DUST Search - [Suggestion] Overhaul KDR

Sole Fenychs wrote:

Grit Breather wrote:

I don't know if I agree with you on that. Giving 2 killers a full 50 WP reward for doing half the damage for a kill seems wrong to me. Getting to 50 WP should be a special occasion where you feel you did good by doing most of the damage yourself.
With your 120 pool, a single kill could give 2 people 50 WP and a third person 20 WP. That is too much reward for a single kill IMO.

I'm running on the assumption that WP should reward good playing.
Rewarding players for double-teaming enemies without bunching up too much is a good thing in a tactical shooter, imo.

Also, the payout will almost never be 50/50/20. It's more likely to be 50/50/10 or something. Three people will never contributed evenly.
Even two people might very well get 50/35 or something, if one does much more work than the other.
The 120 pool is to even it out slightly to prevent people from hating their buddy for doing one shot more or something. Imagine a 100 pool and you get 45 or something, which means that you did 45% damage. You KNOW that your buddy got 50. You feel cheated, because you contributed only slightly less than him.

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."


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Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 972	Posted - 2014.01.21 09:08:00 - [1] - Quote {TL;DR} KDR in DUST means the same thing as other FPS games, it's the quantity of your deaths vs. the quantity of your kills. This classic meaning doesn't quite match up with what DUST is. I suggest death quantity should remain the same, but kills are merged with kill assists to basically give a running tally of a player's ongoing "contribution to kills". {/TL;DR} I'll start by declaring this: I do not believe the classic meaning of KDR (as in CoD or BF) has very much in common with the type of game DUST is trying to become. On the other hand, DUST is a FPS game so we can't just remove KDR because of the types of players DUST attracts. So what is KDR (Kill to Death Ratio) in DUST today? KDR is a number representing the ratio of your total kills divided by your total deaths. Simple enough, but what does that mean? Let's start with deaths. A death is when you die. Pretty easy to grasp and not much complications there. If I die, my death toll goes up by 1. Makes sense. But what about kills? Well, first we need to look at what a kill is in DUST. Kills in DUST aren't all the straightforward. They are usually not performed by a single player but rather by multiple players at the same time. Once someone dies, the majority of these contributing players gain a Kill Assist and the one lucky (bastard) who deals the last blow gains a Kill. This is the case even if one player stripped away 99% of an enemy's HP and then another player steps in and finishes him off with 1 bullet. I'd hardly call the above rewards and ranking contributions fair. They don't even make sense. So what am I suggesting for kills? First off, we should remove the entire notion of Kill Assists. Why? Because we'll be merging them with Kills in a better way. Now we only have Kills (and Deaths which have not changed). So does every player who shot at an enemy gain a Kill? Yes and no. First the 'yes' part. Every player who shot at a downed enemy should gain a Kill Contribution ranking for his death. How does Kill differ from Kill Contribution? Well, that's the fun part. In my new system, every player gains a fraction of a kill corresponding to the percent of total damage he or she contributed to that kill. For example, let's say 3 players shot at an enemy and eventually took him down. He's dead. The first player stripped away 50% of the enemy's HP while the remaining 2 started shooting a bit later and both contributd an additional 25%. Between the 3 of them they all earned 1 kill. By the numbers in the example above, I suggest the following Kill Contribution be rewarded to each of the 3 players: First - 0.50 Second - 0.25 Third - 0.25 Why do I want this change? Classic KDR is all about being a long wolf, a solo player. The most important thing you do is farm kills and try to stay alive more than the people you kill. But that's not DUST. DUST is about team play. DUST is about one team farming another team as a whole. DUST is about tight knit squads supporting each other. Classic KDR just can't provide the type of metric DUST needs. And what about War Points for kills? I suggest the total kill WP go up from 50 to 60-70. That new score should be split between all the kill contributors according to their contribution percentage. * Optional Extra * This is something I'm not sure about so didn't want to fit it into my main piece. What about deaths and revives? Should a person being revived only contribute 0.5 Kill Contribution points to whomever shot at him? My gut feeling says yes (but maybe a slightly higher number like 0.8) but I am really not sure about this. Now go ahead. Rip through my idea and shred it to bits so I can correct it. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 974	Posted - 2014.01.21 10:01:00 - [2] - Quote Heinz Doofenshertz wrote: Where to being. let's start with deaths. Deaths are only deaths if you die. right now in Dust if you down someone, you get credit for a kill, even if he is latter revived. and even if he is revived, it still counts as a death for him, even though he did not expend a clone. this should be corrected. Correct, this should be corrected. But don't forget that incapacitating a player, even if his clone was eventually revived, should still be rewarded. A squad took him on and took him down. They did their job of pushing the assault. Actual death is only a cherry on top. Heinz Doofenshertz wrote: To correct the death issue, a Kill should only be awarded after clone death. insta kill, bleed out, or respawn. If the clone is revived no kill is awarded, and no death is recorded. I disagree somewhat (not entirely). See above. Heinz Doofenshertz wrote: Kills. a Kill is the ending on a clone, not wounding, not hurting, not downing, A kill, as stated above only when a clone destroyed, should a kill be awarded. the kill goes to the person who killed him, last blow. all others get as current a kill assist. as they helped, if you want to stop other people stealing your kills, Make sure the guy dies when you're shooting him. I fully agree with your use of the current terminology. A Kill is a kill and a Kill Assist isn't. My suggestion of removing both Kills and Kill Assists, and then replacing them with Kill Contribution solves this by giving you an ongoing ratio relating to your overall battle effectiveness. Moreover, DUST should not be about the finishing shot. DUST should be about squad vs. squad and team vs. team. Terms like 'finishing shot' should only be used in games that revolve around solo play. Heinz Doofenshertz wrote: to the Ratio. If you are going to call it a Kill Death ratio, that is waht it is Kills divided by Deaths Kills/Deaths. If you want to take other things into account, say a Kill Assist ratio, an assist death ratio. that's fine those are easy to do. I think the main issue here is that you are upset with the determination of kills or death and not the maths of the ratio itself. I have no issues with renaming KDR to something else that better reflects what this idea demonstrates. We could call it Battle Effectiveness (BE) for example. As for KDR vs. KADR, I don't thing either of them should be in DUST as we have them now. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 977	Posted - 2014.01.21 12:38:00 - [3] - Quote Sole Fenychs wrote: Taking down a player should count as a kill. But there should be a separate statistic of how many killed opponents actually died. Your own deaths, meanwhile, should only count on when a clone is wasted. This is about overall team performance after all, right? Your going down should be tracked, though, because it's still an inconvenience for the team. Partially agree. That is why I suggested this fractioned rewards system. Keep in mind that while deaths shouldn't always count as they do today, take downs should ALWAYS return some sort of a reward. Sole Fenychs wrote: Edit: For the total WP amount, I'd suggest having a pool of 100 or maybe even more, but capped at 50 per player. This prevents lone wolfs from being even stronger loners and makes snipers more likely to actually soften enemies. And keep in mind that WP rewards should be instant gratification. They need to be applied on kill, not on death. Otherwise the delayed feedback will make combat less satisfying. I like that idea of a 100 pool but capping at 50. Should make things more interesting and better balanced. I'd make the pool lower though, somewhere around 90 so you don't get 2 people with a full 50 WP reward if they split the damage 50/50. As for instant gratification, I agree with your point in general but have been struggling with this notion myself. I think if we got a clearer kill notification, the actual WP reward could be delayed until revive/bleed out. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 977	Posted - 2014.01.21 13:16:00 - [4] - Quote Sole Fenychs wrote: Grit Breather wrote: I like that idea of a 100 pool but capping at 50. Should make things more interesting and better balanced. I'd make the pool lower though, somewhere around 90 so you don't get 2 people with a full 50 WP reward if they split the damage 50/50. Actually, thinking about it, two people should always get a full reward if they have about equal contributions. So a 120 pool would make more sense. With that, two players will almost always get their full 50 WP without feeling that someone killstealed them, while groups bigger than that start getting dimishing returns. This also means that people would be more likely to buddy up and maybe drag a logi along. That would be a half-squad and fit into an LAV. It would be an incentive to work in groups without half the team bunching up around a single objective. I don't know if I agree with you on that. Giving 2 killers a full 50 WP reward for doing half the damage for a kill seems wrong to me. Getting to 50 WP should be a special occasion where you feel you did good by doing most of the damage yourself. With your 120 pool, a single kill could give 2 people 50 WP and a third person 20 WP. That is too much reward for a single kill IMO. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 977	Posted - 2014.01.21 13:44:00 - [5] - Quote Sole Fenychs wrote: Grit Breather wrote: I don't know if I agree with you on that. Giving 2 killers a full 50 WP reward for doing half the damage for a kill seems wrong to me. Getting to 50 WP should be a special occasion where you feel you did good by doing most of the damage yourself. With your 120 pool, a single kill could give 2 people 50 WP and a third person 20 WP. That is too much reward for a single kill IMO. I'm running on the assumption that WP should reward good playing. Rewarding players for double-teaming enemies without bunching up too much is a good thing in a tactical shooter, imo. Also, the payout will almost never be 50/50/20. It's more likely to be 50/50/10 or something. Three people will never contributed evenly. Even two people might very well get 50/35 or something, if one does much more work than the other. The 120 pool is to even it out slightly to prevent people from hating their buddy for doing one shot more or something. Imagine a 100 pool and you get 45 or something, which means that you did 45% damage. You KNOW that your buddy got 50. You feel cheated, because you contributed only slightly less than him. Maybe... I agree with you about reward. I just think a 50/50/10 or 50/50/20 split is too high. On this we'll have to disagree I suppose. :) "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 977	Posted - 2014.01.21 14:27:00 - [6] - Quote Sole Fenychs wrote: Guys, removing the reward for knockout and shifting it to termination just means that everyone will double-tap everything forever. That is not good for the gameplay, because you then have to develop OCD to get your kill WP, and makes the nanite injector system pointless, because there will be no one left to revive. The idea is to give full rewards for clone death but only diminished rewards (I seriously do not know how diminished) for a knock down which was revived. As for double tapping, that is a good thing for attackers to start doing. It's not always possible though so still plenty of opportunities for revives. Remember a corpse has 200 HP. That's a lot to double tap if you're under fire. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 987	Posted - 2014.01.22 00:29:00 - [7] - Quote Marc Rime wrote: Those changes would, would they not, result in something that isn't really KDR any more? Why not leave kills and deaths as they are, and simply request more statistics. Then we could compare players based on any ratio or rating imaginable. Also people like graphs and pie charts for some reason, this could yield tons of pretty graphs and charts. On the one hand, yes. More metrics = better. On the other, I'm a bit worried DUST has all the "bad" metrics and none of the "good" ones. While DUST is presented as a team based game, all we get are solo performance metrics. I think we should skew metrics in the direction of team based play before adding more or giving back the solo performance ones. Even now when battle results are sorted by WP gained, people still care about their precious KDR more than anything else. That mentality just has to go away... Best way of doing it, just take away the metric for a while. Just my honest opinion. Obviously there are others. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 990	Posted - 2014.01.22 09:37:00 - [8] - Quote SponkSponkSponk wrote: Screw KDR, I want isk destroyed/isk loss ratio. Why not make another post about that? :) "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 991	Posted - 2014.01.22 09:54:00 - [9] - Quote RuckingFetard wrote: We need an ISK efficiency indicator ratio , I,e, ISK destroyed to ISK lost. My main problem with that specific metric is the upcoming Player Market. I don't know how much you know EVE economics but prices are anything but fixed. EVE can be every bit as complicated as a RL stock exchange. All that richness will eventually come to DUST too. Because of the above, estimating item costs may well be an impossible task. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 992	Posted - 2014.01.22 10:00:00 - [10] - Quote GRIM GEAR wrote: This is a great thread Grit Breather. You're idea is really ingenious if implemented it will in-courage teamwork and create a healthier environment via people not yelling over the coms about kill stealers and getting revived and killed simultaneously. Overall awesome idea it will also put an end to KDR whoring. Good to hear my ideas are liked! :) "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 994	Posted - 2014.01.22 10:51:00 - [11] - Quote SponkSponkSponk wrote: Grit Breather wrote: RuckingFetard wrote: We need an ISK efficiency indicator ratio , I,e, ISK destroyed to ISK lost. My main problem with that specific metric is the upcoming Player Market. I don't know how much you know EVE economics but prices are anything but fixed. EVE can be every bit as complicated as a RL stock exchange. All that richness will eventually come to DUST too. Because of the above, estimating item costs may well be an impossible task. All items in Eve have reference prices that are calculated based on some sort of weighted average of the last few months. If you select a bunch of items in your hangar, it will tell you "15 items selected, estimated cost 157000 ISK" so it's obviously pre-calculated. All that needs to be done is to expand that to Dust items. Heck, it probably happens automatically already. Ok, that makes sense. Now go get your own thread about this new interesting metric. Stop taking over mine. :) "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 995	Posted - 2014.01.22 12:32:00 - [12] - Quote hgghyujh wrote: and here I thought I found an interesting post in a sea of......... if we are gonna do kdr right that means isk lost to isk destroyed stats, and isk lost to wp earned. I could care less about blending assists into kills. KDR needs to be turned into Battle Contribution with a weighted 'kill' factor as I stated above. In addition to that, I agree there should be ISK Efficiency metrics too. Thing is, that's a different metric. That is why I suggested it be discussed in a different thread so we don't lose direction. I'm not against more metrics. I'm just trying to not get lost here. hgghyujh wrote: also if we are talking about WP system revisions how about we get WP for damage done back. About that, I believe the CPM are pushing CCP towards that. There seem to be no real barriers around putting that back in as the previous exploits were plugged long ago. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 1029	Posted - 2014.02.09 14:02:00 - [13] - Quote CCP Saberwing wrote: Okay, okay Grit, I'll reply :) As I think I mentioned previously, it's definitely an interesting idea. While I'm not sure I personally agree with simply consolidating Kills + Assists, I think a way of pushing Assists as a valuable statistic is still a good idea. I spoke with CCP Thunder about this and it's something we'll try to think up something nifty around. Ultimately though, no real work has been done on this yet and it won't be implemented by 1.8. It is wonderful to have a reply from you on this! As for "simple", my idea may be that, but it is far from being over simplified. I believe it's an elegant solution to a statistic that is really both useless and counter productive to what DUST is trying to be. Counting kills in DUST basically accomplishes the following: Nullifies the team effort that goes into a kill. Puts personal achievements (and questionable ones at that) before squad/team achievements. Caters to the wrong type of play style for DUST. If I fire a single bullet and take the final 1 HP from a mostly defeated enemy, I gain a kill. The other 2 guys who were chasing him around corners and pushing him away from an objective for the previous 50 seconds gain, well, nothing. They get 25 WP each and an "assist". But was it really that? Or was I just assisting them while they actually earned a kill? My proposes system solves that by providing a weighted "kill contribution" factor as well as weighted WP based on effort put into that kill. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Grit Breather Cannonfodder PMC 1045	Posted - 2014.02.20 09:41:00 - [14] - Quote Alaika Arbosa wrote: This is probably something that has already been brought up in this thread, though I'd like to mention it without reading through the entire thread since I remember bringing this up in Closed Beta and being shouted down by the KDR monkeys. Calculate KD the same as it is in Eve. There should be no such thing as an Assist aside from Intel Kill Assists. Anyone who contributed damage to the kill gets credited with the kill (though only if the killed is sent back to respawn which is the only way that the death is counted as well). Each person who contributed to the kill should get a % of the WP for the kill proportional to the amount of damage they inflicted on the killed. Add bonuses for "Final Blow" and "Top Damage". Read my original post at the start of this thread. I think you'll like it. :) "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." GÇò Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland