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[57th]cneal
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21 - 05-25-2003, 18:07
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From my understanding, UT1 had a stat program. I'm also guessing that U2 had one also so in that case, having that implemented into T:V would help teams find the right person

However for pubs I think the best way of dealing with them is to just make everything non team oriented.

The bombs on the bomber should work 100% for the pilot. Deploying bombs, tossing of flares (if we’re going to have the rocket launcher again :\) etc. Bases should be simpler so that you don't need to have someone full time on gens and the inventories should be close to the outdoors so that anyone can farm if they need to. Repair packs should be close to the base as well. Sanctuary for example had the repair pack way out there and if someone did pick it up and say ran further into the canyon, you could say history to the r-pack until another one spawned. The flag should never have been inside a base. Instead, it should be outdoors where a constant eye can be kept on the flag for the entire game thus if nobody sees a HoF, they can suite up and take the roll.

As far as offence is concerned. Smaller maps mean that everyone will know where everyone else is. Make routes that twist around eachother or trail close to eachother so that if one capper is spotted going on one trail, you can switch over to the other trail and cap from that angle. And of course, like I said before the gens, inventory and turrets need to be out in the open so that someone can see if their destroyed before going in. I can't say how many times either I or someone else ran into an enemy gen room only to find that it was destroyed.
 
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[57th]cneal
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22 - 05-25-2003, 18:14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RenGen
I'm expecting flames for this but, REMOVE THE INDIVIDUAL POINT SYSTEM.

It's ****ing WORTHLESS and does NOTHING but contribute to point whorage on pubs. Leave it for match maybe? I don't know, just kill it from pubs. There's really no reason we need to know how much better player 1 is doing in comparison to player 2, when all that matters is who caps the flag more times.

I honestly think that if we couldn't look at each others' points, there would be a lot less bull**** to deal with.
A lot of people hated the point system. It was the only way Dave could think of getting people to do these jobs. Turret kills were like 5pts and gen repair was a pt etc etc.
 
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[57th]cneal
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23 - 05-25-2003, 18:25
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ricefrog
deployable turrets can only be acquired at a special sort of an inventory station. this would let maps determine not only the presence or lack of deployable turrets, but also the areas in which it would be easy to deploy them.

if the turret inventory is in the basment by the gens, then it's easy to farm up the cellar, but time-consuming to farm out the flag area. a dedicated farmer could still farm the flag, but clearing it would mean that the farm wouldn't be replaced in .5 seconds from the deployed inv nearby.

of course, that would make farming even less fun than it is already. :P
I don't want turret types and I don't want inventory types to go along with the types. But I will tell you one idea that either I or someone else had. That is to get rid of computer controlled stuff and to have it all operated by the player. It would be like how you can take control of a turret in t1 however this idea uses the laser pointer to operate the turret. So if you're on a mountain or in a tower, you can point and aim at the area that you want the turrets to fire on i.e. a take or an enemy etc.
 
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Shinigami
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24 - 05-25-2003, 18:29
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Quote:
Originally Posted by [57th]cneal
A lot of people hated the point system. It was the only way Dave could think of getting people to do these jobs. Turret kills were like 5pts and gen repair was a pt etc etc.
Dave sucks at thinking.
 
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Alexander
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25 - 05-25-2003, 19:27
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We tried the no points thing on Rapture Competition East and people did even less to help when they weren't held accountable for sucking. When I f2 and see someone other than a capper with less than 50 points after 30 minutes, I know it's time for that person to take a involuntary break from the game. With no score, it's impossible to find those people, and it's more difficult to kick the tk-ing assholes.
 
 
RenGen
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26 - 05-25-2003, 19:36
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Is there anything else we could try Kines? :/
 
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TreW_SoulJa
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27 - 05-25-2003, 20:20
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i dont like any of cneal's ideas and i disagree with all of them

(no offense to cneal)


anyway here's what i think, in TR1 the ratings were simple and you could truly tell how well someone was contributing to the game, and when they threw in team mixing after maps, it was pretty accurate and effective (i *think* they evened out the worst players and the best players so each team had the same amount).

Thing is, in CTF there is a ****load of stuff i can do that helps my team that the stats would miss, and i think about this all the time while im pubbing. (e.g. i could clear the flag for EVERY cap and we win cuz i cleared, but the stats wouldnt know it). KP knows this.

A thought i have is, if i remember back in the good ol' days of T1, the admins of the good servers were very personal, and pubbed a lot (s3's donut, 5150 W/E, cheater's, speed's). I think a method to evening the teams is to, between maps, randomize the teams based on ratings given by admins.

Here's an example. I'm an admin. I know that all of KoV are good players, and specific players are more dominating. So i'll get a roster list from the captain and i'll give everyone on that team a rating of, say, 7 out of 10, and the dominating players i'll give 8/10 or 9/10. And if i know a team called [E5] sucks, then i'll get the roster list from TWL or something, and i'll give all those players 2/10. Then when teams are resorted the players with high ratings, and low ratings, etc, will be spread out to equal-ish numbers per team, such that the ratings will add up and be within a certain number. The team rating could be listed in the 'tab' menu right along with team names and score (and team size?), so that people can know which team may have the advantage.

Thing is, that leaves the ratings completely up to the admins' judgement. And we all know admins can be and often are biased.

So to double check it we could correlate it with a stat-based ratings list to do adjustments to the ratings, because an admin isnt going to want to give ratings to ALL players of course. Also, if u have limited or no history with the server, they'd just throw you in the 'unkown masses' pile and sort you randomly.

And for the underrated player that affects the outcome of the game a lot but doesnt get recognized...well...we can just live with that.

One last thing...

as a fun/cool feature, maybe have a vote option between maps to vote for the MVP of the map. It could be based on a per-team MVP or a MVP for the whole map, both teams. Sometimes my team gets beat in a pub and i know exactly who it was that made the other team win.

I'd rather have an MVP vote than the stat awards, it could show up at the start of the next map and say 'Last map's MVP was ____' maybe. (gotta have time for ppl to vote)
 
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[57th]cneal
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28 - 05-25-2003, 21:02
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Except you're going to have teams and friends that want to play with eachother on the same team :\
 
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Sir Lucius
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29 - 05-25-2003, 22:36
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I think having admins giving out trophies and mvp votes would lead to a huge favorites system that would be highly abused.


I think the problem with the points system we see in tribes1 and tribes2 is it takes objective information and uses it to draw a subjective rank (their point value.) Perhapes what we need to do is have the computer report just the objective data and let people draw their own conclusion. The rankings would then be driven by a group mentality bases on the objective reports of the server.


Now the problem comes in reporting that objective material in a way that can be read quickly, so I'll dedicate the rest of my post to analyzing such a system (please realize it's all just brainstorming -- I hate sounding like I'm giving out orders by saying something like "this should be [/u]this[/u].")

Ok first of all, most of would agree that most roles are divided up into offense and defense. But really there are some gray areas, such as someone playing midfield who would chase cappers, esscort carriers, or just pick off strays. Or those who would fly a vehicle around the map ending up on either side of the map. I can really think of no fair way to distinguish a role for these people since half the time they're on D and the other half of the time they're on O. The most fair method I can come up with then is to record the activites of both (objective )
If we use the flagstand way points to distinguish which zone belons to Offense, and which zone belongs to Defense we can draw a line down the median to determine where the player's current activity is taking place. Alternetly we could use base waypoints and raw a radius around those base waypoints were any overlap or exclusion could be considerd nuetral. I don't really like adding extra zones as it will make things harder to read in the future, but I think I may like the radius system better. You could even add an OOB zone, but once again, readability is a factor. Flooding people with information isn't always the best way to go.

Ok, let's go with O/D/N (offense, defense, neutral) using the radius system just for the sake of foundation and start comming up with important role defining stats.

First of all, I think the first thing to display on our player roster is where everyone is spending their time in game. The quickest way to come up with comparitive results for this is tiny bar graphs. Just pick 3 colors (I'll use Red for O, Green for D, and Gray for N) and make a bar graph that represents the time each person has spent in which zone of the map. It's quick, it's easy, and it gives at a quick glance an idea where people are spending their time on the map. Very objective, ok let's move on so we can determine a way for people to distingusih if that's time well spent, or if they're only jerking off.

Now it gets complicated. There are a billion things people could be doing, and like SoulJa said, it's hard for a computer to determine what's important. So let's stay focused are list objective things.

Armor Prefernce [vehicle prefernce?]
Kills [contains about 3094203234 sub stats]
Destruction [blowing up turrents, gens, etc]
Deploying/Repairing
Capping


First is easy, Armor/Vehicle prefernce. We can get a fairly good idea what kind of role someone is trying to fill by what armor they change into most often between spawns. It should be too dificult to come up with a fair algorithm to determine a favorite, but I can't decide if a favorite armor (which may be too subjective) should take the place the current armor. On the one hand, people can change roles in the middle of the map giving a flase status in results. On the other hand people looking at the roster will undoubtably see people midchange which could lead to a false impression of their role.
I don't want to clutter up the screen by showing both. Really what's important is what's going on at any current time, thus it's not very important to factor what someone was doing at the beginning of the map (I know, it contradicts the idea of my zone time logger from before) Ok, here's a solution (and this can work for the zone time logger too): Only display the favorite armor of the last 2 minutes (1,3,5 whatever, I picked 2). As you can see this is getting pretty complicated. I finish up by saying armor prefernce should (imo) bedivided into: naked(for those who do not visit an inv at all), light, medium, heavy, and possibly vehicle (if you spend more time in a vehicle than anything else -- getting subjective again, but it's still based on simple math and not so much opinion influenced algorithm. Of course you'd specify which vehicle) I think that the can best, and most compact way to display this imformation is with a mini icon or letter system. I would color code it for even easier readability as it might be hard to tell the medium form a skinny or a fatty, and it could be difficult to display a vehicle with a 40x40 icon. You coulc even go as simple as a letter, but that could lead to confusion (what does the N mean?) Icon with a letter overlay may be nice. Whatever, I'm sure irrational has better plans for the GUI than me.

W00t! We can move on (jesus ****ing christ this is long...Thank you if you actually ended up reading this far -- I think we're half way there ) Ok...Kills. This is one of the biggest deals and probably a big soft spot for a lot of people. Which kills are more important? Well, that's why we're objective about it :] It'd be outright stupid to report every single sub stat in kills, we can simplify by only reporting according to zones, but then our reports aaren't accurate enough to be role defining. Ok, since I'm brainstorming I'm going to create another list of the important factors that go into kills.
--
Zone Location of Hunter (this is you)
Zone Location of Pray (this is the bad guy)
-->Locations could be as follows: O, D, N or OOB
--
Kills of flag carrier
Kills of flag esscort
Kills of flag chaser
Kills of HoF
--> these are all important as they have to do with the flag
That leaves the other **** you can kill, which includes farmers, repair monkeys, the LD, the HD, piolets, HOs, and custom roles.

Now LD are usually scatterd all over the enemy zone
People hanging around assets like turrets and gens are usually guarding (when it comes to gens) or reapairing them. They're usually just fodder as the attackers main objective is the gen, turret, or inv station.
When it comes to the flag, you are almost always out to kill the *****.
As for those playing D, anything that comes into your base's zone needs to die.

So then, what do we need to keep track of reguarding kills? I thin we need to look at location (O/D/N) and assets (gens, turrets, invs, flag). Ok, time for me to list.

Flag O Kills (clearing, esscorting)
Flag D Kills (kills made by those who kill enemies with the flag or around the flag)
Assest D Kills (Gen/Inv Guards who kills would be saboteurs)
General D (Defenders who kill enemies in their general zone (ho's, esscorts & cappers not around the flag, etc)
General O Kills (those who go O and just blow the enemies up. Gen guards, farmers, light D, etc)
OOB kills (these people are generally worthless, but who knows.)
N kills (only will happen when there's no flag around. Probably someone killing an incomming Ho...or someone tag chasing)
Turret kills (might as well keep track of them here)
Teamkills

Ok, that's a fiar ammount of kill stats. I'm sure I left out plenty of roles, but they'll fall into general O or general D. What's important is that these kills aren't given any special point vaules to weigh aginst each other. What will happen is a person's kill proficiency will be displayed and nothing else. It's a little tricky to determine a kill proficiency, and maybe even a little subjective. But we'll take the most obvious and just say which ever kill stat is the highest will be displayed as the profeceny. There after we can (maybe important, maybe not) display another bar graph of the next top 5 (4,2 whatever) as a percentage of the top proficiency. This would be subject to some testing. General D kills may unbalance Flag D kills for example. I'm not going to go into details, b/c I'm sure many people would have many differnt ways to organize it, but I hope you get the general idea.

Ok! (jesus christ this is long, I'll bet I could type whatever the **** I wanted to right now and it wouldn't matter b/c you probably wouldn't read it anyways. I think I've been typing for 2 hours. Jesus. Ok I'll make up a tribe joke as an intermission if you're actually still with me. "Why do Heavy Armors make lousy medicine men? B/c thier mortars always explode!" ahhhhh....ok moving on )
Destruction stats!!! This is easy to track. How much of what **** does one blow up? Time to list
Base Turrets
Base Sensors
Gens
Inv Stations
Vehicle Stations (if they have these)
Deployable Turrets
Deployable Invs
Other Deployable **** no one really gives a **** about

This one's just like the kill stat tracking. It records how much of the ENEMY **** you blow up and then displays your proficieny (gens, invs, etc) and how many times you've blown it up. Then bar graph the next top five (color coded as always). I don't really need to explain it all that more. I'm sure there would be tweaking involved, but as always, just general brainstorming.



Deploying and Repairing. I grouped these to gether b/c it's all contructive.

First repair stats. List:
Gens
Invs
Turrets
Deployables
Players
Yea, I simlifyed it a bit. But it should give a good idea of what these monkeys repair the most, so you can tell them to stop ****ing with deployables. I dunno, I'm even considering this a waste of bandwidth even. I guess we all agree that repair is the most suck job there is. But then there are deployables, that would overright any contructive stats (so farmers don't look like an ass). And I'd even consider having the constuction/detruction stat display one or the other. Anyways, turrters would get their kill records in the kill stat, but damge they inflict would go into an efficiency (points of damage induced vs. points of damage repaired? Invs would just have to work based on use. I have no idea how to compare it to the other construction area. Loadouts changed? Ammo resupplied? I have no idea. The whole constuction stat seems rather stupid, but if someone took the time to organize it useful information could be displayed.


Finally (holy ****, FIANLLY) there is capping. Nice and easy to track. What to record?
Caps
Grabs
Yea, do both. It should give an idea of who's at least trying I think. Well, that seems simple enough.



Ok, there you have it. Now here's an example of how the stat screen would look (only your team, I see no reason why you should know what the other team is doing).




Yeah, well, maybe that still looks a little hard to read. Better color coding or something.


Oh well, that concludes my idea.
 
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Blotter
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30 - 05-25-2003, 22:46
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good idea lucious. thanks for the thoughtout post, yes i read it all. it actually does look like a good foundation if they were the implement somehting like this. it'd be a bit complicated at first, but i think the end result would be huge for a pub experience.

and cappers should have a "distance traveled" or something, basically to show how far they got the flag.

lol, nice joke btw.

edit
i also dislike the idea of an MVP feature for obvious reasons (favorites)
if it was automated somehow, and given out fairly... somehow... id be for it. just seems impossible
 
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Last edited by Blotter; 05-25-2003 at 22:55..
Fling
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31 - 05-26-2003, 00:45
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Last night I started to post but really didn't have anything constructive to say, as I think the fundamental problem with pubs lies with the fact they are pubs. By definition anyone can play, anyway they want, and often they choose to play lazily. I really don't know how to fix it, because to do so would mean making people care. But! I will make a suggestion

Perhaps a tracking system such as lucious suggested coupled with a way for people to see the statistics when they are not in game. So you somehow attach a preset(1-10) level of prestige to a person's name(also might keep smurfing down). Now what exactly you take to define someone's prestige rating; I don't know, because as stated there are many jobs and certainly couldn't be based on kills alone. Make the prestige rating go up and down. So If you are worthless in pubs it could go down. Then finally make it so server admins could set the acceptable prestige-level on thier servers meaning you would have to be of a certain rank to be allowed to play on said server.

Make it filterable so you can set a range of levels, a highest allowed to play level, and a lowest allowed to play, and of course none at all. This would do away for the need of "private pub" servers that the passwords to will eventually filter out for. It would give people something to strive for, ie they want to play at the top and stay there. It would keep newbies out of high caliber servers, and perhaps awesome players out of 'fun' servers. If you want to dick around with your new buddy you wouldn't be able to ruin everyone else's fun on a top level server.

Servers would fine thier own level system as too high settings would see the server get not enough traffic and too low settings could/would be the same as servers are now.

It would need to only keep up with your rating history for like 2 weeks or since the last time you had played. That way you wouldn't be permantently punished for something you did when you were a noobie. As you keep playing well your rating is continually changed, so if you were brand new to the game you would start with no rating, and could join any server that doesn't filter you out. Then your rating either goes up or doesn't change depending on what you do. Your rating level could be calculated at midnight everynight then averaged with your past 2 weeks, so you never have more than 15 statistics for each player and it would be fairly stable.

This, for a high caliber player who enjoys to pub would make it desireable to play right. For those who want to pub with the best but don't have the skills, it would give them something to work for. For those who have the skills but want to be lazy, well they are the biggest problems and it would punish them as thier level would go down. Perhaps make it a votable option for a server to submit statistics to the 'rating making' server so if you get a bunch of guys who want to dick around they can turn it off

Good joke
Fling
 
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TeckMan
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32 - 05-27-2003, 01:41
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Blotter
i mostly pub and im hoping there will be major improvements to pub gameplay in t:v. im pretty sure KP has a good idea about the pitfalls of CTF pubs. things like HO and no base D, stacked defenses, team stacking, etc. i know there will never be a real balance because of different talent levels with players, but i think some things can be done to the gameplay to prevent pub gayness :x

i dont really have any suggestions on how to fix these things, which is kinda why im posting this (help me). it would be nice if people got the team oriented thing, but after t1 and t2, it just doesnt happen to the extent which is called for, well, most of the time it doesnt happen. there are simply positions people dont want to play. lately, things have been scripted into the server - like no inv destruction til 8v8, team randomizing after every map, not allowing to repair turrets after 8v8, etc. i think they help a ton and i hope these kind of features will be in the game by default, not by a 3rd party.

discuss?
how about we just eliminate the positions people don't want to play, they're generally the unskillfull ones anyways.
 
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Shinigami
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33 - 05-27-2003, 04:09
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TeckMan
how about we just eliminate the positions people don't want to play, they're generally the unskillfull ones anyways.
Are you serious? I believe it's quite the opposite.
 
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Sir Lucius
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34 - 05-27-2003, 04:23
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TeckMan
how about we just eliminate the positions people don't want to play, they're generally the unskillfull ones anyways.

I'm sure they'll have an arena/duel-variant gametyoe. Maybe you should just play that or some other mod. They're not getting rid of farmers and the repair pack, I can garentee you that.
 
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TreW_SoulJa
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35 - 05-27-2003, 05:59
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well, the main thing i was really trying to get at in my post was that there are things the server cant track.

maybe it's a map like stonehenge and you know how everyone on DS (i think its DS) uses that bluenose front-cap hill to ski like 90% of the time? What if i'm 'MF' for BE, and basically all im doing all map is getting ONE disc in on every guy that passes me as i stand at the base of that hill. That makes all their LO come in at half health and get tooled by the static LD. If because of me, my team wins. No one will know that by the stats.

and like my other example, how will i be rewarded for clearing the flag every cap if im not killing the HOF always, im just knocking him off the flag? Stats cant track that...

thats why i thought maybe we should have a human element to the player ratings.
 
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Sir Lucius
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36 - 05-27-2003, 06:14
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Some of those things are hard for even a person to judge. You could be clearing away HoFs or chiseling down incomming cappers, but I doubt anyone is going to directly notice you. If you think of it from a server admins point of view, all you're doing is what you're supposed to be doing. It's nothing too exceptional and there are 1000 other people who do the same thing everyday. No one's going to be handing out ribbions for that.

It's a nice thought, but no one wants to be giving out prizes to people who are doing what they should be doing anyways.

Also, the glory's all in the kills. That's why tekman thinks farming positions and the like suck.


But turnabout is fairplay. While your softening dudes up doesn't land you any kills the HoF that makes a body block droping the would be capper into a turret death trap doesn't get the kill either (that's when the farmers when the prize I guess).

If there was someone to come up with a non biased "assist" tracking system it would be a nice solution. But assists are so abstract we'd need a non-linear dynamics driven computational through-put system to even CONSIDER the implementation of such class! (it's hard to do)
 
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TreW_SoulJa
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37 - 05-27-2003, 06:19
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hm, you're right, its the assist tracking thats the pain.

ok, i'm down for a stat-tracking system.

even a list of "mosts" would probably be sufficient for the likes of me.

most ckills
most grabs
most caps

etc.
 
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Blotter
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38 - 05-27-2003, 14:43
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i think "most damage inflicted" would be a good stat

cuz you wont always get those kills, but u could be discing people off there routes and get credit for it at least
 
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Blotter
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39 - 05-27-2003, 14:47
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TeckMan
how about we just eliminate the positions people don't want to play, they're generally the unskillfull ones anyways.
yeah, i almost wanna say just do that, but im afraid we'd be getting into whole new game types. which kinda gets me thinkin if they're a step ahead of us here, since they are keepin there game types quiet. hopefully theyve addressed this and maybe coming up with something new :x

who knows... i was thinkin more of getting those jobs automated in smaller servers, since there wont be enough people to fill in those "undesirable" roles, or maybe somehow forcing people to do it when the server is full and people still don't play them.
 
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[57th]cneal
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40 - 05-27-2003, 15:30
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If the jobs were more fun then people would do them. Repairing for example is one. If there was a repair vehicle or better yet, repair drone that people would get a kick outa controlling then you'd probably have more people interested in repairing stuff. Also HoF is a job that can be frustrating. Do I dare say barrel? Lift one up, chug it on the flag and you have a temporary HoF. Now realistically that wouldn't work since one mortar and your barrel is offset however as a temporary HoF it would do the trick.
 
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