The fallacy of the scoreboard

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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“I need to see my stats to know how well i did or my build performed”

“i cant “just tell how it went!” i want proper numbers”

Solid sensible arguments at first glance, but think about it how is the scoreboard more accurate a reflection than just noteing how you did in each situation as you play?

If you want to test anything what do you need? as many repetitions as possible and as few variables as possible.

Just imagine testing the stopping distance on your car with a selection of differing brake pads , you ned each run to be the same in all regards esxcept the one variable. same discs, same tires, same pressure on pedal same road , same speed , same temp , humidity same car at the same weight. just one thing being different can throw your results out.

Now in a Tide game , there are 3 other people, differing skills, quality of performance, builds weapons who would run the same level in vastly differing ways if you could repeat the exact same elvel (which you cant). on a level that different with unique spawns . just who walks into a room first can have run changing consequences.

Are there enough mobs that capacity is being tested or is it a race to kill non threats? woop you killed 60 specials what does it mean? without knowing if they would of caused any trouble maybe they were all half a second from death you just beat them to the kill.
your seeing one data point in your spread of wins or losses what you need is the break points

a level could be 99% trivial 2 people afk no probs any stats earnt here wont mean anything but just one room where there was the chance to loose , but these moments that matter are going to be buried in irrelevance.

if the run is fast and efficient the numbers will be lower, if your slow struggling and on the edge the whole way all of the kill stats will be padded to hell.

whose the more usefull the kerrilian shooting every elite through her team just before the heavy overhead takes its head off winning all the green circles or the kruber who had every kill stolen but pulled off that clutch charge/res?

how can the scoreboard even be relevant with all this variance?

then there is all the bad behaviour this sort of competitive scoring promotes. which is an entire other thread by itself.

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thank you you summarizing what i didn’t had the energy to.

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I just like seeing my numbers at the end. It doesn’t matter to me how effectively they convey the reality of the run.

If scoreboard-related toxicity is a concern then comms can be disabled (or opted out-of) when the scoreboard appears.

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There’s also a heavily censored chat box and a “block player” feature.

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I think an interesting solution would be a publicly visible Team Scoreboard at the end of the run, which shows the kills/things that your team accomplished with aggregate numbers. Items used, things killed, objectives/bosses dealt with in X amount of time, team damage taken, etc.

Then, on client side only, you are shown only your contributions privately.

Now the toxic players who want to brag and bash others have to overcome their own credibility, since nobody has access to each other’s numbers.

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that doesn’t sound half bad, i like it

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Ill be honest, and clearly many people are going to disagree with me.

But trying to find a way to make the scoreboard acceptable is an answer searching for a question.

Nothing was wrong with the score board. And while you can argue allot more goes into how one helped the team than just kills, that is still a factor to your overall contribution. Nailing that clutch save AND netting the most damage done is a nice feeling that most would like to see.

Ive played both vermintides, and many, many other coop games. The fear of toxic players being mean based of states at the end is so blown out of proportion. It is incredibly rare.

Its displayed at the end, people react more to how you conducted yourself throughout the whole match than what your numbers were. If you spent the whole game helping your team, pointing out ammo, not running off alone, but you did the least damage or kills. Well people arent gonna be to upset because you worked as a team.

The opposite is also true. Running off alone, not assisting your team, but lots of kills. At the end, people are gonna be mad because you didnt play like a team player.

Scoreboard has so little to do with any form potential toxic players being mean. Removing it is an answer searching for a question. Entirely useless.

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i don’t know why you people who are pro-scoreboard are so hung up by the toxicity argument,
@Padds is talking about a totally different thing?

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Because it’s literally the only argument against the scoreboard that has been given? Every other argument is just trying to say that it’s not really a good metric, which is an argument for why it isn’t a positive, but not an argument for why it’s bad for it to be present in the game. Are there any other arguments made that paint the scoreboard as an active negative? Please share them with me if so because I haven’t seen them.

Most of the arguments given by OP are pretty asinine, basically suggesting perfect scientific rigour is needed to get any feedback at all about how your build is performing, which just isn’t my experience at all in over 1000 hours of V2.

Biggest counter to this argument would be dots. Dots are extremely hard to quantify in terms of damage dealt by just looking at an enemy affected. However in V2 we could compare total kills to melee + ranged kills and the difference would tell you how many enemies died to dots, as well as the damage dealt stat giving you a good idea how much you’ve contributed to clearing enemies.

There will be other circumstances like this where the visual impact in game vs the actual difference can be quite stark, and the scoreboard goes a pretty long way to showing that.

No it’s not perfect, but any day of the week I will take some info over no info. Many times in V2 the scoreboard was genuinely illuminating, even if it was just making me or a friend realise how much FF their build is doing :joy:

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its simple to fix the “toxicity” issue. Just allow each player to see only his own numbers. Done. He will have access to his numbers without having the tools to attack another player.

“Oh but how will I know how well I performed if I cant compare with my teammembers?”

Maybe fatshark could give us a rating comparing other players performance with the same power level. A percentage relative to the average numbers of each stat for a given power level in a specific map and difficulty. Btw, there is always youtube videos to give you reference numbers too.

Another option is to allow only people in friend list to access your stats.

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Verbally toxic players I run into in pretty much any game are most commonly frustrated players who were underperforming and looking to cast blame. Removing the scoreboard just grants them impunity to point the finger, knowing that no one can prove them wrong. Example: Overwatch 1 did not have a scoreboard, and yet the competitive community was notably toxic.

Conversely, toxicity from elitists who are lording their stats over other players does happen too, and needs no further explanation. However, I wouldn’t say that this is any more common than the scenario I pointed out above, and so including a scoreboard does not automatically increase toxicity. Look at Deep Rock Galactic, a competing Horde shooter, which both has an end of round scoreboard and also prides itself in being one of the least toxic communities in the genre.

Bottom line, a scoreboard frankly has no real bearing on a community’s toxicity; a person can exploit both a scoreboard’s existence or lack thereof to flame other players. Meanwhile, it is an almost ubiquitous feature in horde shooters, and so players expect its inclusion (Vermintide, Left 4 Dead, Back 4 Blood, DRG, Risk of Rain 2, the Zombie Army series, Killing Floor 2, most everything else–they all have end of round scoreboards at minimum).

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Yeah it can be more accurate as it’s not always clear in each situation and over the course of a whole run, it may be you can make your build more or less effective. The scoreboard helps give you some additional information even if it’s imperfect and won’t improve your gameplay in critical situations (but it may help you better your overall build).

I get your point and it is true but some stats - deaths / damage taken / downs, total damage done, damage to bosses done etc - are easiest to see if the game gives them to you. They are not totally irrelevant, even if how you play during critical moments is more important to success.

Yeah but who cares there? Those are two separate runs, not something that’d get compared within a run. You know if a run took 30 mins or an hour.

I’d just ditch the green circles but we should get stats at the end.

I did encounter some, but they didn’t need a scoreboard to be toxic, they already were. I usually either left (if I hadn’t been in the group at the start) or if they were really bad they often got kicked.

If they made it to the end the scoreboard usually humbled them, not the reverse. The players that actually carried on Legend rarely complained, and Cataclysm and up had the most relaxed players.

Yup.

Honestly, losing the scoreboard is more of a frustration for me than risking toxic players. I now can’t tell as easily if my build outputs high damage or if I’m just getting killing blows or anything really.

Sure, it doesn’t give you a breakdown of the moment-to-moment gameplay or who did well under pressure, but seeing my boss damage - or my damage taken which I always aimed to lower (and is a good indicator if you were draining healing or not) gave me another goal to strive towards.

Here in DT at the end I know how little I died or not, I don’t actually know for certain how much I contributed to boss damage, general enemy damage or anything, and if everyone is attacking the boss at once you can’t be sure. It’s not good. I can’t be sure when trying out a new build if it was actually effective overall at a glance anymore.

I find losing it a detriment overall. It helped with buildcraft. Moment-to-moment gameplay is a separate skill and can be worked on as those moments usually make or break a run, so the feedback there is clear, but the scoreboard gave a little extra info on how the wider mission went.

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I just enjoy seeing how I did at the end of a game. And yeah, I get some kicks out of doing well.

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I dont Like the Idea that i cant see the stats of an other Player. I want to know If there can pull there weigth. Most VT 2 Friends i have i found this was. Sometimes i Go in low diff Games and teach Them If they want.

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While I personally like scoreboards, I don’t have the same experience as you here. When I’ve encountered toxic players in different games, they’ve often used the scoreboard to “prove” that they are the better player, and to find someone to blame for the team performing poorly. But as others have said, there are remedies if this becomes too much of a problem.

However, I do have another (theoretical) argument against scoreboards, and that would be that it might cause some people to focus on the wrong things. I.e. instead of trying to help the team to achieve the mission, they set out to get as many kills as possible. I mean it’s perfectly possible to play like utter dog s*** and still get a high score on all metrics.

On the other hand, most people wouldn’t obsess about their kill count like that, and I don’t know if that behaviour would be common enough to justify not having a scoreboard just because of it. And during the beta, without the scoreboard, some people would still run off on their own and try to solo speedrun the map anyway

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They should just make it so you can only see your stats. Fixed.

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The scoreboard doesnt need to be fixed. There was nothing wrong with it to begin with.

One can make up scenarios and point out rare instances of when bad players have used it to prove a point.

Bad players are still gonna do that regardless of the scoreboard being there or not. More often than not though, it proves those toxic players wrong when they see the numbers.

Removing it is an answer to a problem that didnt exist. Entirely pointless, and likely more a detriment than a boon.

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There is such a massive disparity in the VT2 classes and such a monstrously wide range of skills/weapons/builds across all classes that comparisons of numbers is hilarously laughably bad and gives absolutely no indication of skill or performance and any who think the Scoreboard somehow shows whether you’ve done a good job or not is a buffoon. There’s simply too much data in a spectacular range with player skill being an extremely tiny part of it.

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This overall is a bad take. Your statement holds literally no weight. Damage done, damage taken, revives, kills literally the whole scoreboard is a metric of what you contributed to the team. Is it the only metric to be judged by? No. But it certainly is a factor. Parts of the scoreboard are definitely proof of ones skill.

There is nothing wrong with seeing hard numbers on a scoreboard to show how one contributed overall with statisical numbers.

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I did point out that the scoreboard is not the only. metric.

Did you take so little damage because you mastered blocking and dodging. Or because you ran away and sat in the back. You will always have to read between the lines.

Expanding it could be nice, but overal what vt2 showed is fine by most standards. It tells me my statistics of everything that i can track, like damage done, damage taken, or my favorite stat, seeing my headshot kill percentage compared to total kills.

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