I find the current Combat Reputation system - the one that compares player kills to deaths by players - to be a bit wonky. There's all these fine gradations between -50 and +320, but there's no further distinction between, say, 50 kills behind and 500 kills behind, resulting in almost everybody being either Laughable or Insane. It's odd having a world where everyone either laughs maniacally or is being laughed at.

Therefore I propose that Combat Reputation not use the difference between player kills and deaths by players, but the ratio. This way someone who's died 100 times and defeated 50 players will be the equal of some who has died 500 times and killed 250.

Plenty of other games use a similar concept, known as a "kill/death ratio", and has the advantage of not getting messed up when the absolute size of the numbers grows. The current system may have worked fine when 100 kills was an achievement, but now it's only a statistic.

I wouldn't have it as a priority, but yeah it would be nice to switch to a K:D ratio for reputation

How about this:

0.4 K/D and below: Laughable
0.4 to 0.5 Feeble
0.5 to 0.7 Weak
0.7 to 0.9 Passive
0.9 to 1.1 Balanced
1.1 to 1.5 Harmful
1.5 to 2.0 Dangerous
2.0 to 3.0 Deadly
3.0 to 4.0 Menacing
4.0 to 6.0 Savage
above 6.0 Insane

5.0 - insane
above 6.0 - BAMF

What about an Elo based system?

What's an Elo system? I'm unfamiliar with the term.

It's the rating system used in chess. Basically, players have a rating relative to 1000. Your rating increases when you defeat someone and decreases when you are defeated. How much that increase/decrease is - is proportional to your opponent's rating.

Therefore, there is a larger reward for defeating tougher opponents than there is for weaker ones, which is supposed to encourage players to take on more evenly matched opponents. For example, if you farmed a bunch of weak ships, your rating wouldn't increase that much - but if you took out a handful of similar or higher rated ships, your rating would increase by a larger amount.

An ELO system sounds great!




Don't bring me down... No, no, no, no, no!

i prefer this to an ELO system. the one on boardgamearena has a base of 1500 ELO ... but there are some inactive or infrequent players who maintain high ELO just by not doing anything. an ELO for GL would require a new formula for 'tough' players that would have to include rank ... atk strength ... def strength ... etc.

using the rating system outlined by BlazingNinja would just replace the current combat rep equation with another equation ... making it a 5 minute coding change. instead of combat rep = range (combat kills - combat deaths) ... combat rep = range (combat kills / combat deaths). then you just change the numbers assigned to each combat rep label. the 40% up and down also nicely mirrors the bt range calc.

Maybe change the numbers around a bit (above 6.0 seems a bit low to me)... but yeah, this would be a nice change

Of course, completely unlike players who maintain a high KDR in the same manner . That's easily fixed. Just make the rating converge on it's base value by a specific amount each day a player doesn't perform offensive actions.



Why? If that was the case, then surely it would also need to be applicable to any other rating system devised, including a KDR based one... Anyway, you could just make it so that players outside of badging range don't count.

but then those with a crappy ELO can just do nothing and their ELO will increase back to the base value.



so many problems ...

rank 500 beats down a rank 300 ssb ... lots of effort ... gets very little ELO
rank 300 beats down a glass cannon 500 ... minimal effort ... gains lots of ELO

rank 200 beats down a rank 5k who unloads all def / atk mods for that purpose ... low rank gets a massive ELO gain and is left alone by everyone in his rank range.

if you do not account for hull / shield / atk strength / def strength ... there is no way to make the ELO score change reflect 'combat reputation'. the advantage of the kill / death ratio is that it requires zero additional massaging to make it work ... it just re.maps the existing structure ... hence easier to code ... hence more likely to be implemented.

At which point they become 'Unaccomplished'. And why not if they don't actively engage in combat?



Why? Rank wouldn't be a factor in deriving ratings.



Again, high rank would not necessarily mean high rating. And it certainly wouldn't for long by engaging in such a practice. In any case, why would the 200 be left alone? If he ends up with a high rating - he effectively has a bounty on his head... Especially when a couple of spy probes reveal he has crap att/def.



Those attributes are precisely what determines the outcome of combat, why do they need to be accounted for? You don't see players with lower IQ/poor strategy being accounted for in chess, do you?



Very true, but keeping the existing system would involve even less effort

Doing nothing would not resolve the issue. A Kill/Death ratio would resolve the issue, with minimal work. An ELO system would also resolve the issue, but sounds like way too much work than Dan is likely to do, especially when he has a perfectly acceptable solution that requires significantly less effort.

an ELO system MIGHT work, but Kropotkin has given zero indication of how it would work in practice. so his suggestion is useless.

he says rank won't come into the picture. so i can disable a rank 400 in my badge range with a high ELO and my ELO goes up as much as if i disabled a rank 2000 with the same ELO score ? Kropotkin has not thought it through at all ...

Needing a 6:1 ratio would actually drop me from insane!

Personally since Rep is too easy to inflate, I don't see messing with it as a good use of time

I doubt Dan has time to provide it, but I'd be interested in seeing a data dump of all the players kills and deaths just to see the distribution. I suspect the high end would need to be at least 10:1 to make it an uncommon achievement. Depending on the data, a log scale might be more useful all around though.

which is the whole POINT of the suggestion. to make it so that the combat rep categories are actually distinguishable. we just want you to get sane Billik !

I really like this idea, but definitely not super important.

+1