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Are Game Stats Important to You?
Nehle asks: "In almost every new multi-player game there is a way of keeping statistics about the games that are being played. Whether it's fan-based services or a service created by the game creator. Unreal Tournament 2004 can write nice HTML files for you, Bungie keep an insane amount of stats about games played over X-Box Live. For my favorite shooter - Enemy Territory, there is an application called Enemy Territory Teamstats and I wrote this little script to keep track of my games.
Are stats any important to the average /. reader? Is it interesting how many times you shot 1337h4x0rg4m3r in the head, or is winning all that counts? Do you even want people to know if you lost 14 games in a row?"
I play TFC and I care more about the fun i have playing then my stats
~ Mooga
It would matter to me, except, I'm no good at games that require good reflexes and coordination. Although that has been different the last few days, I usually get a below average score.
Stats for FPS serve the same purpose that experience points do in RPG's... They bridge single momentary experiences into an overarching experience with wider goals. As such, I'd like to see that I've played 150 games, and have gone from a 3% to a 55% kill to death ratio.
While I'd much rather have more interesting externalities involved (earning cash, switching to advanced servers, getting more control over game settings, etc), stats in some progressive form or another are a great thing to have.
The ______ Agenda
My University had a CS server running on the network.
There were stats and it got really competetive.
Some people were totally manic about it, we did a corolation between high scorers and people who failed their courses, it was ugly.
Anyway I consistently had the highest games won average and kill/death (and kpm which shows I'm not a camper!)ratio but could never seem to reach #1.
There were roomates who would put one computer on as idle and the other one would just shoot him in the head for a while till other people joined.
By the end of the semester someone broke 5000 kills.
It was pretty unifying, but I think it might have discouraged new players.
It was good at forcing people to consistently use names which helped to keep names and faces lined up.
In the case of the new Bungie.net stats for Halo 2, it is fantastic to be able to SEE where uber-gamer10 gets his kills from, what weapons he uses and what others have killed him with.
I'm not personally interested in how many headshots i've had or how many times i captured the flag, but there are plenty of stats that can help you improve your game. It is also a good opportunity to see the tactics of the l33t gamers.
I refuse to have a sig... dammit!
Is Grammar Important to You?
To me, and I think most, Stats are useful just as a cool little thing to look at. It's always fun to try and beat everone else at a particular statistic, but outside of that, I don't see much point for stats except as something to look at.
I already know i'm going to hell, now i'm just trying to get cable down there.
But often when the stats are pubicly availabe, you see stat whores: People who focus on making their stats look good instead of _actaully_ preforming well in-game. They often hide from dangerous scenarios to avoid getting killed, steal team-mates kills, or stick to specific weapons to boost their weapon-specific stats. So in general, public stats are fun, but reveal some immaturity in certain players.
I must admit, I have been known to kill off the freecell.exe process in the Windows Task Manager just to keep a good winning streak going. And I have also on occasion edited the winmine.ini file on a friends computer to make sure they knew just how damn good at Minesweeper I was...
Or at least hide them. Game stats causes more problems and less fun. Any online gamer knows the annoying problem of stats-whores. We've all heard of 'bragging rights' but goddamn, why do servers run specialized programs that regularly inform me of other players' stats? I don't give a shit if DarthLeftHandedSniper got over 2000 kills so stop reminding me every minute.
It's not a race track, or a fucking casino. I don't care about stats or how my percentage is with using a certain weapon.
All I care about is having fun above all. Games shouldn't be about stress but how many times have a joined a server where I saw people yelling at their teammates or saying how their team is useless, simply because they're a stats whore.
Here are things that matter:
- ping
- staying connected
- fun
That's it.
My gaming heyday was during the Doom and Quake I era - "Those were the days". Of course, it's generational, and you'll probably reiterate those words just as my fathers' friends tell me the same thing about Pac-Man.
The point being that I developed my skills more by programming something I was enthusastic about than something I was forced to do for school or the like. If you're interested in it, by all means tweak your [Perl] skills and create something that you enjoy.
Worry less about what's important to other people (unless they're your parents - [seriously] they know what they're talking about). Persue what you enjoy doing to the extent that you can pay your bills and still get sex from your significant other.
To me, stats are very important. They track my progress over time... one game, the one I play the most now, (N) tracks the fastest times for each level on my own machine, and the top 20 speeds for each level and episode (5 levels) which can be downloaded and viewed. If it weren't for the stats and the competition that came from them, I probably would've quit a long time ago.
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
when I first started playing Unreal Tournament, stats were the crack that kept me playing constantly. I'd check my stats 3-4 times a day. Especially if you were ranked well, it was very, very addictive.
By UT2003 though, when I realized how little stats had to do with how well you played, I used them only to actually review performance.
I make no claim that I am an average gamer guy though, I was pretty focused on competition at a high level.
...is who won. Stats just provide the secrets of how to beat you. If any profesional player is smart, they would never let their stats (weapon percentages, etc) out the door. Show up at the LAN party only known for winning, kick ass, erase the stats and walk away.
I'm a bit surprised nobody has mentioned the stats in the GTA games yet. In GTAIII it was just something cool to look at. Vice City expanded the stats to include things like best times in all the races, amount of time spent flying, etc.
Now in San Andreas, it's just amazing the amount of stats that are kept. Not just your character stats like muscle, fat, stamina, sex appeal etc, but stuff like how many times you've failed a mission, how many times you've been to hospital. How many good and bad dates you've been on. How many times you've been laid. The longest you've managed to survive with 5 stars worth of police chasing you. How much cash you've spent on haircuts or tattoos or property or food or clothes.
Adds another level of depth to the game IMHO.
For stats: 6
Against stats: 8
Position undeterminable due to crappy and/or confusing comment: 4
Snide comments instead of discussion: 3
Total comments: 21
Most comments by: Anonymous Coward
Average mod score: 1.3333
Headshots: 0
Sex budget: $0.00
The only thing I'm concerned with, and the only reason I play games in the first place, is having fun. Does having my stats tracked make it more fun? Since I'm not in the top 5% or so that would get noticed for having the best stats, it usually doesn't add anything. I prefer teamplay-oriented games (like the Tribes series or UT2k4's onslaught) where individual performances don't matter as much as the result for the team. Even if you're not a leet killer, you can still play defense and help out your team.
The stats system of Super Smash Bros. Melee on the Nintendo Gamecube was one of the reasons I was so impressed with the game (and so I bought it and a gamecube).
Once you've implemented a decent physics/game engine, stats are just a matter of implementation, it is not a large task in itself to gather the data, it's more how you interpret the data you've gathered.
Sure the most important factor in gaming is having fun, but I love seeing all kinds of crazy stats at the end of the game. Those who don't care for them don't have to look at them. Yes there will always be stat-whores, but you can just ignore them.
Its interesting to see how your performance changes over time, and what metrics you can use to measure it (accuracy, kill/death ratios, etc). There are also stats that have entertainment value, like who killed you the most, and what your favourite weapon or map is. As well as in objective based team games, stats on how many times a player has done certain objectives are nice to know - eg flag caps, bombs placed, tanks destroyed, etc.
I'd often track my own accuracy stats in Quake 3 deathmatches, and even though the correlation between stats and 'winning' is only so deep (debatable to say the least), it is rewarding to see yourself improving over time.
Stats are also good for server admins, who can use them to track average player patterns. Times when player numbers are at their peak and most popular maps come to mind as useful stats to know, for managing server load, default map rotations and the like.
Personally, I love them. Fun to compare with friends, see a cumulative effect of games played, etc.
I once played Day Of Defeat(an excellent World War two themed Half-Life mod) with the brother of a friend of mine.
He had three keys bound to changing his name, one was for when he was about to die(which was ranked on this servers stats at almost the end), one for when he was spawning and moving towards the action(which was in the middle of the stat pool) and one which he used when he was in the thick of the shooting(which was ranked seventh on the server stats).
Stats are good for showing you what the best people use to win(if they show that at all) but so easy to abuse that its often times not worth using.
Read Errant Story.
Personally, I love game stats. I've always enjoyed looking at how everyone did in certain situations, who had the most kills, whatever. I remember GoldenEye for the N64 was awesome because it had the awards at the end, like 'most cowardly' and such. Stats are just another feature, they're not necessary, but they make the game more enjoyable to play, and they keep you playing it longer.
Oh, and there's an excellent Enemy Territory stats site at http://www.wolfet.org/.
Doing things that get me killed again and again and again is often the only way to make that one manuver that tips the game in your team's favor -- or at worst keeps your team from loosing as fast.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I have been playing Americas Army and I gave up stat tracking. Once I did this, I enjoyed the game alot more and I am a much better player now than when I watched my fragrate, kills per hour, etc. People who watch stats get too preoccupied with them.
current rankings
weekly winners
16 week seeded averages
most played maps
recently played games
and every user has their own page with their stats and recent game list.
They get a ton of page views, so I would say that many users enjoy their presence. Of course, some will be obsessed and some will not care at all. It's a spectrum, blah blah blah...
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
The problem with stats is that it's easy for them to become more important to players then having fun. Depending on the stat, that has various effects, often counterproductive, on gameplay.
One of the best acknowledgments of this I've ever seen is the half life mod Natural Selection. Kill stats for marines are -not- shown, but they are for the aliens.
Successful marine teams will typically will play in very tight cooridination, and individual contribution to kills is not important to the bigger picture. Not having stats there removes a big part of the temptation to go totally rambo which is going to usually be bad for your team. Who cares if you are killing a bunch of aliens if you are doing it in the wrong place and your team is losing all it's equipment?
The alien style of play on the other hand is much more swarm everywhere. The aliens basically want to inflict as many kills and cost on the marines as much as possible. Raw kills is a valid way to win the match. Having the killboard then makes sense, as it drives competition between the aliens to accomplish this. There is a support alien type that suffers from this scorewise, but you usually only want a level headed person playing that role anyways, so they are probably not affected by pride games.
Basically, I'd say that individual stats are going to often be bad in games that are trying to emphasize on teamwork, and are totally sensical the more individual deathmatch oriented a game is.
total number of players with girlfriends: 0
Please remember that 68% of all statistic are worthless.
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
They're VERY important to me in a game like Grand Theft Auto. I like the exquisite detail of the stats in GTA3 and Vice City, but the wording and timing in the original GTA was beautiful. I would go around shooting pedestrians to see how high I could get my "murder one" count. (Displayed when you finally get killed)
As for the only other game I give a rat's ass about stats in: TFC...stats are nice, but the point systems used really don't differentiate or account for classes. A Soldier, Sniper or HWG, or on some maps Spy or Engineer can really rack up the kills. A pyro pretty much won't, and a medic, while actually accellerating many deaths greatly, usually doesn't get credited for their kills. Some method of accounting for assists would help those classes. Caps should be noted separately. (it would almost never help pyros or HWGs anyway, but they do bring up scores for spies, medics, and scouts)
OTOH, sometimes I wish there was no score kept when playing Dustbowl. That way people might be more inclined to work as a team instead of just going out to get as many kills as they can.
...because I can see how I'm getting old as the clan kids dominate me. It's a nice reminder of how time passes and makes campers of us all.
The stats also shows I'm such a flak monkey .
I try to pretend that I don't care about my stats in BF1942 and that I "play for the team", but I can't help sneaking a peek every so often.
The problems with stats in BF1942 are that many people play for purely for stats, doing things like sitting back on the wrong side of the river in Battle of the Bulge in a Tiger, shelling the allied spawns and not actually capturing flags.
I used to think it was cool when me and my buddy teamed up with quake and got 1st and 2nd place in many consecutive games, but we didn't really keep track of stats. With single player FPS though i used to quickload/save many many times to get a perfect run in a level (90%-100% health, use as little ammo as possible etc.)
Even when i'd have huge amounts of big weapons and ammo i would still use the smaller gun just to save for what was to come. In recent FPS games they discourage this kinda thing though because new levels usually mean you get 100% health and clean amount of weapons/health..
Sample this!
Usually I play with one or two friends I've known for about four years now. We've always played Quake 3 CTF before, again because of the teamplay aspects. And that's where we get our kicks from. I know that one friend is usually better than I am regarding hit and kill ratio and one is a bit worse, but together we make one hell of a team. We're out for the objective, not honor, glory, kills or whatever. We play classes the team needs at the moment, not necessarily the ones we like (or play) best. We watch each others backs, move as a team, have our tactics, and that's why it's fun.
The stats presented at the end of each map are a nice ego boost (if you've been better than usual) or confirm the feeling you had that you coulnd't hit the wall right in front of you, but other than that they are of no real interest to us.
How well you do on a public server is entirely dependant on your team (if its a team based game) and your enemy(s). Any pub hero can fail under a real challenge, or even just real pressure.
As Brian "DKT/Destrukt" Flanders (Great q3/CS/probably cod now but I'm just guessing player who has his own mousepad(DKTpad)) once said, "Do it when it counts"
The only time stats are important are when the game is entirely under your control -- No teammates to give you an advantage, No unskilled enemy to take advantage of. The only way this can matter in a non-leauge setting is if you're dueling in a 1on1 game, but even then that only works if the other person is both good and trying to win (not trying a new trick out).
Note: This is all relating to First Person Shooters. I suppose in an RTS your wins/loses/ties might matter some, but theres still the problem of playing against someone thats actually hard to beat (again, skilled player whos playing their best game).
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Have you totally forgotten that we are training to defeat the buggers? The scores mean nothing; let's just boycott them. When the buggers come back, nobody will care if Joe Hax0r had 1928841 points, so why should we now?
We run an Enemy Territory Server called Beginner's Park 3. We have a website at http://bpark3.com/. We use a slightly customized version of the systats package to track our stats. You can even chat "!stats" in-game on our servers (see links to our servers from the webpage) and get a summary of your stats including your ranking, accuracy, favorite weapon, etc.
systats is a fairly active project and has a really nice stat tracking system but it is very person centric. IMO, it's great for public servers but for clan matches games I think I'd prefer a program called StatWhore which is designed to summarize stopwatch games.
For our stats system, to try and deal with "stat-whoring"---where, for example, players allow themselves to be killed over and over by another to boost the latter's stats---we developed a weak secondary dominance statistic that basically awards more points to those who kill players with higher K / D ratios. This has helped to encourage the better or more stat-conscientious players to play against each other instead of ganging up on the weaker players.
So I recommend systats for public-type servers, it's very flexible, and I recommend StatWhore for matches. As for whether or not stats are important, I think they're fun as long as you don't find yourself worrying everytime you play about how it'll affect your stats. I think a good stats system should try and prevent that. We've tried to do this, but are still considering improvements.
--Zaedyn (aka auachapan)
I think that Bungie's stat system is extremely cool. Not only does it allow you to review games in all of their gory detail, but also provide valuable insight into strategies of teammates and opponents. By looking over the game stats for clans that you play you can look for patterns and see what kind of strategies they are employing so that you are better prepared to play them the next time around. Like everything else, Halo 2 team games (especially in the non-ffa game types such as capture the flag and territories) and having this kind of detail really helps.
I've been part of the team working on Bungie's older Myth series and those games would create files that would contain all of the game data so you could actually watch a replay of the entire game from any team perspective so that you could learn strategies and replay really cool in-game events.
So I would say yeah, it's an important part of the game. It doesn't really make winning any more or less important (I play for fun... which is good because I suck) but it gives even non-rank-whore types like myself some really cool information for seeing how I can play better against certain teams in the future. Think of it like Football. There are an insane amount of statistics for the game of football, and even entire fantasy leagues which revolve around statistics. I think it's more just catering to the human nature element in people than anything else.
Similar debates over Planetside's stat tracking have been raging across the boards ever since Planetside implimented stat tracking. There are two main camps:
A) Those for whom stats are the be-all, end-all reason to play the game. They tend to be rather uncooperative (considering it's a team-based game), caustic individuals; the type that view the game less as something to be enjoyed and more a competition that acts as a virtual penis. Almost invariably these players use infantry with heavy assault weapons inside, and Reavers so they can rocket spam infantry outside; why bother taking out the tank that's ripping up your back lines when you could go score 4 or 5 quick kills against infantry that can barely fight back?
B) Those that just want group A to leave the game. Not that they [i]don't[/i] want stats, but believe the absence of stats would cause the group A players to go elsewhere.
Personally, I find myself in group B. I don't care about peoples' stats; if they want to make a name for themselves in-game, let them find a way to do it. So long as the game's based on gross equipment mismatches, though, kill counts don't impress.
1 10V3 5331NG 5747S B3C4U53 1 PWN 411 N00B5
My freshman year at my university I was one of a small group of people who got Half-Life and Counter-Strike started on campus. Let me tell you there was QUITE a bit of competitive play at the expense of school work. I have no doubt it my mind that more than a fair share of the hardcore players failed out and/or switched majors. We had a good number of players and clans just on campus. I happened to be running one of two main CS servers at the time and thought it might be cool to have statistics (I used AEStats) to see how good players' skills were and to keep people from talking so much garbage without backing anything up. Statistics totally changed how the game of CS was played from that point on. No longer were the hostages or what-have-you the main point but better stats were the overwhelming objective that players tried to achieve. I remember players using only one gun to try and get to the top with that weapon, players quitting servers after dying once because they didn't want to damage their stats, players using multiple different names (this was before keeping names associated by IP) so that their stats wouldn't be harmed, and there were some cheaters. People became manically obsessive over the statistics. Now that they had "evidence" people argued MORE and there was animocity within the community. Many of the original players who started playing CS and HL at the school thought stats started taking the fun out of the game. I certainly thought the game changed quite a bit and wasn't nearly as much fun with the statistics. Stats directly or indireclty didn't encourage new players to really join. Hell my roommate didn't even play on the servers because he constantly said he "wasn't good enough." I think stats would be good to be kept for the individual player but on a server-wide basis I think it takes a lot of the fun out of the game. By putting a definate number of everything it quantifies the game to a point where I think the experience gets sacrificed. It's no longer about going in with your team to defeat an enemy, it's about your own stats and how you could keep/better them at whatever costs. Just my 2 pennies.
Just like karma whores, you are going to end up with stats whores for different games. It's far better to have a player with less kills but good tactics then someone who always runs for the same mass-destruction gun and blows everything up (almost always including himself/herself...)
I remember playing a UT2003 game at which point a player always runs for the redeemer and launched it whenever the opportunity was there. Enemies would be standing 2 meters away, but that didn't stop him using the weapon... Sad.
BTW, what good does it do to have 5000 kills stats ? What are you going to do with that? Put it on your resume? It ain't gonna impress anybody when they read that and who even remotely cares about your stats except yourself?
I give massages and reiki treatments (for real!). More info here: http://www.universele-levensenergie.be
When I played Unreal Tournament regularly, ngWorldStats were incredibly cool. It used a modified chess ranking system. A highly ranked player kills a low-ranked player and little to no points are gained. Flip it around and a low-ranked player kills a high-ranked player, and that player receives points galore.
The local stats aren't important -- I liked the online stats, comparing me to other players. I liked knowing that I had a high efficency (high kill to loss ratio). I was totally tickled when I found myself inside the top 100 players for the month.
As far as privacy goes, I didn't care how many times I shot 1337h4x0rg4m3r, I didn't care if someone searched my nick and found that I was on an umpteen game losing streak. My name wasn't attached to the account -- just some funky nick. If I cared that much about privacy, I wouldn't have participated (it was optional on ~95% of the servers).
If Epic had got their crap together and made online stats work on UT2004 at release time, I'd probably still be playing. I love to know how I match up against other players...that's part of the fun. Am I dominating servers just because the people on those servers happen to suck, or can I hang with the players who are really good? A good online stats app can usually let a player know if they're as good as they think.
-Turkey
This is based on consoles.
A good example for nicely done statistics is Super Smash Bros Melee for the Nintendo Gamecube. I like how there is a statistic for nearly everything.
Travel, jump and fly distance, Total damage given/taken, times/hours played and lots of others.
There's not just all-time stats: At the end of every match you'll get a higly detailed statistic for the game. You'll get several awards which all have a certain (positive or negative) meaning - and there are lots of awards - there's a ingame explanation list which takes forever to scroll through.
A bad example is Mario Kart 64/DD. They just show wins and losses and don't even save them. I don't know how much time I spent with friends playing these games, but hell would it be fun to know by having 5 screens of statistics to watch.
I love playing Madden 2005 online for PS2, however, I really suck. (My record is 5-32.) I'll often get blown out and it sucks because people won't take mercy requests because they want to run up the score for stats. They will take all these timeouts adding another 15 minutes to the never ending game. I usually quit on thier ass because I don't care about my quit stats. :-)
I play this Slashdot game where I try to make sure my Karma is high all the time. I always leave obvious messages with links to easily findable sites.
I'd like to see a UT2K4 package that would do some thorough stat tracking and analysis of my play. Weapon usage, hit pct, kills/killed by... preferably in nice pastel powerpoint type pie charts and bar graphs. Stats for a single game don't mean much, but if they were tracked for weeks or months, it might be fun to analyze them.
There was one stat I really wished for back when I played bunches of TFC - a simple plus/minus cap tracker. Every time the team you're on captures the flag, you get a point, Get capped on, you lose a point. Track that for a few dozen games, and you should have a pretty decent idea of how good a player you really are.
I've got no interest in comparing my stats to other people. As soon as stats become public, people start looking for ways to screw the system and inflate their numbers. Besides, I pretty much suck terribly at any FPS game I try.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
where is:
- avg days without changing underwear
- avg weeks without shower
- avg years without girlfriend (AKA "age")
- Un*x/Windows user percentage
- GNAA member percentage
- avg cups of coffee drunk by users
- avg amount of crack taken by moderators
- times this story was already posted on slashdot
- percentage of really hot chicks
- percentage of nearly rot chicks
As an older gamer, it meant a lot to me to play the original UT and watch my stats. I was not looking for a way to build my stats per se but I looked for players that were better than me and I would get in games with them. I worked to beat them and get better. Not to arbitrarily raise my stats, but to actually get better in the game.
When I finally broke the top 1,000 I called all my friends. For me it was as one player described what EXP is to an RPG player, stats were for me in UT.
Grandmar was not so important to me in any of my liberal arts degrees (UG or Grad). But thank God for Grammar and Spell Checks.
Thanks,
PaGeN
When a Ball Dreams, It Dreams it's a Frisbee.
I don't think I'd ever argue that game stats are "important", but they certainly add to gameplay value by providing a higher sense of purpose, as well as (in some games) encouraging you to partake in various activities or techniques that you would otherwise ignore simply because certain game stats or mechanisms keep track of it.
Let's take the obvious current example, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It keeps more statistics than any game I know, including measurements of various skills and accomplishments like your skill level with different weapons, ability to drive/pilot different types of vehicles, territories owned, shots fired...
If you're at all familiar with the game, you know what I'm talking about. And you know that those measurements of skill with each weapon encourage you to use the ones you wouldn't ordinarily use, because as your skill improves (and this is very smart, kudos to Rockstar for this) the game allows for improved handling of the weapons, or the vehicles, or whatever it is that just improved.
Then there are games like Perfect Dark, a first-person shooter for the N64, the very first game I played that emphasized stats at all (outside of sports games). If you saved your profile in multiplayer mode, it kept track of how many medals of each type you won (head shots, marksmanship/accuracy, professional, and... one more). There were also stats for how many kills you got and how many times you were killed, how much ammo you used, how far you ran, how many matches you won, etc.
I could have saved lots of time by writing this first:
Stats often encourage you to do a good job and really get good at the game. But this is only as important as you would say your gaming is important. If games aren't that important to you, game stats probably won't matter much. But for those few games where the stats actually mean something beyond bragging rights or where the game is something as culturally reknowned as Grand Theft Auto, stats tend to hold a little more meaning.
A few years back when Unreal Tournament came out, they used NGStats as their ranking system. As others have mentioned, this was an in depth stat tracking system. It could tell you what your kill to death ratio was for each weapon, how many games you won and lost, and what your overall rank was, among other things.
I started UT as a CTF Player, and became quite good. I played about 30-35 hours a week, and I was in the top 100. I would look at the stats to see what weapons I was effective with, and just what was going on in my games in general. The win loss percentage of my teams was very impressive. I started to notice that players in the top 10 would have good kill/death ratios and a lot of points, but their teams would lose a lot. Then I watched them ingame and saw what they were doing..
Instead of defending their base, they would let players from the other team sneak in, and grab the flag. They would camp out somewhere near the flag and once the enemy took it, they would try to kill them. This resulted in a +5 points rather than +1 for a normal kill. This is clearly a less effective way of defending in the overall scheme of the game, but players would do this just for the stats.
I adapted, and upped my playing time for a week, and of course I was ranked #1.
In Mortal Kombat Deception for PS2, I'm currently ranked in the top 10. I can tell you that the #1 player is padding his stats (No, I wont tell you how but it's fairly obvious) and I can tell you that I will take #1 probably this weekend since I figured out what he is doing and how to do it in a more efficent manner.
In closing, I can tell you overall stats are bullshit, the only way to settle who is the best is VIA tournament play or ladders. I played in the 1v1 OGL UT league and worked my way up to play the #1 ranked player on that ladder, and the players on there were 100x better than any of the stat whores could ever hope to be.
Stats are nice to help your gaming skill though. Knowing that you die 70% of the time with the Chaingun as compared to 30% of all the other weapons can quickly make you realize fairly quickly that you shouldn't use it or that you are using it in the incorrect situations.
I'd like to see online games in the future have built in ladder or tournament systems rather than plain out stats, since in my experence purely statistical systems are always exploited.
I love keeping stats. Ever since I played Perfect Dark on the N64 (it saved nearly every stat imaginable to your player saved game, from kill/death stats, to how far you have run in km), I've wanted every game to have something similar, yet havn't seen anything like it since. Halo 2 has online stats, but what about for the endless hours playing LAN?
..on the game I am playing.
..and you have to take the stats with a pinch of salt anyways. :)
I play mostly on the xbox and I do care about the stats/stop myself from throwing the controller when I am playing a game like Top Spin (singles) where I, and only I, am responsible for my scores. Yes, I do want to be one of the best in this case.
OTOH, while playing games like Rainbow Six3, stats have little importance to me as they depend on many factors, one of them being who you play with. I do not belong to a clan so my game stats vary depending on the team-communication/covering each other. In games like Retrieval(RainbowSix CTF), my stats suck as I am the guy with the canister most of the time.. I like doing that but I get shot a lot too. unfortunately, the game does not have a column for successfully retrieving the canister. Big deal.. I have loads of fun playing these.
--
someone who never exploited the lean glitch in the original RS63
PS: yes, I know how to use that glitch
Let me guess. You also work 100 hour weeks. Your friends call you the gipper. Your favourite expression is "take one for the team".
That is one game where stats fail to tell the whole story. How many points do you get for fixing stuff? Or repairing the heavy at the main entrance who racks up 83 kills and no deaths, largely because you keep him alive with the repair pack and run to and fro with ammo? How many points is piloting the APC that drops off the team what takes out their generator?
I did get invites to a couple of different clans at different times, but I guarantee you, it was not from my position on the score sheet.
Maybe in deathmatching where kills are all, they make more sense. But in my experiences with Tribes, good team play beats hell on a good fighter, he may get lots of kills, but he probably is not going to significantly affect the outcome of the game. Where team-work is important, the final score is the only stat that applies...
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Not at all.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This article specifically talks about multiplayer games, but what about if you want to compare your single player stats with the stats racked up by your friends?
For San Andreas and Katamary Damacy, I've had to create a page that we can all individually update. Not so bad for KD, but for San Andreas' level of stats, it just gets a little crazy updating everything all the time.
If I could export the stats into an xml file, I'd be in heaven.
I play Medal of Honor Allied Assault. The clan I'm in has several different groups within the whole. We have around 70 members and we host 2 games servers. Someone in the clan ran across ServerMonitor.com and so we thought it'd be cool to try it out. It is a pay service so one of the clan members decided to contribute by paying the monthly fee. After three weeks of trying to contact ServerMonitor because the player stats weren't functioning properly I decided to try something else. Another member found a php based player stat system that someone had written and it was free. So after some setup and tweaking the scripts to suit our needs these stats are far better than teh pay service. The pay service scored a player based on the team victory and the overall time that player spent in teh game. Once the new system was in place the clan member that had been ranked #1 dropped to 65. Seems his kill to death ratio was lower than he though. We don't use them to say one person is better than another. Machine power and connection speeds have as much to do with your overall skill level than actual skill does. I have noticed an improvement in my overall score, yet I do not like the level of competitiveness it has brought out in me. Overall I don't think stats are a bad thing, but I have noticed they make me try harder.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Warcraft III on battle.net seems to have something similar, where it tries to group players of similar skill. Lately it doesn't seem to work quite as well as it used to (they've changed the way it interprets player stats over time), but perhaps I'm just not seeing the background categorization.
Also, the level system is rather nice... a certain amount of experience points gets you to a higher level, which probably means almost nothing anyhow but I have found myself playing "just one more deathmatch" to try and raise to lvl14 from lvl13. There's also stats based on kills (50 kills for a new personal icon, 150 for the next step, etc), and various other goodies that reward playing.
If anything, I've found the levelling rather interesting as a reward structure (even if you lose a match but do better in points than some opponents it seems that you can gain rather than lose), and it's definately interesting to gauge my win/loss ratio to see how I've improved as a player (a lot).
I think stats are great, the more detailed the better! I wouldn't look at stats for 90% of the games I play, but I think they are very important in fostering a competitive community around a game. For instance, I am playing a lot of Warcraft 3 right now, and Battle.net keeps an insane amount of stats on your games, which provides me with a great resource to look at what trends I can find in my playing, and can help me identify what I could do to make myself a better player. Of course, if I was just playing a game here and there with friends I would hardly ever check it out, but as I play several games a night trying to become a good player, it is important to me to have that resource. When I used to play Counter-Strike, it was nice to have stat tracking just to give me another reason to try an excel. We had a ladder on our CS servers, so playing well to try and boost my stats to climb higher on the ladder was fun, and enhanced the replay value of the game. Stats are a great thing, especially for pro-level competition games.
At one point in time, I would have said "hell yeah!" but now that I'm living in the real world, I just want to have peaceful fun.
There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.