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?"

Comments

University

[Deliveranc3]

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.

Re:University

[zangdesign]

It was pretty unifying, but I think it might have discouraged new players.

Good point. Running up against extremely experienced players while trying to improve my own meager skills tends to be pretty discouraging in online games and has actually driven me away from them on occasion. Apparently, Halo 2 has some mechanism in place to at least attempt to place gamers of similar levels in competition, which is helpful to those of us without the copious amounts of time that students seem to have.

Grand Theft Auto?

[Joel from Sydney]

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.

Re:Stats are nice

[superpulpsicle]

Call of Duty stats are far more accurate than Enemy Territory stats, which are warped to hell with all these cheats. That game is officially doomed on the network. There is not nearly enough patches, and there are far too many hacks immune to punkbuster.

"Infinite landmines"

"Airstrike thru walls"

"1 hit kills"

"Super fast ammo charges"

"Starting campaign with top level abilities"

I am not making this stuff up. I talk to enough ET admins who monitor their servers up close. Even they don't know how to actively ban and kick 24/7. As if ET pro bringing down everyone's performance wasn't enough to affect stats.

Re:Stats

[AuMatar]

On the other hand, I find stats detract fromt he game. People start worrying about the little numbers and stop having fun just playing. and if you're teammates with them, you either have to start putting absurd importance on them or they act like assholes to you. It detracts from the game experience. I don't want an overarching experience, I want a game. If I want a persistant experience I'll play an MMO.