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 Ranks, promotions, and pps - 03/07/03 | By: Quizzical
Perhaps I should begin by saying that I never liked how 2am dealt with pps. The problem is the purpose of the pps system. Some people may have the idea that pps were designed to measure who deserved to be promoted, or how good a player was, or something like that. Completely wrong. The pps system was designed for one reason: to encourage players to play defensively, even to the extent of abandoning their team and retreating. Later the purpose of pps was expanded to act as an incentive to play in regiment games rather than open games.
I do not find either of those to be worth tracking. Incentives for defensive play should come from the gameplay itself (snipes). It is also harmful to push people who prefer open games into regiment games, where they’ll treat the game like an open game and not follow orders. Still, the pps system does have one component perhaps worth saving: they offered a subjective rating of a player’s performance, as determined by the mission commander.
The problem with this is that the culture of the game was that the mission commander would just divide up the pps evenly between the players on the team. This turned pps into a measure not of performance, but of experience in regiment games. I’d like to see that changed, and think that it can be done, but will require considerable changes to the pps system.
I would set up pps such that the mission commander assigns pps at the end of the game, whether he lived or died. Anyone can gain or lose pps, regardless of whether they lived or died. The mission commander should have stats on kills and deaths available, and can arbitrarily assign pps to his team members based on how well they did in the game.
The default number of pps that the mission commander gives each player is 0, and he has to change this up or down to actually assign pps. In open games, the mission commander would have the choice to give a player +1, 0, or -1, with the -1 generally given only for making serious mistakes, such as blatant disregard for orders, pointless suicide, and so forth. In regiment games, the choices would be +1, 0, or -3. The harsh penalty would be there as a way to punish players who blatantly disregarded orders, or otherwise misbehaved in the game.
If the team lost, the option to give players +1 pps would be removed. The mission commander could still dock people pps for not following orders or other such things, but could not assign any pps. There will be games where everyone on both sides played well, but for the most part, the losing team won’t have played as well as the winning team.
The mission commander himself would not gain or lose any pps. This is to prevent the players who gain some pps early from forever commanding and running away with huge numbers of pps. That will allow other players to catch up to the mission commanders in pps.
I’d like to see some changes to mission commander selection as well. Highest rank, with most pps as a tiebreaker, is a good base system. The problem is that it doesn’t take into account that some players may want to command and others may not want to. I’d let all players of the highest rank on the side choose whether they want to command or not. Of those who did, the one with the most pps would be the mission commander. If no one wanted to command, the one with the most pps would be stuck as the commander.
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I didn’t like how 2am assigned the lower ranks, either. The problem with basing it just on pps is that some rather bad players could just play a bunch of regiment games and become officers after playing a few dozen games, and still be rather bad players. I’d like to see gaining rank say something meaningful about a player, not just that they’ve survived in some regiment games.
To that end, I’d give several requirements for rank, all of which would be necessary in order to gain a rank. To keep ranks somewhat stable, I’d make it so that if they have a rank, but lose one of the requirements for it, they can keep the rank. If they lose two of the requirements, they get demoted to the previous rank, and have to get both of them back to get the rank back.
The requirements I use concern the statistics that I’ve written up of WKR, WKDPG, AWP, CE, WOKR, and WDKR, as well as pps as outlined above. A complete description of the other ratings is available here:
http://www.callofcombat.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3401&start=60
I also assume that the ranks will be PFC, corporal, sergeant, and 2nd Lt, as in Chain of Command, with 2nd Lt the highest rank attainable from pps alone. It would be easy to add more ranks by keeping the values to get promoted from the lowest rank and to the highest, and putting the rest in the middle linearly.
Requirements for corporal, sergeant, and 2nd Lt respectively: WKR .5, 1, 1.5; WKDPG 0, 1, 2; AWP .1, .3, .5; CE 1, 2, 3; WOKR 0, 1, 2; WDKR .6, .8, 1. The ratings for pps should increase much faster with ranks, perhaps quadratically or exponentially. I’d like to see something along the lines of 10, 30, 100 required, though that is neither quadratic nor exponential.
The hardest one there for a newbie to get will be the WDKR, which is the main rating that newbies should be looking at. The basic question is whether they’ve learned to take cover yet, and once they do learn to consistently take cover and not suicide, it will be easy to get the .5. It will still take a little time (probably not more than 10 games) to get the AWP and CE, and probably longer than that to get the pps, so that they don’t just have a good first game and immediately get promoted to 2nd Lt.
Most of those ratings needed to become officers will be considerably below average for veteran players. The idea isn’t to make it so that a player has to be exceptionally good to become an officer, but merely to exclude players who are quite bad. The exception to this is the AWP, for which a rating of .5 will be average. The idea here is that players need to be decent at winning games to become officers, rather than just having average individual skills, but doing stupid things to mess up the team.
It is also worth commenting on problems in rank separation when the game comes out. A lot of those ratings are meant for long-term ratings, and it may take a while for veterans to kill enough newbies to get the overall averages up. It will be rather difficult to become an officer early in the game, but that should settle down in a few months or so.
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I like the idea of letting the regiment commander assign promotions for the higher officer ranks. The problem with this in Chain of Command was how it was implemented. The number of promotions available was very discontinuous, such that at certain thresholds the number of promotions available would be tripled or more. Further, regiment commander ranks could change back and forth to dramatically change the number of available promotions from day to day. Finally, promotions were based on the number of active players, which meant that large newbie regiments would have far more promotions available than small elite ones, even if they didn’t have more good players.
I would contend that counting active players is the wrong way to pick a number of promotions. Rather, I’d count number of regiment games won, whether normal or playoff, weighted by the size of a game. For example, winning a 5 on 5 would count as 5 player-games, a 3 on 3 as 3 player-games, and so forth. Losing a game would count as 0. Only regiment games would count, and not open games.
A regiment’s number of promotions available for a month would depend on its number of player-games won in the previous month. They would get an extra 1st Lt at 100, 300, 500, and so forth, a captain at 200, 600, 1000, and so forth, a major at 400, 1200, 2000, and so forth, and so on. In general, if they had k player-games won in a month, then the number of promotions to n ranks above 2nd Lt would be .01k2^(-n), rounded to the nearest integer.
The regiment commander would automatically take the highest promotion in the regiment, and could assign the others arbitrarily to officers. Only officers would be eligible for promotions, and they would lose the promotion if they lost the requirements to be an officer. A new regiment would get only a single 1st Lt promotion, to be occupied by the regiment commander, and no others in its first month. A player with a promotion who leaves the regiment would lose his promotion.
The idea of only counting wins is to weight it toward regiments that have a lot of good active players, not just a lot of active players. A regiment that wins 500 games and loses 200 may have far fewer players than one that wins 500 games and loses 1500, but probably on average has much better players. This would make the system such that just adding lots of newbies wouldn’t automatically give a regiment lots of promotions.
The idea of weighting by game size is to not unfairly favor regiments that play smaller games. If one regiment plays a 6 on 6, and another has six players split up to play three 2 on 2’s, then both regiments are about as active. The one that plays the smaller games shouldn’t be rewarded (or punished) for splitting up to play more, but smaller, games.
Finally, note that my formula makes the number of promotions available as close to continuous as possible. An extra promotion is available for each 100 player-games won, with the particular rank of the extra promotion varying. Further, there will be exactly one player of the regiment’s highest rank, so that no one can outrank the regiment commander. | |  |
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