Request: scoreboard changes

[Armonddd]

GSF has been out for a while now, and I think most players will agree that the scoreboard is not currently organized in an ideal way.

 

Like the ground game, the GSF scoreboard prioritizes kills. It is the first statistic shown when reading from left to right, and it is the sole criteria for default sorting; when the scoreboard pops up, the player on top (with the most prestige and recognition) is the player with the most kills. Perhaps unlike the ground game (I wouldn't know), this is not a particularly informative or even important statistic.

 

I suspect -- and confirmation from others would be very appreciated -- that the human eye is attracted to the leftmost columns and tends to pay less attention to columns farther to the right.

 

Both solo kills and damage per second, two comparatively important statistics, are hidden in mouseover tooltips. Information for support ships, such as damage granted and healing done, is omitted entirely.

 

The scoreboard would be much more useful if the information were presented differently. I propose the following columns, in order from left to right:

 

• Player name (mouseover tooltip: ships flown and percentage of time flown in this match, e.g. Flashfire -- 75%; Novadive -- 25%)
  
• Damage per second (mouseover tooltip: total damage done, number of blaster shots fired, number of missiles fired, etc, zeros omitted)
  
• Solo kills
  
• Kills + Assists (mouseover tooltip: kills, assists, and longest kill streak)
  
• Deaths (unchanged)
  
• Hit % (unchanged)
  
• Repairs (mouseover tooltip: number of repair skills activated (exclude zero healing), number of allies buffed, number of enemies debuffed)
  
• Objectives (unchanged)
  
• Medals (unchanged)
  

[Altheran]

Changing "Damage" for DPS isn't desirable, IMO. If repairs are going to be displayed in total, so should be damage. Going for two different standards for similar data will only confuse people.

 

P.S. : the ground game sorts scores by medals. Sometimes I wonder why GSF don't.

Edited April 22, 2014 by Altheran

[Armonddd]

Medals don't give rewards in GSF, so I can understand why they don't sort that way.

 

I neglected to mention that while DPS is more important than damage, players tend to perceive damage as more important than it actually is and support as less important than it actually is. Thus why DPS is presented next to total repairs; the bigger/smaller numbers help offset that perception.

[Altheran]

Medals don't give rewards in GSF, so I can understand why they don't sort that way.

 

I neglected to mention that while DPS is more important than damage, players tend to perceive damage as more important than it actually is and support as less important than it actually is. Thus why DPS is presented next to total repairs; the bigger/smaller numbers help offset that perception.

 

In our case, I think DPS isn't more important than damage because the game isn't calculating damage/battling time but damage/game length... Basically just a different way to display total damage that will interest only hardcore pilots.

 

And I think that what interest people the most, is their place on the board.

In other words, that's how the game sorts scores by default that will have the most influence.

So I think that as long as scores are sorted by kills, meaning almost a direct cause of damage, whether you make damage look puny compared to repairs by displaying DPS instead, people won't really care about repairs as it's not what will make them top the boards.

However, if you find a sorting criteria that is blind to whether it's offense or support that you did... People will likely be less biased. And that's why medal sorting is interesting.

Edited April 22, 2014 by Altheran

[Kalphitis]

• Player name (mouseover tooltip: ships flown and percentage of time flown in this match, e.g. Flashfire -- 75%; Novadive -- 25%)
  
• Damage per second (mouseover tooltip: total damage done, number of blaster shots fired, number of missiles fired, etc, zeros omitted)
  
• Solo kills
  
• Kills + Assists (mouseover tooltip: kills, assists, and longest kill streak)
  
• Deaths (unchanged)
  
• Hit % (unchanged)
  
• Repairs (mouseover tooltip: number of repair skills activated (exclude zero healing), number of allies buffed, number of enemies debuffed)
  
• Objectives (unchanged)
  
• Medals (unchanged)
  

 

Your scoreboard change preferences would only offer some benefits in Deathmatches.

 

Most games are Domination (60%) -- having DPS and Solo Kills listed first really doesn't lend itself to showing who the best domination player was. Admittedly, medals and objective points don't really mean a lot either.

 

I do like a lot of your ideas though, some comments:

 

-Other posts have argued over Total Damage or DPS...without going into too much detail, I prefer total damage shown as opposed to DPS

 

-Solo Kills is a bad stat to track -- it's best as it is now as a mouse-over. We should encourage people to work together (the wingman concept), not encourage people to fly off and do their own thing.

 

-I like the Kills+Assists concept. Total kills is misleading, and can encourage people to only work on getting the final 'kill shot'. Total assists is also misleading, and can encourage people to just tap multiple targets. Combined would be best. This wouldn't have to also change the existing starfighter records categories that each player has.

 

-I really like the idea of showing total repairs on the scoreboard. Those folks don't get enough credit.

 

One other thing I would change is how objective scoring works. In domination, you basically get no credit for flying around a satellite unless you already own it, or successfully assault it. If you spend 2 minutes unsuccessfully assaulting a satellite, you should get some props for it.

[General_Brass]

One other thing I would change is how objective scoring works. In domination, you basically get no credit for flying around a satellite unless you already own it, or successfully assault it. If you spend 2 minutes unsuccessfully assaulting a satellite, you should get some props for it.

 

Should be the same as flying around a captured satellite.

[-Streven-]

The scoreboard would be much more useful if the information were presented differently. I propose the following columns, in order from left to right:

 

• Player name (mouseover tooltip: ships flown and percentage of time flown in this match, e.g. Flashfire -- 75%; Novadive -- 25%)
  
• Damage per second (mouseover tooltip: total damage done, number of blaster shots fired, number of missiles fired, etc, zeros omitted)
  
• Solo kills
  
• Kills + Assists (mouseover tooltip: kills, assists, and longest kill streak)
  
• Deaths (unchanged)
  
• Hit % (unchanged)
  
• Repairs (mouseover tooltip: number of repair skills activated (exclude zero healing), number of allies buffed, number of enemies debuffed)
  
• Objectives (unchanged)
  
• Medals (unchanged)
  

 

I really like all these suggestions. I absolutely love the first bullet. Whenever I'm checking the scoreboard I ALWAYS wonder what ships were being flown. As is, the current scoreboard is a poor indicator of overall performance.

[Pilgrim_Grey]

Should be the same as flying around a captured satellite.

 

Yeah, if you're working that hard to capture something, it should count.

 

I wouldn't mind a change in the scoreboard either, but I still prefer overall damage to dps. DPS is rather iffy in a game of short, fast encounters like Starfighter, I think.

 

For the rankings, I kind of wish it was weighted by a combination of kills and assists, and maybe objectives. I have seen plenty of people (including myself) that were fourth or fifth down because of their kill standing, even though they were higher for assists and objectives by a good margin (and maybe damage!). Just weird to me, since all a kill means is you go the last bit of damage in.

[Kuciwalker]

I am somewhat surprised to find that I don't agree with this proposal at all - in fact, I think it is almost completely wrong.

 

First, I think the appropriate purpose of the scoreboard is to show relative, not absolute, performance. "Absolute" performance is unknowable and incalculable anyway (for the same reason that Elo is not portable between disconnected player pools). Just like with Warzones, the goal is to show a ranking of players within the match.

 

With that in mind, replacing any quantity with that quantity per second is meaningless, since the denominator is equal for all players in the match (barring people who join or leave mid-match, which is an unimportant edge case).

 

Second, I am dubious of "solo kills". If your concern is that people are doing only a tiny bit of damage and getting credit for the kill, that concern seems deeply misplaced for three reasons:

 

1. Finishing off the enemy that has a tiny sliver of remaining hull but has been eluding your allies for two minutes is a valuable contribution to the team.
   
2. In a random scrap, the person who is able to do the most damage in reasonably-sized bursts (that can get through shields to hit the hull) is most likely to get the kill anyway, given a reasonable positive correlation between kills and value.
   
3. The Assists and Damage columns provide additional data that mitigate the weaknesses of Kills.
   

 

By contrast, solo kills has three glaring weaknesses:

 

1. It can be indicative of (and encourage) bad play, because solo kills only happen when you aren't focus firing.
   
2. The difference between a kill and a solo kill can easily be just a tiny sliver of damage - damage that can occur at any time. Contrast this with regular kills, which can only be "stolen" with damage at a particular moment.
   
3. Related to (1), it is wildly unbalanced between ship classes, since some ships simply should not be getting solo kills when played effectively with a effective team.
   

 

(1) is really damning here. The idea here is that if I'm setting up to kill some fresh target, but then see him hit with a full-charge ion railgun, I should veer off to find some virgin target that can offer me a solo kill? That's an absurd incentive structure.

 

Regarding showing "kills + assists": dear god no. This already is fairly annoying in warzones because of how it inflates the kill column, but its acceptable there because time-on-target is much higher in the ground game and getting the killing blow is less important. In GSF getting the killing blow is important in itself and requires more than just maximizing your dps - it requires focusing that dps into continuous bursts.

 

I agree that healing done should be shown on the main screen.

[Zharik]

And I think that what interest people the most, is their place on the board.

In other words, that's how the game sorts scores by default that will have the most influence.

 

^ So true. ^

 

Oh yeah, and the only reason DPS is superior to total damage is what about the poor guy who got pulled in halfway through the match and looks bad for a lower total damage than his peers? DPS would auto adjust for that.

Edited April 23, 2014 by Zharik

[Kuciwalker]

I am ambivalent about the objective points in domination.

 

I think the reason that objective points are given for defending a held satellite but not for attacking a neutral/enemy satellite is to give an incentive to node-guarders - you don't need an incentive to fly around enemy satellites because that's where the action is. That's a pretty reasonable goal. (The incentive isn't in the scoreboard ranking so much as in the requisition earned.)

 

That said, it's annoying that this makes the objective points statistic basically useless and a waste of scoreboard space. I think I'd prefer if it were replaced with # of satellite captures, which is probably the best (though still imperfect) measure of contribution to competitive domination matches.

[Zharik]

I think the reason that objective points are given for defending a held satellite but not for attacking a neutral/enemy satellite is to give an incentive to node-guarders - you don't need an incentive to fly around enemy satellites because that's where the action is. That's a pretty reasonable goal. (The incentive isn't in the scoreboard ranking so much as in the requisition earned.)

 

Incentive for guarding is good, but if half your team is sitting on your lone satellite, good luck prying one of the other two from the enemy. I can't tell you how many times I have had to say something when the score hits like 600-300 and we've still got 3 guys sitting on a very uncontested satellite where the rest of are team is *so close* to turning another satellite neutral...

 

Maybe defense points should only give half reqs for a loss. (or double for a win, either way encourage players to play to win)