Disable some information in the leaderboard in COOP

@grumf said in Disable some information in the leaderboard in COOP:

What extra points ? There would be no points at all

People still need to level up... even though giving everyone alive points is the same as awarding no points, this is only true if the whole team is alive, which usually isn't the case (only those alive would get the points) and giving points contributes to xp, so it has to be awarded, even if everyone is alive.

@thehappybub I meant, the points you get by completing objective in a game. Your personal score in the leaderboard. Not XP points. Of course everyone needs XP points. Doesn't mean they should be visible in the leaderboard.

@grumf
Its funny you had to explain that.

@grumf that translates directly into xp though... Are you saying the points wouldn't be visible or wouldn't be awarded? I interpreted your post as the latter.

@max80 said in Disable some information in the leaderboard in COOP:

@thehappybub

jesus christ dude.....

I don't need Jesus, I just need someone to explain to me how points translate into xp… because it seems I'm not understanding.

@thehappybub I don't know about the correlation between your score in the leaderboard and the XP points you get after the match. If those are linked in any way whatsoever, though, I don't think it matters that much. All I'm saying is that the leaderboard in coop should not contain any scoring information for each member of the team, but rather a score for the team as a whole.

A bit like when trick or treating at halloween, the kids would have a big basket to put all the candy for the group rather than each of them having their own bag and trying to get more candy than the others. The first solution makes each child work for the team to have more candy to share later, while the second one only encourages competition between the group members. I hope the analogy is clear enough. English isn't my mother tongue, so... Yeah. Can be hard to explain in details.

If the game needs to calculate the ammount of XP in relation the your personal score :
a- It's a flaw in the leveling design (when doing COOP) and it should be adressed, in addition to making individual stats in the leaderboard invisible.
b- If it's not fixed, at least they should make it invisible by hiding personal score/K:D/objectives in the leaderboard.

last edited by Grumf

@grumf

I would like a t/k list or at least a way to access the information for reporting purposes.

@max80 Of course. Never said TK should be tolerated, mate. The game automatically kicks on the third TK anyway, so...

I believe that when game is done and there are private servers that this will be handeled. By adjusting bot difficulty. Everyone brings up very good points, time will tell.

I like the idea of a team board that has bonus experience for all team members... perhaps measuring how many team members were on the objective when it was taken or how many team members were defending an objective when it was blown up...

I'm also ok with getting rid of the personal achievements at the end of the round.

But I also want to see my personal stats so I know if I'm getting better or worse.

@jballou , the over-watch is rewarded as "assist" , but only shows up at the end of the round when naming everyone's accomplishments. It makes the person look like bad since they are not "rushing" but in reality they are successfully acting as over watch for those who are advancing. You wont know until the end of the round when there comes the rewards.

@rampart I think everyone who's alive should get points for blowing a cache.

@thehappybub said in Disable some information in the leaderboard in COOP:

@rampart I think everyone who's alive should get points for blowing a cache.

I like that

The best outcome for coop game is completing all objectives with nobody dying anywhere in the process. Personal skill and teamwork increase those chances. Change the point reward mechanics to encourage teamwork and discourage solo-suicide rush to objectives that devolves into a run and gun, tunnel vision spray and pray, blow up everything ahead for a race to the end. It's a journey, not the destination, and the journey is made better when cooperating with people. It can be a destination for those that choose to, so somehow keep options open for rushers who like to play that way.

Notes
The points here are to give an idea of what is rewarded in a relative sense. Give all players who complete a checkpoint 100 points. A regular bot kill gives 25 pts.

Sticking together
Staying near a teammate for a period of time constantly gives you, for example, 75 points. Additional teammates in the vicinity gives additional 25 points. Either it gives a fixed number of points or gives a bonus percentage of points applied for a certain period of time that fades if you suddenly decide to go lone wolf or with 1 buddy. Variations of this can be percentage bonus for 3 or more players in the vicinity and loses its effect if you go back to sticking around only 1 player. Give these hints on load screens to let the player know.

Match Summary
Similar to Overwatch, end of game votes on positive tags like "great team player", "battle buddy", "great sniper/overwatch support", "good comms", "good commander/team leader" "good cover fire". These can only be added once on each player by each player for each match, and probably has a drop down list below each player's name and show the array list of tags. Other players who stick around at the end of match sees a player getting a tag but won't know who provided it. Make it like a badge and rank like Overwatch does.

Make it attractive for the players to stick around at the end of the match with chat enabled and see what they did to gain points (the current system sort of does that by showing you the progress gained from "time played" for example), but its current implementation is only visible to you and only shows one after the other so you'd miss it if you somehow looked away for a few seconds (working off of memory here). And again like Overwatch, adding a "stay as team" for next game would be nice.

Tab Screen Changes
Move K/D ratio to somewhere the player can see on their own when the game is over. No need to look at it during a game or flaunt it at the end of the match to your teammates. Currently, we look to see who has the most points for capping objectives and blowing up caches. You are either #1 on the team or you're not, and you were rushing the entire way, racing against your team, annoying your teammates, encouraging the same rushing play style for your team. This change should give more players satisfaction for just being in 2nd, 3rd, 4th because they added to the teamplay experience even if just a little and at least tried to keep each other alive.

These points given for teamplay should show, in a summarized format with good UI here, in the Tab screen for each player based on what they did. This continues the Tab screen's utility since players already have a sense of familiarity with this screen and know the reason for all the nice points they are getting. Hopefully, this encourages a shift from how people are currently encouraged to play by telling them why they got points. Put this in the match summary screen at the end of the game for every player (good UI and sound effects here so we can look at who did the most teamwork). The intended effect is to still find the player with the most points but being the result of a team player, not a "first!" player.

Discourage solo-suicide rush to objective
I can't really think of much without changing a lot of the capture mechanic and pacing of the game to the point where it's much better to just coordinate with your team over the mic to solve it. Something should slow down the player's pacing when getting closer to the point. Although I actually like a checkpoint's corner-camping bots in its current state, it isn't enough. A skilled player or RPG/IEDing through a window before rushing into the cap area can still work. Having another layer would help. We want to make it so even a skilled player will feel cautious for rushing in doing quick "slice pies".

If UE4 can do this: allow the map designer allocate 3 areas where random mines can be placed since those are already in the game. If there are some barbed wire setup (like R6 Seige?--don't know much about that game) that require time to dismantle and thus cause a player to be vulnerable in that moment, it would be interesting and play into the teammate-covering point reward system.

Discourage solo-suicide rush to objective (Part 2: Three Wishful future add-ons)
This is getting into the old-school Rainbow Six/SWAT series' pacing, which slows the game down a lot, and probably not in the vision of the devs since choice in tactical play is something they usually go for (one example is the inclusion of peeking through a partially opened door)--not somewhat forced as I'm about to write, but it would be amazing for those who like to play tactically in private servers. This would be add great variety, randomness, and depth to the gameplay throughout just one match.

1: Alerted cap/cache areas with bots have a chance to use toxic gas grenades on the area, and they'll already have gas masks on. The security team will make the decision to invest in the gas mask. For servers that have unlimited supply points, taking the gas mask will be a no-brainer, but simply having this different scenario and vulnerability putting on the mask changes up the gameplay. Putting it on earlier means their sounds are muffled, putting them at a disadvantage.

2: This applies to the checkpoint camping bots: Certain movement speeds/run, or firing a shot without a suppressor really close to them causes 1 or 2 bots to say "they're here!", and go investigate the perimeter or flank the player.

3: Another thing to slow down the pace (maybe too much?) is have the bots trigger a small explosive at the perimeter/entry point of the cap area when they hear loud player movement. This can only be triggered by a specific-looking bot sort of like the suicide bomber's signature white striped shirt. These events shouldn't be at every single point but randomized maybe 2 out of every 8 capture points (includes cache points). They're also randomly placed in 2 out of 4 entry points to the objective; the frequency is just an example. This means a player can take out the bot with the trigger via stealth should they choose to or communicate to their team that they've taken care of the bot with the trigger. We get awesome replayability through some map randomness.

Big rewards for those that cover teammates
I don't know UE4 so I'm not sure if UE4 can allow these hooks into the game: If bot(s) investigates a player during a flank (which happens often in Insurgency 2) but the bot is then eliminated by another teammate. Give a large 250 pts to the player covering their teammate's back. I often do this with success in Insurgency 2's counter-attacks and find the teamwork productive and rewarding. The reward from points is large because you're often looking in the opposite direction of the action or entry point. In another scenario, if a bot is targeting and firing at player A and player B kills the enemy, then give player B 125 pts, and this would be reflected under the Tab indicator: something like "Savior". To keep the Tab screen simple, maybe only show the most recent points and respective label for each player. Add partial points if player A was originally shooting at the bot; less if player A was only suppressing bot with no hits; and equal split to both players if both hit the bot, known as an assist. These functions encourage players to not all run to the corner and bunch up like rabbits to be the first one to secure the kills which is another occurrence where players are competing against each other, and we want to foster sticking together and covering each other.

Counter-attack frequency
I think there should always be a counter-attack for each obj or default to 80% chance if not already (adjustable by server admin just like in Insurgency 2, and I think the Insurgency 2 default is 75%). You get the most out of the map by defending in each checkpoint location and figuring out with your team the best way to handle each point.

We change how the system rewards player points; discourage those who rush to the objectives to cover out bases for those who don't care or are stuck in the rushing mentality even with these implementations in place by making the checkpoint/cache dangerous for a rusher. They simply die and miss out on the defending aspect of the counter-attack, which itself should also be rewarded in points. Maybe label these bots as counter-attack bots that provide more points than a non-counter-attacking bot. And for snipers who take out/assist/suppress these counter-attack bots, they get more points the farther they are from the kill. Though, I can still see a scenario where players who are familiar with a map will bunch up and launch an RPG or go full-auto in a specific location where the bots will come out from around the corner from their spawn point, but I'll end it here.

@thisisjames I like the overall direction of your suggestions even though I disagree with a lot of them in particular.

@thisisjames said in Disable some information in the leaderboard in COOP:

Staying near a teammate for a period of time constantly gives you, for example, 75 points.

I like this idea, but the radius would have to be rather large to make sure people don't hug each other. As much as I hate the current commander/observer making out fire support system, perhaps give the observer points for staying in range of the commander too in addition to what you propose.

@thisisjames said in Disable some information in the leaderboard in COOP:

Similar to Overwatch, end of game votes on positive tags

Really like this idea, would allow players to commend players they thought were useful.

@thisisjames said in Disable some information in the leaderboard in COOP:

3 areas where random mines can be placed since those are already in the game. If there are some barbed wire setup (like R6 Seige?--don't know much about that game) that require time to dismantle and thus cause a player to be vulnerable in that moment

@thisisjames said in Disable some information in the leaderboard in COOP:

1: Alerted cap/cache areas with bots have a chance to use toxic gas grenades

@thisisjames said in Disable some information in the leaderboard in COOP:

3: Another thing to slow down the pace (maybe too much?) is have the bots trigger a small explosive at the perimeter/entry point of the cap area

I don't like these at all. I believe that this could be solved simply by better AI and bot placement. Instead of bots placed within objectives to guard them, some should be stationed outside or on the roof to patrol the area. I also notice that there usually aren't any bots protecting caches, which there should be.

@thehappybub Thanks for the response. I was about to delete the entire part 2 section as those ideas sort of steals the focus of the overall feel of the game and makes things more complicated. I purposefully avoided improved AI as I figured good AI requires a lot of time, testing, and effort. It'd be a silver bullet outside of how we're rewarded with points now.

Definitely large radius. Cause then it's opening up for a bot to take out the entire team with an explosive. Not fun.

I would love to see better and more bot placement protecting the checkpoint/cache.

There should be no points at all. Gaining points makes people want to get to the top. Trying to organise competition so that it becomes coop is like trying to control a tornado so it vacuums your living room.

Give people a chance to get to the top, and not only will they try to take the cake, but also keep others from taking it. I don't believe more rules/creating new ways for how points are awarded is the solution. The whole system needs to be redesigned in order to suppress competition with your own teammates. There shouldn't be a way to make yourself more valuable than your partners. If you're the best, you'll know anyway. If you're bad, I'm pretty sure the average gamer can also have enough self-criticism to figure it out by himself.

The goal is to get rid of any form of ranking, not make those who are not #1 less unsatisfied when a rushing player that desperately needs to be #1 makes the whole game awkward. Introducing even the slightest and most subtle way of scoring element in gameplay (like showing the leaderboard after the game ended, when you're in the XP attribution screen, for instance) just ruins the thing. Those players only worry about performance. If you let them have access to dick-measuring tools, they will keep seeking performance so they can measure the size of their ego, being afterwards or during a game.

It's better not to know, sometimes, for the greater good. Because COOP is exactly that. Working in a team, for the greater good. Not for yourself. If you want to understand how to get better so bad, then you need to practice in PVP anyway.

Bots will never make you a more intelligent, faster, better player. They can help you become "good" when you're a newbie, and help you with knowing the maps, but they won't make you that much of a better player compared to human adversaries. I should know that well, since I'm almost always #1 in coop, but somehow get fucking destroyed in PVP since I almost never play anything beside coop. Both in Sandstorm and Source.

last edited by Grumf

Well, this post starts to seem more like "missing teamwork in coop" for me (sorry if i am totally wrong). I am not saying that all your suggestions are bad. Actually, I am really impressed, how much good suggestions you have given.

From my personal experience, teamwork needs communication. When I am playing I rarely hear people communicating via radio. Maybe in other regions this is not a problem? Everyone knows the objective and everyone seems to work on it on their own (maybe considering others a bit). I really appreciate then someone takes initiative and talks, gives commands and tells what he is going to do. All this talk makes game somewhat more fun and produces more teamwork.

So my point, maybe teamwork can be achieved without changing the game.

Of course, there is some considerations/problems about talking via radio - bad mic, having to talk silently or can't talk at all, because other family members are sleeping, etc...

what do you think about this? Maybe you have some suggestions for silent players to tell what are they trying to do and how can they contribute to teamwork?

P.S. Sorry if this does not belong here. Feel free to redirect me 🙂