Skill partitioning

[WD8502]

I've been previosuly flamed for this idea in other game communities but here we go.

 

I read a lot of posts about JO dying and Raven ruining the game with the patches. Obviosuly, the problems are due to different player skill levels and Raven's inability to make up their mind and put their foot down. Online gaming was not as mainstream as it was 6 years ago, and every gamer cannot be fitted into a same frame. Yet developers are using this outdated mentality. There are players with different skill levels and different reason for play. Dedicated players who play 6 hours a night every day are not the same skill as "Weekend warriors", and it's not all black and white, there's a lot of gray area of variating skills among players. My proposal for all developers out there: Implement skill tracking system. For example, a server could track individual player's stats and assign a skill level to him/her then send the stats to master server. Now, we could have several levels of skilled servers, we could have an "Pro" servers "Intermediate" and "Basic". This system would be logical and players would be happier, for example now a newbie couldn't whine that somebody's "owning" him or accuse people of cheating if he's playing on a pro server.

 

That's my 2 cents.

[Spider AL]

Do you know, I absolutely agree with this. This plan would provide newbies with an environment which they would enjoy, and it would add a competitive spice to the public servers.

 

But without the level of automation WD suggests, it would require nearly constant moderation of the server by an admin, they use something similar on certain CS networks and the admins have to be there nigh-on 24/7.

[Lightning]

good idea would be nice for n00b servers attacking

[Spider AL]

good idea would be nice for n00b servers attacking

 

Ahem, I think we've discovered one reason why the idea would be harder to implement than it might first appear, WD8502.

[WD8502]

That's just a general plan. I'm sure if people sit down and think this through, we could work around issues like that. For example, a very skilled player could have a "scaled" score when playing on a lesser skill server. You could only count a fraction of a kill. So, that 1337 players dont just get easy skill points for slaughtering newbies.

[Spider AL]

Perhaps, though that would take an awful lot of work to implement. Another way would be to auto-kick high-skilled users from low-skilled servers, but there are serious issues with that... All in all a good idea though, and I'm sure all the issues could be surmounted if sufficient effort and thought is put into the project.

[TheWhiteRaider]

Not a bad Idea, but that would take alot of time and energy. For once I could see newbies stop complaining. There was one that was a real jerk. He said almost every bad word know to man and said I cheated. It was something I never saw before. I killed two people with one charged disruptor shot.

[JEDI OUTCAST]

Originally posted by WD8502

I've been previosuly flamed for this idea in other game communities but here we go.

 

I read a lot of posts about JO dying and Raven ruining the game with the patches. Obviosuly, the problems are due to different player skill levels and Raven's inability to make up their mind and put their foot down. Online gaming was not as mainstream as it was 6 years ago, and every gamer cannot be fitted into a same frame. Yet developers are using this outdated mentality. There are players with different skill levels and different reason for play. Dedicated players who play 6 hours a night every day are not the same skill as "Weekend warriors", and it's not all black and white, there's a lot of gray area of variating skills among players. My proposal for all developers out there: Implement skill tracking system. For example, a server could track individual player's stats and assign a skill level to him/her then send the stats to master server. Now, we could have several levels of skilled servers, we could have an "Pro" servers "Intermediate" and "Basic". This system would be logical and players would be happier, for example now a newbie couldn't whine that somebody's "owning" him or accuse people of cheating if he's playing on a pro server.

 

That's my 2 cents.

 

 

can i just say that jedi outcast is not dying. people are trying to get new mods, new skins, new levels, out as soon as they can. seen as half of them go to school it makes it hard for them to do all of it.

[WD8502]

There's a lot of different ways to accomplish this newbie problem. You could lock out a player from playing MP untile he's finished with SP (bad idea). And again, you could use a simpler stat system. If a players stats are those of a newbie over some period of time a person could be forced to complete "training/retraining" level which would test every skill that beginning player should know, and until player completes it, he can't join any multiplayer games. Of course, to make this less hackable, the training map could be run on some server which would record progress and finally "graduate" a person once he completes all obstacles. This system could also be used to punish serial team killers and exploiters. The player ID system already exists with games like HL , Quake 3, Tribes 2 , RTCW, and others. So, it could be modified to accomodate the rules I described above. Of course, servers that want people to do whatever they want, could turn off some rules, so everything could be all dynamic.