Fortress Points Rescaling
 

since I seem to have hijacked Dylstew's thread and there seems to be more discussion on the topic I figure it should be it's own thread. (sorry dylstew :-P)

anyways as i in the previous thread said i was working on a list before i started assgining values so heres what i have so far edit as i go. its a google doc to work on it as well as you will be able to give me your opinions as i go and potential collaboration. (ask premisson and i can add you to the page.)

Google Doc

since i don't have an official list i am getting ideas/items from TF2s point system and shamelessly stealing them to try and get an idea of what is suppose to be on this.

note i have added in triggers im pretty sure don't exist in the game part of my plan. :D i wanted to try and add losing points on death though the idea is that you won't lose as many points as you can gain from a kill. the idea is that the stats will essentially track them even if they don't largely effect your score.

I also would like to mock up a better scoreboard but I don't have art skills. :( that can come later.

just one comment- I really don't believe it is a good idea to subtract points for dying. Dying itself has it's own inherent punishment and subtracting score would disproportionately affect offensive players. There needn't be any further encouragement to 'not die'. :)

When you are playing offense it has always been a good sign if you have a LOT of deaths because it means you had streamlined your runs and were putting pressure on the defense that much more often. The nice thing about tfc and FF is that it promotes aggressive and risky play because while dying is punished by taking you out of the action, it is not punished so severely (i.e. no 10 second respawn times) as to make you play very passively and conservatively. If anything players need to be encouraged to be even more aggressive in the game...adding a point penalty for dying would go the wrong direction.

^^^^ That.

Actually, if you can factor in WHERE you died(enemy base, your base, mid-field, with flag, without flag.... etc), you might be able to make a loss of a point have some value, but dying on O, having the flag, and losing points.... that's just a bad idea.

I'll take a look at the chart you're proposing, and make known any ideas I might have. I don't need to edit the actual file. :p

Where's the current list of FP actions/rewards?

I could look myself but I'm quite lazy. Is there an equivalent of the bat-signal for squeek?

FP rewards are scattering throughout C++ and Lua. Compiling a definitive list would take some effort.

Actually, never mind, it's pretty simple. Here's search results for AddFortPoints in C++:

Here's all instances of AddFortPoints in the various default Lua's (filenames not included because I'm lazy and Sublime Text doesn't have very copy+pasteable find results):

Thanks, squeek :)

I've made a spreadsheet of the current values which relate to CTF (there may be some missing/wrong..), put the current values "on the same scale" as kills, then put my first thoughts on reworking them to get something down to think about:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

I think everyone should be able to edit it to add their own suggestions if they like.

i knew should have used a spreadsheet. (i r spreadsheet noob. :mrgreen:)

im technically a horrible person to ever attempt to read code im dyslexic and ad.d. but i'll try to make it work. (squeek is awesome) :mrgreen::thumbsup:

caseium thanks for deciphering it not sure if its complete list but if it is my concern about our current list is there isn't allot of points slots set to team play objectives but rather most of it set to kill stuff.

so i am going to continue to use my document to finish my idea which is probably what should do if i want to finish it. (also i can do that now because i have all the data.)

added critique to your stats sheet

so now that ive offically come to conclusion that i can't use a spreadsheet to save my life. so i am busily converting my word document to a table :D i still not quite sure exactly how it shoudl work yet im just sorta randomly plugging in numbers. :)

I remember this discussion back in like 2006 on the old dev forums and I think this was my suggestion: to make the scoreboard cleaner just truncate the extra digits on the scoreboard, but still sort players by the underlying full score # and keep the full point values and score shown in upper left for the player as-is. You don't have to muck around with changing a lot of point values and you avoid the decimal display situation. win-win...and should be the least amount of code change required.

i.e. if you have 2580 points and another player has 2530 points the scoreboard will show a simple 25 for both, but show you above that player. If you want the finer detail you have it in the upper left where it doesn't take up precious scoreboard space. TF2 actually ended up doing something similar to this- they have extra digit granularity but truncate the score on the scoreboard

Things you do that benefit the team outside of killing players do already reward points (i.e. flag touches, killing sentries depending on the level, etc).

Just going 25/5 and hiding in your spawn will leave you with 2500 points...an offensive player going 17/44 but getting 10 flag touches, killing multiple sentry guns and getting a cap or two is going to end up with more points.

Best question to lay out is what is something you do to help the team right now that you feel is not currently recognized by the scoring system? And is it easy to measure?

Some of the old ideas we had that never made it in:
1) When your team captures the flag, +xxx points for anyone else that touched the flag prior to capture...rewards all the people who contributed to the final capture
2) Flag defense bonus +xxx points: Killing an enemy within x units of flag or killing an enemy who has your flag
3) homerun cap bonus +1.5x the defined cap value - a coast to coast capture is hugely valuable
12) Flag save (by offense): If a flag is going to return within x seconds and the player touches it, keeping it alive: +200 point bonus for that flag touch
13) Flag save (by defense): If your flag is returned, +200 points bonus for the player that made the last kill within x proximity of your flag (pretty complex...)
14) Relay after cap (defrags idea): +200 points to the player if touching the flag x seconds after your team caps.

the main things ive added though ive probably added a few more espeicalyl in the individual category.

assist kills (in there traditional sense do enough damage to a traget but dont' kill them get an assist kill them. there would have to be a timer of some sort to prevent someone from going back and healing then coming back and getting killed by someone else and that other person still getting an asist kill.)

flag distance recorder (more points for longer distance you move the flag towards objective. (it seems that caesium has added that.)
tracking if your throwing the flag in the right direction (flag throw points)

also defense points which are basically killing someone that is capping the objective, or with the flag maybe even near the flag. you would get points for that making it so priory targets are rewarded.

also another thought i had and really like about the concept of losing points is that it would allow in depth analyses of your play. if you were able to pull the stats to see how efficient your sentry gun was. or how efficient your scout play was etc... you lost 50 points with your sentry gun but gained 125 or something (using bullshit numbers). thats kinda the vison i had with fortress points. id like to be set them up so later someone can look at them and break down what happened what they could do better. in FF K/D can't tell you those things. also that i don't see alot individual points either like showing the benfit of backstabbing a player or ability to use head-shots for a sniper all those little things won't show up in fp because they arent' recoreded. (well acording to the CTF FP excell sheet.)

Thanks for the ideas, PHISH. My thoughts:

1) I agree with the intention but not the implementation (sure it would be a fairer reward than atm, but I think we can do better, plus as an aside unfortunately I think any reward just for a flag touch [other than initial] is open to abuse). My suggestion attempts to reward players for their actual contribution to the capture (it rewards players by the distance they move the flag towards the capture point, scaled by the remaining capture progress required when they picked up the flag): max(0, 20*(distance_moved/distance_initial)*(distance_pickup/distance_initial)) - might look complicated but I think it would work well.

Edit: P.S. the "20" scalar is just a guess and if needed we could further reduce the reward (i.e. from the suggested linearly decreasing reward) for later parts (relative to earlier parts) of the capture process by sticking a power on the last term (e.g. (distance_pickup/distance_initial)^2).

2) I'm not convinced by the first part (why should it be better for defense to let the offense get close to the flag?); the second part I agree with and is already in my suggestion.

3) Again, I agree with the intention but not the implementation. My suggestion essentially attempts to contain a suitable "homerun bonus" within the flag moved points (along with initial touch and capture).

12) Good idea - I've just added this to my suggestion (note: although the objective of the offense is always to get the flag, sacrificing yourself to get a touch without much chance of a flag move [within say 10 secs of flag return] is a very worthy cause to encourage).

13) I disagree (as the objective of the defense is to stop the offense and if they have managed to get a return then they should already have been suitably rewarded by both the FP leading up to that moment plus the fact that the returned flag will now be easier to defend).

14) I disagree (I don't think there should be any additional FP at all for a relay relative to a non-relay - the fact that you took the opportunity to get the flag at a time when the defense is compromised is your incentive/reward).


Regarding granularity: if need be for clarity I don't see any problem with having FP displayed at a lower fidelity (e.g. rounded down to an integer or whatever on the scoreboard) than it's actually calculated at internally or displayed on the HUD (e.g. floating point).

this is where i think primarily disagree with you on fortress points. fortress points shouldn't be purely a motivation to play well. it should be a lose guide to help you play better. and such somthing like this while yes rewarded in game should also reflect a reward in FP as well. As they are seperate from the game. fp shoudln't be incentive to do somthing you won't ordinarly do (that you are suppose to do.) but a record of what your doing right and a guide to help you play better.

so say i get 100 fps the first game i play i say how can i do better after a few games you start to do better and as such your fortress points will be higher. (that should be the idea of fortress points. why i think it should have all the little things recorded even if they already show up in game.

i don't think anyone is going to abuse FPs anyways on a large scale if it all as we aren't gonna list what you do and don't get in the game. (also there is no actual reward for them and as such we shouldn't worry about a little abuse unless it can drastically effect the scores without making a large effort to. i personally think there should never be a reward for fortress points anyways never be content you can unlock do to them or even a leader board (though that might work). would be cool to record them for personal analyses so i could see how effective i was with this or that and work on ways to improve on it.

Idea(if it's not done this way, or having been suggested before):

Below the "Fortress Points" score in the upper corner, a short "+10 points Flag Touch", "+100 points Flag Capture", etc.... which fade away after a few seconds. That would give the player an idea of what they're doing right, and how the score is kept.

If it actually DOES work this way(I haven't played in a few days, and my mind isn't as sharp as it usually is, given the close proximity of my sister)... then forget I said anything. ;)

It does (and always has). :fall:

Points for turning off security is the only really "crucial" thing that FF points should implement, methinks.

Yeah, I saw that last night. So..... I'll just go sit in the corner, drink a few beers, and contemplate shit for a while.
;)