I've been playing with another idea to help people hook up with quality and like-minded squad members. See screenshot below, and read on for explanation.
Two things are new:
"Squad Want Ad"
First, please note the interface on the left, which allows squad leaders to flag certain kits as "Needed by the squad". SLs can pick as many as they want by clicking on the kit icon to highlight it (I'm not sure how self-explanatory the kit icons are, but that can be tweaked).
Members cannot join a squad unless they are currently using, or flagged to spawn with, a kit that matches up to one that has been requested by the SL.
Leaving a slot blank or highlighting all kits in a slot means that anyone with any kit can join.
If a player joins with a certain kit, and that kit is requested in other slots, the player will occupy the slot with the most restrictive kit request. That is, if there are two slots with Medic flagged, the newly-join Medic will "use up" the slot that has the lowest number of other kits besides Medic. If that doesn't make sense it's okay - it's just a business rule to maximize likelihood of a "match", and not critical to the concept.
"Player Skill Readout"
The other new item is the expandable player skill readout on the right side. The goal here is to give an SL (or anyone) more detail about the skills and gameplay style of a given player.
A few of the basic measures are there, such as % balance between Combat and Teamwork, and % balance between flags captured and flags defended.
The remaining sections give players a simple Basic/Veteran/Expert ranking in a number of categories, some familiar and some not.
The skills section contains a number of dimensions. The leading column (Explosive, Marksman, CQC, etc.) is new, and shows ranking based on a few composite calculations from the player's stats. Marksman, for example, is a (still conceptual) rank generated by combining weighted values from rifle/carbine time used, accuracy, kills per hour, and kill/death ratio. I haven't worked out the detailed math yet, but the idea is to allow players with various talents (great accuracy, great K/D, or an overwhelming number of hours used) to receive high marks in a category.
CQC could track composites from Shotgun/Pistol/Knife, Explosives would handle C4/Grenades/Mines/Claymores, Survival might track Deaths Per Minute and overall Kill/Death ratio, and Squadplay could handle time as a squad member or squad leader. These are just examples, but the goal is to get to a better measure of someone's proficiency in key areas that are relevant to matching your "playstyle".
The second column covers the typical teamwork actions, like Resupply and Heal. Ideally, these ranks would be determined by taking the total # of actions into the total time played, to determine a "Heal per minute" or "Resupply per minute" number that would (hopefully) give a top-down view of that player's ongoing interest in being helpful, and their commitment to certain tasks.
Players who heal a lot of people for a month and then never do it again would start out with a high rank in Heal, but it would drop over time unless they kept healing people in proportion with their time played.
Then vehicles, mostly to help pilots and gunners find each other.
Next, the kit rankings are a little closer to home, and measure overall composites from weighted values of time used, accuracy, K/D, etc.
So, there you have it.
One inevitable question will be: "That'll take too much processing and it'll bog everything down."
My plan to address that is a simple one. Every night (or two nights, or whatever) the stats server can build a profile of each player by running these calculations and then storing them in a simple XML file. When you join a server, the retrieval of the small bit of data would be part of the loading process and made a static piece of information for as long as you're in the game. No on-the-fly calculations or use-by-use data retrieval required.
And no worries if this is too much information to digest - the photoshop took about 30 minutes and this write-up about 15, both fun to do, so it's not a big deal. All in all, it's just a new concept that'll never get implemented, but I'm always curious what people think would be useful/useless.
Two things are new:
"Squad Want Ad"
First, please note the interface on the left, which allows squad leaders to flag certain kits as "Needed by the squad". SLs can pick as many as they want by clicking on the kit icon to highlight it (I'm not sure how self-explanatory the kit icons are, but that can be tweaked).
Members cannot join a squad unless they are currently using, or flagged to spawn with, a kit that matches up to one that has been requested by the SL.
Leaving a slot blank or highlighting all kits in a slot means that anyone with any kit can join.
If a player joins with a certain kit, and that kit is requested in other slots, the player will occupy the slot with the most restrictive kit request. That is, if there are two slots with Medic flagged, the newly-join Medic will "use up" the slot that has the lowest number of other kits besides Medic. If that doesn't make sense it's okay - it's just a business rule to maximize likelihood of a "match", and not critical to the concept.
"Player Skill Readout"
The other new item is the expandable player skill readout on the right side. The goal here is to give an SL (or anyone) more detail about the skills and gameplay style of a given player.
A few of the basic measures are there, such as % balance between Combat and Teamwork, and % balance between flags captured and flags defended.
The remaining sections give players a simple Basic/Veteran/Expert ranking in a number of categories, some familiar and some not.
The skills section contains a number of dimensions. The leading column (Explosive, Marksman, CQC, etc.) is new, and shows ranking based on a few composite calculations from the player's stats. Marksman, for example, is a (still conceptual) rank generated by combining weighted values from rifle/carbine time used, accuracy, kills per hour, and kill/death ratio. I haven't worked out the detailed math yet, but the idea is to allow players with various talents (great accuracy, great K/D, or an overwhelming number of hours used) to receive high marks in a category.
CQC could track composites from Shotgun/Pistol/Knife, Explosives would handle C4/Grenades/Mines/Claymores, Survival might track Deaths Per Minute and overall Kill/Death ratio, and Squadplay could handle time as a squad member or squad leader. These are just examples, but the goal is to get to a better measure of someone's proficiency in key areas that are relevant to matching your "playstyle".
The second column covers the typical teamwork actions, like Resupply and Heal. Ideally, these ranks would be determined by taking the total # of actions into the total time played, to determine a "Heal per minute" or "Resupply per minute" number that would (hopefully) give a top-down view of that player's ongoing interest in being helpful, and their commitment to certain tasks.
Players who heal a lot of people for a month and then never do it again would start out with a high rank in Heal, but it would drop over time unless they kept healing people in proportion with their time played.
Then vehicles, mostly to help pilots and gunners find each other.
Next, the kit rankings are a little closer to home, and measure overall composites from weighted values of time used, accuracy, K/D, etc.
So, there you have it.
One inevitable question will be: "That'll take too much processing and it'll bog everything down."
My plan to address that is a simple one. Every night (or two nights, or whatever) the stats server can build a profile of each player by running these calculations and then storing them in a simple XML file. When you join a server, the retrieval of the small bit of data would be part of the loading process and made a static piece of information for as long as you're in the game. No on-the-fly calculations or use-by-use data retrieval required.
And no worries if this is too much information to digest - the photoshop took about 30 minutes and this write-up about 15, both fun to do, so it's not a big deal. All in all, it's just a new concept that'll never get implemented, but I'm always curious what people think would be useful/useless.
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