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I'm going to start off with saying that HoN has a bad community. Everyone knows this. It is possible to deal with and I have been since I bought the game as it was coming out of beta, and I absolutely love it, but it would be nice to remove one of the biggest factors (in my opinion) that contribute to the flaming.
Public statistics.
While it has it's uses, it more often results in players being called trash and not given a chance to fully apply themselves in a game.
Pros:
- It enables you to check at a glance the general skill level of a player (this is linked to the cons however)
- They can be used to track your progress
- It is useful to look at professional players' statistics to get an idea of what levels of farm/wards you need in a high level game
- It feels good to have good stats
Cons:
- Often causes a lot of prejudice in public games (KD is the be all and end all of someone's skill level)
- Players often play as individuals in a team game just to improve their stats
While I can see more pros than cons to having public stats I believe that the cons still far outweigh the pros. They cause a lot of flaming, especially against newer players (the future of HoN), causing them to leave.
To rectify the situation I suggest the following
1. Make detailed stats private to only yourself
- This would track all stats as they do now, but only you would be able to check them. Everyone else would only see your MMR and total wins and losses.
- This would mean that you can still track your own improvement but you can't show them off to other people or flame them for having bad stats because you cannot see theirs.
2. Make detailed stats viewable only to friends and clan-mates
- This would track all stats as they do now, but only yourself, your friends and others in your clan would be able to check them. Everyone else would only see your MMR and total wins and losses.
- You can track your own stats and compare them to your friends. This would also stop the flaming because you don't go around trash-talking your friends' bad stats, and, if you do, it doesn't mean anything because you are friends.
3. Remove detailed stats completely
- Only track MMR and maybe total wins and losses. Nothing else. This means flamers don't even have the option to tell other people what their own KD is.
4. It has been suggested to me that it could be a good idea to make the showing/hiding of stats optional. I think this could work too.
Of the above options, I like number 2 the most. I also think that keeping the 'Most played heroes' list and perhaps adding in a publicly available True Skill Rating would be acceptable. All solutions unfortunately mean that you cannot check a professional players statistics, and for the people that don't flame (which I agree is most people) you cannot get a general skill level of a player by looking at their stats. However, that is what MMR is for!! All the people that currently flame based on KD or average GPM will now only be able to flame based on MMR. That means that the flamers will have to try and get a good MMR instead of a good KD, so they will have to play well as a team to achieve that.
Please vote yes if you agree with any of my suggestions, your input is also greatly appreciated.
If you vote no then please vote why, even if it is just something small like "I like to show off my stats". More detail is of course better though.
I realise that this is not a new idea, but I do think that it would make a big difference to the HoN experience, and encourage more people to play this game.
If you have any more suggestions to this idea, please bring them up. Any more pros and cons to what I have already listed would be great too.
Another idea from RedRooster has been added to my signature
Teal text is that which has been edited
Last edited by Strayreaper; 09-05-2012 at 02:24 PM. Reason: Adding new ideas
Back in DotA where there were no stats, flaming was just as bad as it is now. Friends of mine who were otherwise calm kind individuals in every other game and situation could turn into monsters during DotA.
Stats are just an arbitrary means by which to manifest flaming that would already occur.
Virtually all flaming is simply a means to reinforce how good one views themselves and not necessarily a strict attack on another person.
I do it myself.
I go mid as Silhouette against a Zephyr. He doesn't stand a chance in hell, despite being over 100mmr higher than me, the mismatch is too high. I call him garbage. Why? I know he isn't (I don't think all this at the time).
Because internally, I know he isn't garbage, and I know he knows he isn't garbage. So by calling him garbage I am indirectly saying "I'm ****ing good" without even consciously approaching the idea or mentioning the idea; because to boast makes one an easy target.
I rush in to gank someone and I don't tell my ally I'm going. He misses his stun or something by a little bit by not reacting fast enough. I call him an idiot, or a downy, or something to that effect. Why?
I know it's a very reasonable mistake, I know I would probably have made the same mistake in his shoes, if it even is a mistake. I am utterly deluded about my own mistake.
This will do nothing. I do however think that detailed stats should be available to you, but the stats the public sees (at least without going deep) should be of the past 20, 50, 100 games, something like that.
Alternatively one could pick a role at some point, support, carry, initiator, ganker; then have stats reflect the role you choose in the game.
Only tracking wins and losses is a horrible idea. After a set amount of time EVERYONE will coalesce at 50%.
I am agree!!!
Originally Posted by AngryAtheist
I agree completely with this!
What i believe that needs to be added to the stats is the TSR (True skill rating) google it if you don't know what I'm talking about, theres a couple of threads explaining it. And this should prevail over Kand all that stuff.
I've checked it on every player that i usually play with, although I'm not very fond of assigning numbers to the general performance of a player, this rating is pretty accurate.
I pointed this out in other thread and i got replied that 'TSR is ****, it doesn't work'. Thing is nobody could explain to me why.
Disagreed, if you're good enough, you can easily tell how good someone is by their stats. Though having the option to make stats "private" definitely doesn't hurt.
I disagree also. When people flame others in game, it has nothing to do with k:d or stats. You don't flame someone by checking their k:d and calling them garbage. You flame them and *****/complain/*****/***** in game when something goes wrong.
I would say, and god forbid how this is taken, a no stats MM. In such a game type, those players who feed are worth less money to the opposing team after every consecutive death. This would give players who aren't as good or experienced a better option than public games (which have seem to completely died off with the MMR system in place) or regular MM. Put in an option where you can play with people without as much punishment.
While I do understand that this would not eliminate flaming I do believe that this is a step in the right direction to reduce it. The type of flaming that this would reduce is flaming before the match has even started. When you look at someone's stats and see that their KD is below one. Certain people automatically assume that this player is trash and start flaming before even seeing how the person performs in-game.
With the changes that I propose there is no opportunity to flame until after the game has started, giving players time to talk to each other in which friendly relations can be developed and choose heroes that better fit the line-up (Still quite unlikely in most games).
The point being that if a game starts off without trash talk then there is less likely to be trash talk later in the game.
Thank you for your input so far, I also would like to see something like a TSR rating put into this game if my suggestion does not come to fruition, or it could be shown publicly instead of the current detailed stats.
Yeah I think starting a game with less flame should make the game better. Maybe instead when you are in a game you cannot connect to the stat server? And possibly have the player colours mixed around.
I quite like that idea too. You would be able to have a look at other people's stats after the game is finished but during the game you would not even be able to flame people based on their colour. I will make another suggestion for this.
While maybe 'only' 30% of the flame I see in games are based on stats, I see no reason not to adress the issue.
I personally thing that hiding stats except MMR could potentially help with this.
Stats are like women in bikinis, they are interesting to look at however they don't show you everything.
I said it before and i'll say it again:
Removing stats in order to reduce HoN rage is like removing car brands in order to reduce road rage; believe what you will but it simply won't happen.
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Honestly, who cares if the whine about your K/D ratio? If you get mad over that you need to grow some balls. Removing stats in order to remove K/D whine will only remove the main way of filtering banlistworthy/ignorelistworthy people, seeing as if you K/D ratio isn't 0.000000000001 that argument is insanely dumb anyways, especially if you solo queue.
I don't care myself, but it hinders the growth of the game. Why should new players continue to play this game if they are going to have a bad time?
You just need to look at LoL. It is nowhere near as good as HoN, but it is more inviting to the casual player. This has resulted in a much larger playerbase with a ton more money being injected into the game. This mean professional players get more money for playing LoL, and they end up stealing HoN professionals, hurting our competitive scene and the growth of HoN.
Are you saying you ignore people based on their stats? Presumably when you are still in the pregame lobby as you don't often check stats in game. How is that in any way constructive in a team game?
In my experience people do not flame each other solely because of their stats. They flame each other because the game isn't going how they like and KDR and other stats are just an insult to fall back on when they try to validate their claim.
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