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Score

A quick question about scoring systems, primarily multiplayer. What makes a scoring sytem good?

John Mawhorter, Blogger

April 23, 2009

1 Min Read
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It functions as a social bragging right, a way of sizing people up, a quick reminder of one’s accomplishments. But there is a tension between social “score”, ie the way other players/people evaluate your accomplishments and the actual number.

Should we come up with a simple figure and let the players/people do the real reputational math. Or is it best to keep track of it all?

I’m working on this problem for a design doc I’m writing and am leaning towards a (ultimately biased) system that keeps track of things carefully to award a more realistic number for peoples actions, mostly prompted by how fake score systems in multiplayer FPS are most of the time.

Kill Death ratio, one used by a lot of players (this being a socially propogated idea that has now been taken up by devs for stat tracking) and now games, isn’t a very good measure either.

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