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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?"
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.