Caleb wrote: ↑Thu Jan 11, 2024 8:29 pm
[The Killboard KDR is a Problem!]
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!
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.
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 ):
- - 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 )
- - Joining / Helping new WB Leaders
- - Experimenting with Off-Meta Classes / Specs
- - 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!