Outfit Leaderboard - Ideas Draft

[robocpf1]

I plan to submit this post to the PS2 community in one way or another, maybe when players are allowed to propose roadmap ideas like Higby suggested - or I might try making an illustrated video - but I wanted to get some PSU feedback first. If you don't like the idea of outfit leaderboards in general, telling me in this thread doesn't really help your case, I know some of you don't want them. I do, however, think they will get put in the game, and so I am here to suggest a way to implement them.

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This post will put forward some ideas about the proposed “Outfit Leaderboard” system on the PS2 roadmap. It’s a long one, folks – but this is a controversial topic and I owe it enough space to properly illustrate my points. If you don’t have much time or interest, skip to the bottom paragraph in [brackets] for a TL;DR summary.

One of the problems with leaderboards is finding this “metric,” as SOE says, by which to measure how successful an outfit is. Kills? K/D ratio? Experience gained? There has to be some notion of an outfit’s “score” in order to determine who is winning. That’s the whole point of a leaderboard. However, Planetside is not a simple deathmatch game – there is much more to it, and so it follows that more needs to be measured.

My answer is not to design one new “super metric” but to use all of the metrics. Let the players decide what is important for them. Allow sorting for any metric the player wants. There can be both “total kills” and “kills per outfit member” – the large outfits might compete for the massive amount of kills – “Hey TR Outfit, that’s a nice 1000 kills you got this week. We got 5000.” - while the smaller outfit can say “Yeah, but our members killed, on average, 300 people each this week. Your outfit killed only 50 per member. Quality over Quantity.” The planned distribution of the API could let us create our own leaderboards, too.

You could show both a “simplified” and “advanced” leaderboard. The simplified version shows the composite metrics, like “most territory captured” and “most kills”. You could then access the “advanced” leaderboard for the breakdown. I’m talking about really in-depth breakdowns of the kind that would show some very cool statistics, which I will get into. Having “all of the metrics” creates a less biased statistics pool that the players control. SOE has been big into letting the players control our experiences – this is one more way to do so.

“Territory captured” is a unique Planetside concept, which is based around control of the many hexes in the game. We can do so much more with this statistic though.

“Territory Captured – No Activity”
“Territory Captured – Enemies Detected”
“Territory Captured – Enemy Squads Detected”
“Territory Captured – Enemy Platoons Detected”

This breakdown would show how contested the territory is that this outfit is capturing. You could clearly see, in comparison to the other outfits, if this outfit is taking hotly contested territory or just ghosting around.
Each outfit is a different size, however, so we could use relative stats, like so:

“Territories capped while outnumbered”
“Territories capped during an even fight”
“Territories capped while outnumbering the enemy.”

I’ve already briefly mentioned a kill stat breakdown – How many kills did this outfit get while in tanks? As infantry? In the air? You can go deeper though - why not have a metric for “amount (or percentage) of kills that had been alive for less than a minute” and “amount (or percentage) of kills that had been alive for more than a minute”? You can tell who has been spawn camping and who is fighting in the trenches.

Another problem is properly adjusting the scores so that outfits with an exceptionally large number of players and outfits with a smaller number of players are both fairly scored. It isn’t fair to small outfits to be pitted against the overwhelming kill stats large outfits can generate, and it isn’t fair for the large outfits’ achievements to be thrown aside in a game where the tagline is “Size always matters”.

So, to be fair to all outfits (as I would expect every outfit to have some inactive members) it is also important to have an automatic process to mark players “inactive” with regards to the leaderboard. Outfit A has 1000 members. This week, only 500 logged in. For the leaderboard listing this week, Outfit A’s scores are adjusted for having 500 members – not 1000. This makes it so outfits do not have to kick members that have simply gone inactive, like military personnel on deployment. The bottom line is, if they aren’t actively contributing to an outfit’s score on the leaderboard, don’t count them as part of the outfit’s membership for that leaderboard listing.

[The nature of the competition is that outfits are already comparing themselves to each other – and no matter what super-metric you design to encompass everything, there are outfits that will be unhappy with it because their playstyle doesn’t mesh with the metric. So forget about a super-metric, give us all of the metrics, and let the players decide who is winning engagements based on that information.]

If you’ve read to the end, I thank you, and I humbly ask for your feedback.

---robocpf1