The Karma System

Development
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stats will most likely induce more camping as the main thing people will look at / boast is their kd ratio. As in: more human stacking as humans generally just get more kills and more md whoring.

It might be a good idea for clans though, but for individual players this system will be both a joke as there are only like 100 ish players left and campy for reasons above.

CS:GO has hidden elo and the ranks themselves don’t really have any value (look at the rollback from half a year ago, maybe longer idfk)

League is toxic, no denying it. I think it has something to do with throwing 5 random people together, calling it a team, and having them play for something that really matters to them, elo. This almost always results in excessive team blaming and toxicity, especially at lower elo (who hasn’t heard the ol’ “Nigger team fuck you learn 2 play fuck garbage bot lane shit jungler” League created its own problem with the whole elo-booster situation: it’s obvious people care too much about rank in LoL. Now if someone in trem decides to feed the other team 3 goons at 2 minutes, i will get mad, i will most likely lose the game, i will shout at him for a bit, and then i move on to the next map, not really caring about the whole situation anymore. I don’t play league anymore but i have in the past, and if someone would throw my placement series (10 games for initial placement on leaderboards, if you get low elo it can be very hard to get out so everyone wants to win those 10 games) i would probably, like the rest of the toxic LoL community, get very fucking mad.

Tl;dr More camp because of rank, game is already dead anyways don’t bother, stop rantspam and md whoring because that shit will happen more if you introduce ranks.

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Tremulous stats should not show kill/death ratios, nor should it even show kills (those would be accurate metrics for Quake 3 Arena, but not for Tremulous). A Tremulous score system should accurately indicate the quality of game play that directly and efficiently leads to the goal of the game (kill all enemy spawns and any remaining enemy players) which includes the factors of combat, base building/attacking strategies, and team coordination (more about Tremulous score info at the following link: Player Efficiency rating and K/D rating idea for 1.3 - #7 by dGr8LookinSparky ) .

So if the scoring is done correctly, it shouldn’t encourage camping. Having such scores tied to your account would be yet another incentive to not get banned and not abandon your account for evasion. I was also planning on having such a scoring system factor into game activity for earning karma (although the maximum amount of karma you could earn in one day from such game activity would be capped as how well you play game play wise should only be one of the factors in earning karma as karma is more about behaving well than skill ).

Besides score, if karma was publicly displayed for player accounts, various clans might take that into consideration, as many clans factor players’ behavior into membership and not just skill. Additionally, displaying the average karma of a given clan’s members could factor into a player’s consideration of joining a specific clan.

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Not showing kills is a great way to piss off a huge amount of the population.

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@dGr8LookinSparky: stats should include everything. Maybe an unique formula where we find everything (K/D, time outside the base, building, teamwork, karma points, etc.).

The only question is if this is possible.

We must give at this game more competitiveness. Maybe not for PUB games, but for sure for Clans/CW games.

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It is possible technically speaking, however, if values are shown that are not actually relevant to neither playing the game well nor behaving in the game well, players will be doing activities to maximize those values that don’t actually contribute to the game and could even hinder the game.

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Once we find a formula, we don’t have to release to the public.

Can’t we start to think at the formula and then figure out how to branch work? You have already thought something?

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I’ll repeat what I mentioned in the slack group.

I think the Karma system concept is a good solution to evaders, although it may take more time to implement and fine tune.

Although I am in disagreement with some incentive’s you have proposed here. The focus should be on providing MORE to those who behave, you should never take away currently available features to players because they are new. Especially something as vital to enjoyment and gameplay as the chat.

Possible positive incentives could include the new colours added recently to the test server. Perhaps gold colour could be the highest karma rating unlock.

Another positive incentive which is a little more controversial, is that those with a higher karma level can have access to join a team before those with a lower karma level. That means that those who respect the rules and raise Karma have very small priority on what race they would like to play on which map.

So for the first 5 seconds nobody can join (warmup). First 10 seconds only those with karma level threshold (above lets say 2000) can join. Finally after the first 15 seconds anyone can join a team regardless of Karma.

These are the type of incentives we should be thinking about. NOT removing currently important and basic features.
Assuming the Karma system doesn’t remove features currently available in tremulous to new players I am all for this system.

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Like being able to join a team whenever you want?

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That’s not entirely true though. For the first 5 seconds nobody can join due to it being a “warmup” you also cannot join a team if it is full. So to expand the “warmup” for almost 5 seconds to allow players some incentive to behave might be worth it.

I would not like to see it cut into the warmup as that is not fair to those with slow PC’s.

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I have at this post: Player Efficiency rating and K/D rating idea for 1.3 - #7 by dGr8LookinSparky

The thing is, should new players be able to do things like decon the om/rc or spamming floor trappers on a public server with a lot of other players in the match before gaining a basic understanding of how building works in Tremulous? With the warmup mode that we have been developing, such actions are far more forgiving, and learning by making mistakes would not be so devastating for the rest of the server.

However, for the actual matches, imo it is better that completely new players are not allowed to build at all to start to get familiarity through observation of the other builders and of what those buildables actually do in the game, and then gradually give them building abilities as they gain more karma, along with having players with karma above a certain threshold treated like designated builders in relation to players with karma below that threshold.

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How to access to this http://forum.grangerhub.org/t/player-specific-gameplay-statistics/33/2?

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I agree, and there is a potential problem with coming up with a ranking formula and then fine-tuning it: it may piss off people to see their ranking mysteriously changing around. I would make player ranking not based on some unknown formula, but directly with karma. And karma should not be only automatic, but also people-driven, like a review system. Intermissions would the perfect place to distribute a few karma points to your best teammates. This would avoid any type of abuse of an automated system because it would be people-driven, and people are smart. :slight_smile: And reviews are a time-tested way to provide feedback.

In addition to the karma/review system, all stats should be available - including a complex total formula for player competitiveness. However, this should not be used to give advantages in game so that we don’t end up like in League as @DarkMicrobe explained. Instead, the stats should be available to filter and rank players freely and can be used by clans, etc.

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How you avoid the camp with this? By doing for everything x*time_outside_base ?

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To avoid camp, we need the karma/review system, not the stats. Players would know when a teammate has been camping the whole game. The stats should be simple. Complex/mysterious calculations can hurt as much as they help. They should be left as optional statistics that could be used if someone is looking into competitiveness.

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Floor trappers are still better than no trappers. What if all players online are new/have low Karma, nobody would be able to build and games would be shit.

The Karma system should attempt to make them think “oo I would like that feature, I should raise my karma or stop lowering it by misbehaving” Not “Fuck,this is annoying. Fuck this game/server”.

What if the Karma was compared by other builders present?
If you have 3 builders, the one with the highest karma could be designated/lead builder. The one with the second highest Karma could have normal building rights, the one with the lowest karma has restricted building (can only make or decon rets) If the 2nd highest Karma builder changes weapon or dc’s the 3rd highest karma builder would now be able to build normally. This would prevent games with no builders at all.

The issues with this is, we are setting a precedent that GOOD KARMA = GOOD BUILDER which is very BAD. Perhaps the building restrictions should be scrapped from the karma system and be built into some sort of “Builder review” system.

Building is just too vital to the game to restrict, especially automatically. Also just because someone misbehaves doesn’t mean they are a bad builder. (maebong)

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That is almost never true.

The first purpose of the building restrictions is to prevent immediate griefing upon evading (as an example a player who is banned, then evades and attempts to maliciously decon the om/rc as a “revenge action”), the secondary purpose is to protect completely new players from themselves. But for what I have in mind is that full building abilities could be obtained after a week or two of regular activity. In tremulous, if you are new to the game, that is generally not long enough to even become a good builder, but you should at that point be at least somewhat familiar with the basics, and could start to become an ok builder.

Very good idea. In general various abilities should take into consideration the availability of other active (not afk ofc) players on the server and their karma levels in relation to a specific player and his/her karma level. This would help a new server with an unestablished playerbase grow.

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Almost never is better than nothing.

I understand this, but it’s worse than NSA monitoring video games to catch terrorists. Building restrictions could piss off way more people than the actual deconning.

1.1 building is actually more simple than the building in GPP. Whilst they may not know everything there is to know about building in 1-2 weeks most competent individuals can grasp how to build a standard and proficient base in mere minutes by simply reading (or watching) a guide.

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[trailing posts]

enough of the discussion of rating systems. they have been discussed before, and this attempt yields nothing new.

what significant behavioral property do u expect to derive from karma ?

  • eg., the player has passed the initial (restricted) startup stage, and on top of that, he/she has a karma value granting some non-gamelogic-related capabilities (eg., kick vote must have a ≥85% acceptance ratio) — on a particular server group, that is.
    so fucking what ? ok, it shows that the player isn’t an ultimate newbie (unless the player avoided the system by becoming „friends” with a manager of the server group, or broke the server group’s security systems).
    • also, eg.; on all other servers, the player only disrupted games, for many years; but „u don’t have to know anything about that.”
  • suppose that, in addition to the karma value, a CRIMINAL™ history is shown for a player, and suppose that it shows a few malicious decons.
    so fucking what ? it happens every now and then that a game is so gay due to others, that someone perceives it as insignificant.
    eg.; /dev/humancontroller, in his first year of Tremulous, was a „full-time” game disruptor, uniquely known for things like chat flooding (DOSing)1 and the development of an aimbot and laghax. later, he became a prominent contributor to Tremulous, ioQuake 3, and open source in general.2

1 anti-flood systems in ioQuake 3 (and derivatives) were developed in response to his chatfloodkick-based server-takeover activities.
2 however, he has recently been losing faith in and support for GrangerHub, due to sum 2f4gg0tz.

all-in-all, the karma value will be a very weak metric.

first of all, the system proposed here is all about automation. second of all, an also-ppl-driven system will be arguably as hard to use and predict as a fully automatic one, but the point will be that the latter will continuously need work from all users.

@DarkMicrobe explained not only why whore metrics shouldn’t give in-game advantages, but also why whore metrics shouldn’t be shown at all.

and here u’ve just suggested a metric that directly changes the way ppl play the game (not the meta behavior (such as whether they grief), but what they regard as winning). this is exactly the opposite of what the karma system aspires to influence.

WRONG. in general, they take away buildpoints from properly composed base layouts.

headshot ! this is an example of what could have been fucked up.

also, there’s a fuckup: if the 2 most „karmish” players don’t want to build, or if they can’t build fast enough, then the team could remain in a lack of other buildables, eg. only 2 telenodes for 20 ppl, no armory, etc.

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I’m going to have to agree with DevHC here. The Karma system explained thus far seems vague and even if I did understand it, would require multiple iterations to get to a point where its considered useful.

I believe if such a system is going to be used, it should be opt-out once you are registered to the server. A proper tutorial system implemented after the release of 1.3 would be a better alternative than spending resources on a Karma system before the release of 1.3.

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Addressing the problem of preventing most occurrences of a very new player from making a very big mistake that disrupts game play would only be a secondary effect of the Karma system. The karma system is not intended to do the job of dedicated tutorial systems.

The primary purpose of the Karma system is to provide a downside from being banned and evading, provide encouragement to behave well, and protect against new accounts maliciously griefing (which many times are evaders).

Yes it is true that in-game behavior of a player known to disrupt game-play could improve, as well as in-game behavior of a player known to not disrupt game-play can deteriorate. However, those are not counter examples against the karma system, as the karma system is meant to be dynamic, and any player could have a net gain/lose in karma based on change in behavior. That is, unless you have zero karma, in which case it should not be possible to obtain negative karma, as that defies one of the primary purposes of providing a downside to evasion.