Killboard KDR should be removed!

[Caleb]

[The Killboard KDR is a Problem!]

Quick Reminder for future comments.

The Thread isn't about removing the Killboard completely - almost no one wants that.

It is strictly the Life-time Kill / Death Counting on your Profile, as shown in OP Post Spoilers.

So please keep the thread on topic, without derailing.

There has been a few major discussions on the ROR Discord on this topic so I thought about making it an official feedback post here on the forums too for dev feedback and further discussions on the topic!

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

In its current state, the Killboard of the website shows the lifetime Kill/Death Ratio of a character upon search and is available to anyone to lookup and judge players based on a fairly useless Stat that does not tell the full story / playstyle or the skill of a player. Unfortunately this website feature is provenly causing many players to shame others based on their KDR or even have major negative effects on individual player mentality and behavior, by unconsciously playing more defensive and passive in order to maintain a "better" KDR.

RoR is a massive PvP MMORPG that is designed around the bigger picture of a faction vs faction campaign and is designed for players to die many a times in battle, sometimes without scoring kills in order to tip the balance towards their faction. The gameplay flow is directly fed by a steady source of players wanting to fight each other endlessly and thus generate content. The moment players start to care more about a positive KDR stat and are afraid of dying or encouraging pushes and aggressive manouvers and only participate in one-sided "surewin" scenarios, is when the gameplay flow of such game will deteriorate and show signs of unhealthiness that we are currently experiencing, from Warbands not always supporting each other or the populating Xrealming to one Faction.

Tracking Negative In-game Stats in a profile has been proven through years in many different games to have a larger negative effect on the game's playerbase, and it is tightly connected to a base human ego and self-worth problem that a good chunk of players will unconsciously start caring about them and connect their own skill or character's worth on it. Very similar to a certain male real-life comparison and issue I shall not name here. By human-nature it is not as easy to just "ignore" it and the human-brain connects it with "losing", which we know the majority does not like.

EDIT: As pointed out in a comment later, it is enough for this behavior to be present at only certain individual, such as Warband Leaders, to be overly aware of their KDA to affects the whole playerbase by them engaging less often, and as a result have less fights for the whole community, snowballing into faction problems that we are facing nowadays. Without naming anyone, there are multiple warbands already who do this.

Counter-argument is that if someone cares, they will track KDR anyway, which is true, can be done through addons. But not being able to tell other player's KDR will eliminate the shaming/judging issue and then we still have the large subset of players who are only manipulated to care about this stat by the existance of the tracking on the website Killboard that reflects their performance to other players. So removing it will still have a larger effect on a considerable amount of players who's gameplay is manipulated by a worry of "what others see of them".

It isn't an individual player issue, but affects the server's health as a whole. One shouldn't feel stressed or bad about fighting for their faction against the odds and dying in the Warhammer universe.

[Effects & Proposal]

On a quick note of things I can think of, that are discouraged indirectly by KDR for those who are stressed by it ( care for it ):

• - Throwing Winning Scenarios to preserve KDA

• - Joining Even Fights

• - Warbands not helping each other when others seemingly are losing

• - Not Defending "hopeless" Keeps / Forts

• - Joining Underdogs ( Faction Balance )

• - Splt pushes ( half Pug Warband stays behind / half Attacks )

• - Early withdrawals, causing unnecessary wipes

• - Melee actually being in melee to pressure ( Pushing )

• - Trying Warband leading

• - Joining / Helping new WB Leaders

• - Experimenting with Off-Meta Classes / Specs

• - PvP RPing

• - RP Warbands ( though RP people probably dont care )

• - and probably other aspects of the game....

By removing the KDR Tracking from the Killboard and as a result removing other's ability to track other players, it would eliminate both the social issues that this feature is causing along with the gameplay effects it is causing on a good chunk of the playerbase - while still maintaining the ability for each individual player to keep track of their own scores.

Additionally, perhaps showing only Killcount and Deathblows and not deaths would also encoruage more aggressive playstyles and generally players caring more about getting kills, rather than playing massively, which is what Warhammer is about!

The Weekly / Monthly Leaderboard could still track players based on highest killcount - but without showing deaths, but this can still be up for discussion on how important people think that leaderboard is.

[Discussion]

This post has been created with the aim to give this topic more visibility and let everyone discuss and share their opinions on it, whether you agree or disagree with what is said above, or share any other viewpoints and perspectives you have on the matter! Potentially, if there is a common agreement - give a visible proposal to the Development team to review!

Please keep the discussion civil!

[reynor007]

and let's remove armory so that people come up with builds themselves and don't look at armory and ctrl+c ctrl+v

[Sapblatter]

Showing or hiding the KDR system wont change a thing:

you will still get people who enjoy playing for a kdr and just zerg surf.
you will still get people who don't care about kdr and will just keep clicking respawn.
you will still get people who like to solo but dont like dying and will try to dc.
you will still get players who die once in scenarios and never leave spawn again.
you will still get players who just camp spawn points and wait for fights they can't lose.
you will still get players who make pvp videos of them farming lowbies or in hours of the day when the player level isn't as high.

I'm sure I can keep going but as you can see people play this game for different enjoyment, so having this board or not wouldnt change a thing, people will still behave the same.
You also don't need a kdr system to find out if a person is good or not, you can just play the game and overtime get an idea of if this person is good or not. I'm aware of streamers who don't care about kdr and will just click respawn and run at the enemy again but will die even before they get to hit something. I have also seen players who hate to die and won't leave warcamps without a 6 man, all these I have mentioned above happened before the kda board and will still happen after it's gone.

Maybe we should remove the  scenario and city scoreboards since that could also create a toxic environment since people might be worried about how they get judged in there also.

But the server always seem to want to hate on something, first its xrealmers, then ranked and now the KDR board, i wonder what will be next.

[Caleb]

Showing or hiding the KDR system wont change a thing:

It is true, people who do care about certain aspects will continue their behavior just like they probably did before.

The KDR is affecting people who were not prone to such behavior before its existance, which is the whole point of the discussion. It isn't about people who do it anyway - it is about the significant portion of players who's behavior is altered since the existance of the Killboard Stats. It's about minimizing that sort of behavior instead of further encouraging it with more features that highlight unnecessary statistics.

But saying it doesn't change anything is simply not true, proven by many researches and just general gaming history too, which is actually why more and more games do disable negative statistics that discourage gameplay.

Long story short, the Killboard's KDR isn't really adding anything of real value to encourage proper gameplay on the server - but it did introduce a meta problem of people caring too much about their stats.

[Sapblatter]

I would have a guess that on this server there's a handful of maybe 20 players who really focus on the KDR board, i bet most of the players are surprised when they see themselves after a good day/evening of killing. I don't care about the KDR stuff since I look at most of those names and I understand the playstyle and what they do to get on it but there's no harm in a bit of friendly competition between classes to see who can best the other.

I pug join a lot of pug warbands, i join lots of guilds warbands, i solo a little, i small scale a lot and i never get asked what my KDR is, i just play the game and people see and remember your name and my playstyle hasn't been altered since the existence of killboard stats, you could look at the cross lads and lasses, first couple of weeks they was negative kda but do you think they care, they're just playing a game they enjoy and i bet most guilds on the server would consider them if they wanted to join a warband.

Like how Showdown is the leading person on the killboard, does he care maybe but i never see him saying in /5 ( rr82 rank 1 mara / 2245k / 531d LFG must have similar stats) Just surround yourself with players who are like minding and you will care about the KDR stuff a lot less.

[wargrimnir]

I don't have any say in whether the killboard stays or goes, but there's nothing here that I find remotely compelling.

The dev that made the killboard did it out of his own interest, and it was shared with the community to do as they see fit. I find the chances of it being removed over your reasons given to be exceptionally low. Since the killboard released we have seen no impact on player population that can be attributed to it aside from the occasional noise that someone doesn't like it.

We find a lot of people not liking things here or there from time to time. But it's very rare that we find a LOT of people disliking the SAME thing all at the SAME time. I'll check back when this thread has over 50 pages perhaps.

[Sapblatter]

All i'm trying to say rather than trying to cancel something like today's culture seems to be about, you could just eliminate the issue of the KDR board by creating your own discord, calling it The KDR safespace club and you could advertising your groups in /5 or the ror discord, over a course of a week or two i'm sure you would find more like minded players like yourself and play within this bubble, your enjoyment levels would go up and let others worry about the KDR nonsense.

There's stuff in other games I don't like but I don't go, hey GGG i don't like heist or sanctum, i want it removed, i just get on with it and do stuff to eliminate it from my gameplay.

[Uberlix]

I rue the day Killboard got introduced. There have been discussions on the RoR discords and ingame aplenty, not a small amount of people voiced similar concerns stated in OP.

It is not about Killboard impacting player population, it is about Killboard impacting the way people play the game.

There are the folks that rightfully don't give a damn KDA and accept that krumping and getting krumped is just part of the daily WWWAAAGGGHHH. And then there are the people that care way too much. And some ridicule other people, for having a "bad" KDR.

I remember some undesirables giving Troma and Cross **** for their KDR starting out, when they were starting out playing the game and making fun of the chad "we don't care when we die" mindset.

A middle ground would be something like the "hide gear" option ingame (which is super pointless with the introduction of the killboard armory btw, but personally i think it had no business being a option in the first place), that let's you just hide your KDR.

Now this would probably be a pain in the backside to implement (if something like that is even possible) and it wouldn't solve all the problems (already mentioned undesirables would just make fun of people hiding their KDR for example), but imho it would be a decent compromise.

[bw10]

yes it should. thats exactly why its going to stay

[Everdin]

You always see how bad people are in this game, a view in the killboard just reinforce the assumption.

Unfortune, beside dps these information are pretty worthless...