and Blazed_minD for their suggestions and to everyone in general for taking the time to read this and respond. Even if I did wish a few people on the steam forum didn’t.