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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
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!
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...
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.
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.
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.
...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 .
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?
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
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.