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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
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!
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...
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