I think under the character information screen you should remove the "deaths". I think a more relevant section to replace deaths is "time played". By displaying time played against all your stats would more accurately display the pilots skill imo. Deaths is irrelevant and not very "lifelike"... and no one would really care how many times you "died" as long as you hang in there and try to improve. I just believe this would be a better display for stats than "deaths". Any comments?

heh I wonder what happens if you have the tendency to put your pc on with VO logged in while sleeping...

Hmm... I disagree. If you don't like the term "deaths" why not replace it with "ship losses."

I like knowing how many times I've died.

Me too, phaser, I'm going for the record! Almost to 2,000!

I've found that pk's/deaths is probably the best indicator of how dangerous a pilot is (adjusted of course in the case of people who run when they get low).

One might suggest that piracy would skew these. But nobody gets many pk's from piracy anymore, and they haven't in months.

But the real indicator is the derivative of pk's/deaths over time. If a person's ratio is creeping up, you can assume that their effective ratio is a good deal higher.

You want to fight the alt of a strong player? look for pk/death ratios of 3 and above. Its very easy to find them under this light.

i agree with Phaserlight. just call it ship losses.

Keep the deaths counter... but add also a player-deaths counter - a PK/PD ratio would be more informative and useful than deaths alone. I've suffered at least as many deaths from bots/issuing as I have from other players... and even now, a good 2/3 of my deaths were in the first month of my playing - less than 1/6 of the time I've played; I've only died a dozen or so times in the last month (while I have well over 1,000 deaths on my record).

Perhaps there could be an absolute statistic, and a relative statistic... one shows total kills, total PKs, total deaths, total player-deaths, etc... and the other shows the number of each from just the last 30-60 days. For new players, the numbers would be the same... but as time goes on, the latter would become a more accurate representation of their skill.

EDIT: on another note, I'm now working on levelling a new character, and trying to break my previous personal record of 1,837 kills and 3 PKs / 0 deaths (was finally finished by a queen's explosion on that character, breaking my streak - now I'm starting anew...) Deaths give you something to aim for - a goal which goes beyond immediate activities: this is a good thing.

Everyone made good arguments against, mostly on which I agree on. That made me re-think my post...

You could have "recordable deaths" which only count deaths if a player controlled ship actually killed you. I think that would be reasonable, as well as take into account what everyone was saying.

This way, stupid things, like running into roids, bot kills, etc, are taken out. Then you will be able to see how many PK's vs. deaths you actually have.

Maybe you could even have a requirement where for the first 30? days deaths are not recorded for newbies so that it doesn't skew the results.

Actually, detailed stats on HOW you died would be awesome, ie:

LeberMac : 1734 deaths
**********************
Breakdown:

Arklan Guardians: 622
Fennus Guardians: 438
Asteroids: 151
Station impacts: 63
Artemis Collectors: 59
Hive Queens: 37
UncleDave: 36
.
.
.
etc, etc.

your stats are more like this leebs:

ARklan:500
Fennus:400
Asteroid:200
station:100
arty:60
HQ:40
UD:40
WM:all the rest

but how useful?

I'm against completely negating any part of your player statistics (such as the first month of play), but I am in favor of keeping some statistics (such as NPC-deaths/total deaths) private, and only allowing them to be seen by other players if you choose to do so (ie. checkbox "publicly show total deaths", etc..).

Rather than removing statistics as they become outdated, it would be better to replace them with a more relevant statistic (retaining the original/total statistics also)

I don't see the harm in tracking specifically what kills you, but those statistics shouldn't be visible where they clutter up the in-game UI, and should be kept private (personal record-keeping, perhaps in the 'Your Stats' section of the website)

Only statistics that are relevant in the game should be shown in the game (with the charinfo command). These include:
Total Kills
Total Player Kills
Total Deaths
Total Player Deaths
Last 30 days Kills
Last 30 days Player Kills
Last 30 days Deaths
Last 30 days Player Deaths
Week-to-Date Kills
Week-to-Date Player Kills
Week-to-Date Deaths
Week-to-Date Player Deaths
Session Kills
Session Player Kills
Session Deaths
Session Player Deaths

Perhaps all these could be seen in the station (by the player)
While only select ones would be seen in space (by the player and by other players) These might include:
Total Kills/PKs
last 30 days Kills/PKs/Deaths/PDs (possibly disabled if the player so chooses)

So, in Brief:
Keep Deaths counter
Add "Player-Deaths" counter
Add timeline breakdowns of statistics
Add Kills/PKs/Deaths/PDs statistics for the last 30 days (keep totals as well, but don't direct forcus to them)
Allow selective hiding of stats in-game

yep cunjo, good idea.

Shape, k/d raitio isn't the best example, I mean, I have 2.26 or so in that, but I'm a fairly good pvp'er.

the thing is..

I have a total of 2500 kills...

1110 of which are player kills
and I have 1170 deaths..

doesn't really add up well.

*STAMP OF APPROVAL FOR PK/D RAITIO**

i think the whole point of a deaths count of any kind is so you have to own up to all the times you loose a game of chicken with a 'roid or station.

I like Cunjo's stats as well.

If the game keeps track of these events, could it write the death details to a database somewhere? then, via a web interface, you could see all the reports based on that data. Would it tax the production server any to log all deaths? Playername, date & time, killed by <other player/npc bot/npc bot type/station guard/strikeforce/impact on station/impact on roid/impact on other ship/explode command/other>

You'd sign in to the stats area with your same login & pw for the game, and you can choose your characters and analyze their stats. Would not be too hard, and it would not slow down gameplay since it's running on the webserver - NOT the production gameserver.

It logs all kills now (not deaths from suicide though - that would be easy enough to add), along with what the killer and the um, die-er were carrying on their ships. It's pretty interesting what can be gleaned from that.

<offtopic>
For instance, http://a1k0n.net/vendetta/pvp_rank.txt very good flamebait material. Er, I mean it is a very rough estimate of "player skill" in PvP combat although it ignores the inherent differences in weaponry used - the next step is to factor out the item usage and determine some kind of objective measure of "balance". These numbers are obtained by creating a simple probabilistic model (a player of skill A will kill a player of skill B with probability 1/(1+exp(B-A)) and doing Bayesian [edit: not actually Bayesian, just maximum likelihood; if I redo this, it'll be with a variational Bayesian method] inference on all the data which in this case involves minimizing a function of ~1100 parameters. *Dxxxx indicates a deleted character and the number in parens on the right is a rough measure of confidence interval (higher is more confident), and I only show those with a confidence >100 (otherwise, people with like three kills can show up "ranked" highly with the probability distribution of "skill value" spread all over the spectrum, so it isn't fair to show it as a rank)

(please direct disputes of the validity of this method with arguments based largely upon your ranking in the list, or the tactics which people highly ranked use, to some other thread)
</offtopic>

Anyway, yes. We can show more stats but the data aren't indexed very conveniently to show things like the number of PvP deaths in the last 30 days.

interesting indeed...I really don't know what I hink of having a real "player skill" measure, because it is so very subjective in nature... better, I suppose, to simply show the stats, and let personal experience be the judge.

I, for one, believe you really can't know someone until you've fought them... since every fighting style is unique, and different players exhibit different levels of mastery within their own specific styles as well as specific weapons/ships, you really can't say 'playerX is better than playerY' until you've pitted them against eachother... exhaustively.

I really like matchup tournaments, because they put the players on an even playing feild, and see who owns the feild... Free-For-Alls are great too, but the balance is different depending on how different ships are matched up. (ie. a player who is a master of the Centurion, FLYING a centurion, should have no trouble wasting a player who is a master of a rail-hornet, FLYING a rail hornet)

Example:
Shape, is awesome.
Shape will kick my ass any day of the week if given the opportunity to fly against me in a light ship.
However, when Shape and I go head-to-head in Ragnaroks, we're fairly evenly-matched, with the balance slightly in my favor. Why? because I specialize in heavy ships, while Shape is more well-versed in light ones.

What does all this mean? I have absolutely no idea... I just know that I really don't want to see players rated against eachother on any kind of algorithm-controlled scale... If you want to know who's the better of two pilots, fight! and if you want to know who's the best of a handful, organize an extensive tournament.

This isn't to say that I don't like duel ratings - I do... I just don't want the focus or judge of a pilot to ride on their duel rating, nor do I want it to ride on some "objective" statistical analysis, and I fear that is what would happen if you introduced such. It's just not appropriate to express a subjective factor in an objective statistic...

by the way... what ever happened to "Solution"?

Well, it isn't fair to call it objective anyway - you can't do inference without making assumptions. My main plan for that sort of thing was to use the player skill estimates to factor out of the item balance statistics, not to really show the player skills on a global scale. There are a lot of confounding factors, like free-for-alls where anyone can kill Shape by bombarding him with rockets from afar while he's working someone else over. But with enough data, we can probably tell for certain just how much of an advantage a Neutron MkIII conveys over the MkII, for instance. You're right that there will be players better at one style of ship than another, but we'll know both on average how "good" one ship is, and also how much the "goodness" of that ship can vary by pilot skill.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is we keep the statistics, and that was the original reason for it. So it isn't too much to ask for a "death by X" count.

[off topic] Cro-bo was a better pvper than me, HA, I knew it![/off topic]

Yeah, i'd like to see a list of people who killed me, would be kinda neat when someone says *yeah, but I blasted you last week!*, mine would look something like this though...

Bojan = 193,
Scarlett Lioness = 171,
MysticRogue = 156,
mr_spuck = 96,
Splash = 78,
Martin = 75,
Niki = 61,
Alamar = 51,
Shape = 28,
RelayeR = 27,
MonkofAkan = 25,
Mad_Max = 23

Heh, got to love Alamar :)

Wooo! I'm not NEGATIVE!
0.03466 - LeberMac (216.499493)

[EDIT] It hurts me that Zoras Ock is RIGHT above me. GAH! Whazzup with THAT?
I demand the opportunity to whittle him down to size!

quoting alkon:
It logs all kills now (not deaths from suicide though - that would be easy enough to add), along with what the killer and the um, die-er were carrying on their ships. It's pretty interesting what can be gleaned from that.

Holy crap that rocks. And the DB is persistent? I suggest that Guild SW makes the data available to logged-in users via some kind of web interface that rould run reports (like rrdtool & imagemagick) and display relationships. For example: me vs. Cunjo in light ships vs, heavy ships. Total deaths by day of the week and/or time of play, etc. etc. All of that stuff could just be saved as specific "reports" that would be called up and graphs generated on-the-fly. Kickass.

im last! woot!