Scoreboard thoughts

UPDATE: Looks like K/D has replaced threat level in the scoreboard in 021. Cool! Would appreciate keeping this thread open nonetheless as there are other things to discuss about the scoreboard.

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Hey, I don't know how much active development there is on bitfighter currently, or if new changes are even being considered. But could the text on the scoreboard potentially be shrunk a bit? Or have the badges be hidden behind the threat level? The badges overlap with the threat level, making it tough to read.

Screen Shot 2020-05-14 at 10.29.10 PM.png

(If you can't see the image: https://i.imgur.com/ZbNUzLW.png)

Speaking of threat level, I figure it's some cumulative stat that combines other various stats to produce a result or something? I couldn't find any info in the wiki, forum or in-game help.

To be honest, while it's certainly intriguing, I have no baseline for what a "good" or "bad" threat level is. I'm guessing negative is bad, but outside of that, I don't know if 0.17 is considered great or just middling, or if -0.42 is considered hot garbage or just mediocre. I also am not sure how threatening a decimal score really feels... Is there any consideration with replacing threat level with traditional kills/deaths/scores?

Finally, there doesn't seem to be any clear ordering of player names on the scoreboard. I had figured players would be ordered by threat level but that doesn't seem to be the case. Nor does it seem to be ordered by name, player level, or ping. Is there something else ordering it behind the scenes, or perhaps this is a bug?

Thanks for your consideration!

Is there any consideration with replacing threat level with traditional kills/deaths/scores?

That would maybe make an interesting thing to check out at the end of games. Maybe the game could highlight (MVP?) the player with the craziest k/d ratio at the end of the game?

Yeah I think The score boards need a tune up.

One I idea I ahd is show the top maybe 1-5 players then show your score underneath

KDA would be really good to but might make the board hard to read withour a rework.

as for scoreboard I belive its related to the order people joined the lobby

If the text was shrunk down I would think there could certainly be four columns for kills, deaths, scores, and ping. Don't get me wrong, threat level is cool, I just have a tough time translating it into something that I can relate to. Like if my team has:

Quartz 0.07
bobdaduck –0.13
footloose 0.22
raptor 0.35
sky_lark –0.05

At first glance I don't know what these numbers mean, nor do I have a reference for what is considered great, good, average, bad, poor, etc. If I'm at -0.05 and quartz is at 0.07 and raptor is at 0.35, I can assume raptor is doing better than quartz, but... by how much? By what metric? It's just tricky to get a sense for how we are performing as a team or how the other team is performing.

as for scoreboard I belive its related to the order people joined the lobby

If this is true, it would be great if this could be changed to sort by threat level (or scores/kills, if that gets modified). One of the main reasons I check the scoreboard in modes like bitmatch and nexus (where the scoreboard IS ordered by kill/score) is to see how players are performing relative to each other. It's not terribly helpful to see which player joined the server the earliest.

It looks like the scoreboard badge overlapping issue is in the github issues list here and here already. Some interesting ideas within, but honestly, I think just shrinking the size of all the text would solve 99% of these instances. At least for the time being

[bobdaduck]

Threat level being reset each game would be an improvement I think, if it doesn't already

[raptor]

Threat level being reset each game would be an improvement I think, if it doesn't already

The threat level (which is K/D ratio spread over -1 to 1 bytheway) was intended to be for the duration of being connected to server and to more-or-less aid in balancing teams.

[bobdaduck]

Sure but that's not as useful for players, players want to see how good they're doing

[raptor]

OK, I can see replacing that metric with K/D on a per-round basis would be better in that sense.

[Santiago ZAP]

What about player score, possible along of of KD Ratio? We only have that in FFA Gamemodes, what about having "flags captured", and alike in the rest?

Also, what if every section had a limit to how much it can display in an area, say, if you have too many badges, or if you have a long ass name *coughmecough*, it gets "masked", bonus if it can scroll in that area to display the full name/badges

Like so (Horrible edit btw)
https://imgur.com/a/bdvCYtt

It should be easy to do I would imagine
in python ( a similar code im learning) you can check the string length with

len()

you could also just delete extra stuff with something like

if len() > x
print string [:x]

note that I did this in like 50 seconds so its completly wrongly written but the idea is it checks the string lengh and its to long it cuts of anything beyond a certain point :p

Thanks for the information about the threat level! That's interesting to know. I'm a bit surprised that it isn't resetting per round. Wouldn't this mean that the threat level could be negatively skewed when playing death-intensive maps like dungeons and novelty maps?

@Santiago, that's a solid idea. I do still think resizing the text on the leaderboard would be sufficient for 99% of use cases and still be plenty easy to read. Of course, if more badges get added then maybe a different solution would need to be explored.

@raptor or whomever, personally I am a fan of adding Scores/Kills/Deaths to the leaderboard, but even if it's not added, could the player names at least be sorted by threat level on team maps? This would at least make it easy to see which players were doing well, where we stood relatively for our own interest, and who... ahem... wasn't quite pulling their weight.

Slighly related but what if instead there was a different score board based on the game mode

Bitmatch would be KDA ratios.

Soccer would be goals

Rabbit would be run time and rabbit kills

ctf would be captures and KDA

ect.

it would take quite a bit of work but once the initial scoreboards formats are made you should just need to call varaibles and plug in values.

I think just having three columns for scores, kills, deaths, and then a fourth for ping, would be sufficient. No need to change based on the game mode. It's clear and consistent and conveys the important information for all of the game types. Text might need to be shrunk a bit but imo it should be shrunk anyway to solve the badge display issue.

Ok but doing the same things isnt usefull in every game mode.

for example KDA ratios in soccer doesnt mean anything to how much you contributed to a win.

or for capture the flag its not as relevant as the nubmer of times you grabbed scored and recovered a flag.

[Skybax]

He mentioned score. That would include how many times you made a goal or capped a flag.

[Santiago ZAP]

I think just having three columns for scores, kills, deaths, and then a fourth for ping, would be sufficient.

this sounds fantastic, with the reset each match, this would make the scoreboard much more useful and cleaner.

[Skybax]

The threat level is useful, but mostly for backend I think. As long as teams are still shuffled by threat level, we don't really need to see it. More user friendly numbers like, yeah, scores, kills, deaths, would be nicer for the end user I think

As I said though shouldnt the boards be different based on the game type?

for example kills deaths assists are not very usefull to know in soccer

in rabbit a modified list of hold time and times you killed people while holding the rabbit flag would be more usefull

flat out KDA isfull in most game modes is fine but not all why not have it vary by gamode.

[Skybax]

No amgine lol
Why would we want to take away information. Knowing kill stats is literally always useful

Clearly you didnt read my post because I didnt say take away info.

I jsut said put info in thats most relevant to the game mode IE NOT kda on soccer maps and not zone captures on rabbit.

I am all for score board changes but I think it should be whats relevant most to that game mode type.

[Skybax]

amgine, listen
NOT putting a statistic on the scoreboard
when the statistic is ALREADY on the scoreboard normally
is called "taking away info"

amgine, I understand the point you're making, but I think it would be pretty confusing if the scoreboard details were constantly changing with each game mode. While it is true that kills/deaths aren't particularly useful for certain modes like soccer, it's always nice to see how you're performing or if anyone is tearing it up in particular. I'm not sure what else could really be shown in its place anyway that would be pretty helpful to know... ball taps? idk lol.

At the very least, just ordering the names by threat level and/or shrinking the text to not cover the threat levels with badges would be really nice.

[Santiago ZAP]

Im with the sky dudes in this one, but if I may add another small detail, not so off topic here;

Right now, when deciding team balance, the game uses threat level as a base does it not? having a balanced threat level overall, the game could then also take into account how much a player scored for balance, rather than only threat level only, more specific, a players contibution to the overall team score.

Imagine for example getting 2 captures of of the 3 in you team, but having a kinda bad 0.7 KDR, the game could see you as a player that contributed 66% of the team score, and thus try to balance the game around having high-scoring players on both teams along with balanced KDRs on both sides.

This of course, implying KDR resets each round.

I actully agree on that point it should take into considiration how the player performed in the game and not just KDA for team balacing.

Also im not really agreeing with your point on the score board for most game modes its easy to adjust the scoreboard for values that makes sense to players even if it changes between games.

Bitmatch KDA
Rabbit Flag Hold Time And Kill Count as Rabbit
Soccer Goal Count
Nexus average flag amount average flag cap count
Capture The Flag : hold time captures recovers and cap count
Hold The Flag :flag carry time flag recoverys and flag capture count

[Skybax]

Right now, when deciding team balance, the game uses threat level as a base does it not? having a balanced threat level overall, the game could then also take into account how much a player scored for balance, rather than only threat level only, more specific, a players contibution to the overall team score.

Threat level is already based off all that. Kills, deaths, and scores, afaik

amgine, it's just about being as clear and simple as possible to the end user. Adding a bunch of different stats might give a lot of information to the player, but it would be confusing to digest. Players shouldn't have to spend mental resources trying to adjust to the new values for each game mode, there should be consistency so the information can be read and understood quickly and easily.

[raptor]

I've been digging into this and the kill/death is not sent from the server to the clients during a game. That would make this feature impossible to do without breaking 019 network compatibility which I'm hesitant to do right now.

For those interested, the algorithm for the rating (threat level) is calculated as follows:

(kills - deaths) / (kills + deaths)

where deaths does not include suicides. This puts your rating between -1 and 1.

Ahh bummer, but appreciate you looking into it anyway. Good to know about threat level mechanic.

Would it be possible to have the scoreboard arrange names by highest threat level? That would at least make it easy to quickly see at a glance which players are performing the best in terms of kills/deaths.

Cool.

A though though is it possible to add assists to the KD scores? so its K D A kills is when you got the killing hit on the ship deaths is when you die and assist is if you damaged the shop but didnt get the killing it ( and this would probably need a threashold as since phasers do very low damage and would add unnecessary Assist count.

[Skybax]

Assists are unnecessary

[Santiago ZAP]

A though though is it possible to add assists to the KD scores?

we a moba now

ctf or feed

but yeah, assists are unnecessary.

Part of the reason I was considering it is consider the following imaingine if you take out 99% of a ships health after a long but then a enemy ship comes in and takes the last hit and steals the point that would be frusturtating as you didnt get any reward for the kill.

on the other hand if kills were 2 points assists were 1 you would still get some credit for almost taking out the enemy.

[Little_Apple]

Most games that have any sort of kill assist credit also have a progression system tied to experience points, so in that context they make sense. In the context of bitfighter they would be completely pointless. The only purpose they would serve would be meaningless tracker of kills you didn't really get.

I thought about it for a while then what if instead of kills and deaths as a score it tracked instead Damage Dealt and Damage Received

The upside with this would be you could see how threatening you are for other Ships even if you don't manage to get the last hit on an enemy as often with many ships fighting in the area its easy to large amounts of damage to ever but not get kills.

How would that be quantified and displayed though? That seems like we'd have the same issue with threat level, ie. not having a reference point for what is good or bad.

Scores, Kills, Deaths, Ping. It's simple, consistent, easy and quick to grasp.

Maybe I'm missing it but I assume most basic gamers would understand that more damage = more threatening and less damage received = more survivability skills. the values would just be a direct output as a float value.

As for displaying scores damage dealt could be shown as damage and health lost which oculd be shown with some sort of a icon for damage and a health pack for health lost.

[Skybax]

High damage but no kills = not threatening at all in my book

not nesicarrily scores might be slightly undervalued if you managed to go get a ships health low but someone else took the last hit with a phaser a few times killing them with the current KD setup. it would show you had 0 kills but in fact, you were more threatening than the 1 person who managed to take the kill. as you overall contributed more damage to the ships in the game so Damage / Damage would show more accurately how effective you are at killing ships.

also since ship health is out of 1 ( I think) the values shouldn't get to crazy on the end board.

Amgine, can you give an example for how it would be displayed? What I'm asking is how is this quantified. Is it a numeric value? Or percentage?

For your next point, while you are correct that someone who doesn't get a kill on a ship but does most of the damage could be erroneously visualized as less effective than someone who got lucky getting a kill at the last moment, there is another view to consider: Someone who just sprays bullets around, racking up the damage but not really getting kills might be skewed more positively with this metric you've suggested.

(Damage Avoided is interesting, though. Chances are if someone is avoiding damage they are playing well, although it's possible this could be skewed by folks just hiding or camping.)

Personally, my main concern with presenting damage metrics as opposed to the simple score/kill/death is the same concern I have with threat level: While the metrics are certainly interesting, they don't give easy, quick reference points for players. It's very difficult to see the damage number or threat level number and quickly understand, "ok I'm doing well" or "ok, I need to step up my game."

A score, a kill, a death are easily and quickly understood based on the player's experience on the particular map -- they know how easy or hard it is to get one kill, to get one score, or to be killed one time. So they can quickly apply that knowledge to the score, kill, death metrics and have a reference point to factor their decisions and perceptions on.

A few replys to your post.

it would be shown as a raw number and not a % ( though perhaps a percentage would be easier to read)

while players could be spraying wildly and getting damage there damage avoided score will below.

Similarly, if Damage avoided is high because they are camping it will show there effective damage is low showing they need to be more aggressive.

only if they are effective at dodging AND attacking can they score well in both categories

Another option to the latter would be damage received instead of damage avoided.

in response to your thought that spraying could be skewed to show better play yes players could spray to hit tons of targets a few problems arises.

one if they are focused on spraying they will be more focused on a shoot then dodging and they are more likely to get hit and die thus scoring worse on damage received // damage avoided. Another problem that arises is that for anything that's not phaser spamming aimlessly will make you run out of energy and get killed.

Will add more to this post later getting tired.

Ok, so how is the number determined? How is something like this tracked?