Measurements Of Success
Stats. The sum of all your online experiences in a game, measured in numbers. Power, points, kills, wins – these are the kinds of stats we’re talking about. Stats are a snapshot of our time spent online, but they aren’t necessarily representative of our time spent online. I obsess all the time over the stats in my service record World of Tanks.
Goals and Motivation
Stats are what motivate us to move forward. In MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2, we work for Exotic (or Ascended) gear because it has the highest stats. In FPS games like Battlefield 3, we look at more technical stats. Kill to death ratio, accuracy, and so on. Improving stats is pretty much the sole object of every game. You may go for something basic like gear stats, or something difficult like performance stats, or you may just be the social bug and go for achievement points like in World of Warcraft. No matter how you look at these stats, they are goals that you constantly strive to achieve.
Stats Don’t Tell The Whole Story
Paul Harvey was a radio broadcaster that was an amazing storyteller. He’d spend the first part of his show telling you a story. At the end of the show, he’d tell you ‘…the rest of the story.” It would be a tiny detail that made you change the way you looked at the first part of the story. Take the following video for example. In World of Tanks, I got a Mastery badge on one of my tanks. A Mastery badge is the highest personal performance reward you can get on the tank. It means you have done better than 95% of all players using the same tank. Sounds good doesn’t it? Watch and see if you can figure out ‘the rest of the story’.
Did you notice at least one of the enemy tanks I killed was AFK? Part of that mastery badge was pure, dumb luck. It is still my only Mastery badge, though I do have a few 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class badges.
Players Like Stats
Planetside 2 has implemented a new players stats page. A Planetside 2 fan page keeps stats on entire Outfits (guilds). Guild wars 2 has announced they are planning to implement leaderboards for their competitive sPvP players. This actually has me interested in doing sPvP in the future. They also plan to provide stats for WvW. It’s going to be interesting to see what stats they plan to track in WvW. I’m very much looking forward to it, and it might even bring players back. Stats are a popular feature in games today, and the different types of available stats are growing constantly.
What stats are most important to you? What stats would you like to see tracked?