Kills, Deaths and Score

[GoodOl'Ben]

Hey guys!

I'm currently feeling very revolutionary and radical, so bear with me here.

One thing that I've come to notice with MB2 from time to time is that we've looked at this game with blinds on for so long that we've made some really wonky decisions and solutions. One of my favorite pet peeves is kills and deaths.

STORY TIME!

Right now if you kill a soldier with 3 lives, you will get 0.3333333 kills out of this. In turn the dead soldier will receive 0.333333 deaths. The reasoning here a long time ago was that we had soldiers give off a kill only when their last life expired. Then people didn't like this as people often rushed for the last soldier and killing the previous lives were meaningless. Then we introduced the system of giving 0.3333 kills for this and deaths would amount to 0.3333 as well. Sounds about fair right? Yeah kinda great!

Let's go forward a few builds. People felt it was unfair for deaths to be tracked like this for solds. You might be alive at the end of the round but you might've still accumulated a death this round due to dying once and filling up your fractional death pool. This sucked.

We changed it so that the sold would have to lose all lives to get a death. Fair since a Jedi won't get a death for losing 50 HP during a round right? This lead to solds camping with their last lives which could sometimes frustrate players. As of late we have returned back to the system we had years back.

Often from new players I've heard confused questions like: "I killed a player but I didn't get a kill?" This got me thinking if we should think bigger.

For years now we've had a scoreboard that tracks score earned by players and it's a decent measure of a player's input and ranks people based on their score/round ratio. The score earned for kills uses fractional kills to a degree: Killing a soldier will give you 4 points, killing a jedi will give you 12 points. Great! The score system seems to be the best way of tracking a player's impact on the round and K/D is more like a nice-to-have thing on the side. So now's the time for the big question: What if we made all kills count as kills and a player is counted as dead when their last life is killed.

There are some really cool things that would happen from this.

• No newbie confusion regarding hidden kill/death tally mechanics
• Your K/D stats would look far nicer as a single-lifer
• A positive K/D will not be nearly as hard to achieve

Technically all the important valuation for a soldier's life is handled in score, so we could turn K/D to match actual kills and deaths. In similar fashion we can bloat assists to match this since assists also were tallied in fractions.

I'll put this change in if people like it.

 

[KaineMAF]

I don't think what he said is really irrelevant. He's just saying "why are we focusing on this, there are other areas of importance?" -- which is fair.

I can see that, And I agree with him completely, but this is a thread for a certain topic, it doesn't matter how weird or pointless that topic is, it is the focus of said thread.

 

[Jacen Solo]

No thanks i want a competitive game

 

[SomeGuy]

I really like other games' scoreboards where K/D is only visible to yourself and everyone else is just by score. Stops people from trying to brag about their K/D and actually play the game. Maybe make assists and doing objective count for more points.

So, I would say no to your idea, and to just go the opposite direction.

IIRC multi life classes used to only grant kills and deaths when their last life was taken, so a soldier who only died 2 times every round could have an X/0 K/D which kind of misrepresents what happens. On the other hand they're squishy so it doesn't take much to end one. I like the fractional system.