Its the dev’s opinion not mine firstly. Though I will note the main reason for removal of a scoreboard is “green circle chasing” not chat rudeness. I’m using toxicity as a catch all term here.
ust my 2 cents on team play: i enjoy seeing a team where everyone understands their role and moves together like cogwheels. no explicit comms needed, because everyone’s play is on point. but this ideal team play is unfortunately not always the case with randoms. imo it’s even rare. sure one can try to help them and ping stuff and save them when they’re down, but many are oblivious or stubborn or both. so when @Index and i play together, the best option is to let them do their thing and move on. hence more emphasis on individual skill than on team play because often there’s not much of a team.
i use the scoreboard mainly to gauge my own play. someone did much more damage? perhaps i’ll check their build and learn something.
regarding a commendation system: it will be gamed, as everything where one can earn titles, frames or cosmetics, so those with many friends on their social list will get the most, obviously.
Yes! That is exactly why I want squads to remain together by default instead of the useless merge squad function. So many times Ill be playing maelstrom and end up on a beautiful well functioning team, only for that to only last one game… And I’m not going out of my way to go and add people who I played with once for 20 minutes, just feels weird to me.
Yeah that unfortunately is lost with the score system I suggested. But if you see someone who seems to be playing well you can always just ask them what their stats are like.
Unfortunately yes it is impossible to completely stop the exploitation of a system like this. This does happen in foxhole as well, however the “you can only commend a person once per day” thing more or less solves it. Yes people who play with a bunch of friends will earn these things faster… But you also need to be likable enough to have a bunch of friends you regularly play with so shrug. It isn’t perfect but its good enough to help influence more people towards better behavior in my experience.
Scoreboard mod has been up for years now (and was one of the earliest mods available). I’ve yet to see the flood of toxicity due to the mod after thousand+ hours.
Your misunderstanding my points. Also dev’s are more worried about how seeing stats effects people’s behavior “green circle chasing” rather then chat toxicity. My point is that having the scoreboard be a mod is the worst of both worlds so a better version of it should be implemented into the game, that solves the issues that the dev’s sought to fix by removing the scoreboard.
OP how come every post you make is way, way longer than it needs to be? You could’ve summed this up in like four paragraphs tops. You’re not writing papers, you’re writing forum posts.
To be fair, the way you break your paragraphs is the gold standard, but there is too much writing here to the point that it’s hard for me to slog through it without losing focus or getting distracted and not retain any of the information.
Response to the title: I agree with Jan, scoreboard provides basically no toxicity whatsoever and I can gauge the performance of other players (who is doing poor? who should i support more?) ingame. The stats are mostly just for fun for me. I see no issues with it being base game.
No yeah this one is long… Its basically like 6 posts stitched together. I just like reasoning out my points and addressing multiple arguments in the process. It would be practically impossible to slim this down much while doing that. I guess I could put my reasoning and additional information into drop down text boxes to make it less intimidating.
Drop downs would be a good bandaid solution, but I think my main issue with it is expanding upon things far more than a brief summary (in layman’s terms: “who asked”). For example, with comparisons to the commendation systems in other games, you could have said “Foxhole and Overwatch want everyone to commend each other to foster some community positivity, even if those commendations don’t serve any practical purpose. Could do something similar for DT, like rewarding bling if people like you enough.” If someone asks for you to explain that further, go for it in a reply!
Bunching up information all at once can really cause the age-old “boring textbook study” thing to happen, so I recommend against it when you can.
Well I have been in enough forums to predict counterpoints/questions so I just address them in the post itself. I guess that has backfired at this point because people cant be bothered to read all of it and make the same arguments anyways lol (I think I said “Please read section X” about 30 times on the steam forum at this point).
Maybe I should just make video essays since people have less of a issue with watching/listening to those lol. Ill be sure to include the patented ADHD corner.
Also the whole point of the post is to pitch stuff to the dev’s on the off chance any one of them reads it. I want it to provide as many compelling arguments as possible there.
IMO green circle syndrome exists whether or not green circles are in the picture. Some people just want to kill all the things. Which is why I think scoreboard has little to no drawbacks, and I’m surprised FS removed it wholesale instead of making an attempt at a ‘toxicity-resistant’ version since green circles are apparently bad (tbf green is the devil’s colour dontcha know!). Point being, selfish people who play selfishly do so with or without scoreboards.
The flip side of scoreboard toxicity is evident if you’re not an ass. I like it when my team mates are performing well, so it can be nice to applaud their performance – with or without chat. I do it with friends when we play together since we can all see the data, but I’m also hyped when some random is really pulling!
I like the idea of a commendation system, even as a qualitative alternative to scoreboard mods. Even better when players can choose, because in a game you know who is saving your bacon. I don’t think there even need to be rewards outside of the dopamine of getting commended itself. Otherwise yeah it opens up to gaming the system. I put Foxhole in the poll for player commendation rather than persistent player ranking – there’s really no need for that in this game imo. Rannick might get mad too 
Not to derail overmuch, but IMO a forum is precisely the place for long form content and discussion. Reading is a joy. The widely-spoken unspoken rule of course is that people may not read what you write but that’s life.
OP if you wanna write a paper, write a paper. Keep up the headings n things.
kthxbai
Yeah its behavior that will always exist of course. FS thinks that removing the scoreboard wholesale helps, I think the existence of the mod kind of defeats that (especially in the long term). That’s really my main argument against the current solution.
Yeah rank names could use work to reflect the fact that its a inquisitorial warband, I’m sure there would be some sort of different naming scheme or maybe the rank scheme could be reworked like the US army enlisted ranks. (Its just sergeants all the way up with various more and more impressive sounding prefixes)
I just think some form of reward for the commends needs to exist so there is at least a point to it beyond it being a glorified emote lol. Easiest reward would probably just be resources really.
Unfortunately this is the main problem. If things are too long nobody wants to read it and they’re gonna complain about it like I did.
Like I said, try to keep your posts relatively concise, and if you wanna address those counterpoints/questions, consider preparing them beforehand before anybody asks them. Should contribute less to bloat, and anything that nobody asks about wasn’t information that was needed anyways.
Hah, that’s fair, but IMO a forum post’s max length should be 4 paragraphs (the book of grudges is an exception because it’s more of an archive that should probably be a website atp). At the very least, I’d appreciate a quick and dirty summary of a section at the beginning of it.
Fair enough really. Though again this is mostly me writing a professional PowerPoint presentation for the dev’s then for average bored forum user. I did include a TLDR though!
Not that it helped on the steam forum anyways lol. The amount of people who still don’t realize that I do actually want some form of score system in the game (despite a bright bold heading at the very top of the post) is frankly frightening.
Yeah, I’d go further to say that the popularity of the mod proves the demand and relative lack of toxicity indicates against the FS hypothesis!
Not that it’s firm proof or anything, just feels like a ‘this is why we can’t have nice things’ situation on account of a few bad eggs that I’ve never had the displeasure of smelling.
Well do note that they are mostly preventing “green circle chasing” caused by people having access to stats during gameplay/ability to show off those stats at the end of the game (not necessarily via chat just that other people see how big their di- I mean damage number is).
I dont know how true this is, but it is the opinion of FS that it is a problem so I kind of have to take their word on it.
The main issue with the mod is the offence/defence/etc. scores that are very arbitrarily weighted and defaulted to on. The second issue is that the mod can be a bit inaccurate, but it’s generally only a few percentage points off, so it doesn’t matter as much after a certain point.
This is me every time I read anything on the DT section.
Honestly reflecting on all of this its kind of funny that I can make a post not that long ago, with the same conclusions and similar arguments, get basically nothing but support on it… Then take some time away to think of better points and suggestions, make a better and more thought out post that more accurately addresses the concerns of the dev’s. But since its a little more complicated people don’t bother to understand my actual conclusions and I get nothing but criticism (that isnt even accurate to my take lol).
Maybe this post is too long or the provocative title was a bad idea. Idk Ill probably make a video in a few weeks or months or something.
Begone, tourist.