Is there a term for measuring skill?

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Sly

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Is there a way of measuring how much skill it takes to overcome a certain tactic?

Lets say that there are two similarly skilled players in an FPS, one is a camper, the other is an assaulter. In a certain situation, it takes the assaulter, on average, five attempts before he can take out the camper. So that would mean the camper has a 5x skill advantage.

But if the player acting as the assaulter was considerably more skilled than the camper and manage to maintain a 1:1 kill ratio. Then that would mean he's 5x more skilled than the camper. A skilled camper on the other hand, will be expecting his attacks so it's back to the camper having the 10x advantage.



The thing is, when i'm in debates regarding tactics. The other guys would often reply, "meh, i can just go in there and kill him". Completely disregarding the whole point of being a camper (Hard to reach, but easy to kill from). I have the sudden urge slam the table on top of him every time this happens.

When it comes to arguments regarding tactics, i always assume that both players/teams are of the same skill level before weighing the pros and cons (Never assume that you're better than the other guy!).

When in a team game, if there are 16 people on your team, there are probably around 2 that are actually elite level. If you're a good tactician, you don't base your tactics on how well those two elites do, you base them on the fact that there are 14 cannon fodders on your team.

So i need a way of quantifying skill just so i can put teammates in different categories.
 
Stop: Trying to measure skill

Start: Measuring the drinks ingested pre-game

End Result: Quantifiable levels of Durp.
 
It would seem to me that the means by which you determine skill is completely dependent on the title. In BC2, for some it could be the player's K : D ratio, to others, it could be the number of points gained in a single round. In COD it's primarily the player's K : D.

Edit: Fucking smileys...
 
I think he is trying to quantify skill to better coordinate his prearranged teams tactics, not as some "epeen" contest though.

In terms of a trying to evaluate a small sample set like this, I think a more hands on approach of observation and testing works better than statistical analysis. As the latter generally works better with larger sample sizes.
 
Not only by game title, but on the gun, the equipment and the situation as well :D It's your clanmates so you're aware of what they can do, and you as the clan tactician has to make the most of his skill. It's a thankless job, especially with members cycling in and out, i'm hoping being able to actually write down what they can do would help so i don't have to keep going by gut feeling.

Why did you put two guys to guard a corridor, but when they aren't available, you resort to putting a four man squad there to do the same job :confused:

In my clan, there are a few good tacticians, when they aren't online, the members feel it in the game. I'm trying to put down some sort of ground rules they can follow when they're on their own.

After playing quite a few online games, i'm starting to see that you can train players to be elite class, but leadership and tactics aren't something you can easily find.
 
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This is pretty hard.

TDM: pretty straightforward... K/D ratio.
Objectives: How well they cap the flag or plant the bomb?? not sure...

One thing my clan did was to scrim as much as possible and record every scrim.
Then we would post it on the forums and have an open discussion about what we did wrong, what we could improve and future suggestions.
 
Skill and tactics are 2 different things.

Sometimes you can be out skilled but if you acknowledge that you can create tactics to either win by factoring in your own weaknesses and strengths, or even just minimize your loss.

The idea that camping is beneficial is not always true, it depends on the game to be honest. People who overuse camping usually do so because their opponent is bad at dealing with campers and so they're just playing the best strategy possible.

Some games aren't well balanced and always reward camping, in this case I would seriously consider playing a better, more balanced game.

As for measuring skill, usually you have to measure on fair ground, so give one person a chance to camp and the other to attack, and then reverse the roles. This is why a lot of multiplayer happens either with mirrored maps OR the maps are played in 2 rounds and the team with the best score after 2 rounds win.
 
2 of my favourite debates - accurate scoring in games, and strategy vs tactics.

The really key question here is how is the camping sniper affecting your team's ability to complete it's objectives?

If you have good tactics you will be able to find a reliable and elegant way of taking him out, if you are a good strategist you might decide to take another route and simply ignore him.

A good strategist with bad tactics might repeatedly attack a well defended spot, and be killed many times over, but when he finally succeeds, despite a terrible K : D ratio, he can complete an objective and utterly turn the course of a game.

In well created games, success in acheiving objectives will lead to a high points per hour\points per minute.

Elite players will have a lot of skill (response, reflexes), good tactics and good strategy.

A sniping camper might have skill and be really difficult to shift, but be in a strategically useless place and have no impact on the flow of the game, and be easy to flank - he'd have bad tactics.

The balance of those 3 factors is what defines a player.
 
rhiridflaidd said:
2 of my favourite debates - accurate scoring in games, and strategy vs tactics.

The really key question here is how is the camping sniper affecting your team's ability to complete it's objectives?

If you have good tactics you will be able to find a reliable and elegant way of taking him out, if you are a good strategist you might decide to take another route and simply ignore him.

A good strategist with bad tactics might repeatedly attack a well defended spot, and be killed many times over, but when he finally succeeds, despite a terrible K : D ratio, he can complete an objective and utterly turn the course of a game.

In well created games, success in achieving objectives will lead to a high points per hour\points per minute.

Elite players will have a lot of skill (response, reflexes), good tactics and good strategy.

A sniping camper might have skill and be really difficult to shift, but be in a strategically useless place and have no impact on the flow of the game, and be easy to flank - he'd have bad tactics.

The balance of those 3 factors is what defines a player.
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This is rather well put, i am going to put this out here, i do play a lot of halo (kill me if you want, i also own 4 gaming computers). Because i have tons of halo examples i will use them for this question. Keep in mind, i also play with a team.

So here i go, We are playing big team battle (8v8) 5 people on my team are setting next to me. Are we start, its classic capture the flag. We are start playing, and we are in a dead lock. Neither team can advance, neither team scores. It ends up in a draw, even thought players might have a good k/d ratio.

So what happened?
Looking back at the game, we notice some things. First, are sniper never left the base, he stuck back, and defended. Did he goes positive, yes lets say 8+. Did he die over and over again, no.. did he do well? NO, you see this is capture the flag, with the sniper in the back, we had a hard time gaining map control. As such we where not able to push into there base at all, however they couldn't get into ours.

What else happened?
The tank player never left the base... read above at sniper.

Did they have skills yes, are they good players, possibly. But the fact that they went 8+ doesn't mean they helped the game.

I am going to move around, if a player doesn't get alot of kills, even goes negative. But has alot of assets, and drove the flag back home a couple of times. Did he not do as good as the sniper kid, i think you see my point.
I am out of time, but i just wanted to example alittle more.

Its hard to measure, but i think it comes down to this. If you know skill when you see it.
 
if you want to quantify skill then go to a league website that tracks win/loss ratio, k:d ratio and a slew of other facts.

You can't just take a single scenario or game and make judgement of player skill. Well you can, but your quantified observations would be too narrow
 
I don't think there will be any way to statistically measure the skill of your players that will be both (a) reasonable to do in your spare time and (b) more accurate than your gut.

I would offer this advice: people tend to perform better and care more when they are doing jobs they enjoy. They also tend to enjoy jobs they are good at.

Make a list of players. Rank them by your gut feeling of how they perform. Ask them what they like to do the best, and that should give you a good idea of where to put people.
 
You don't quantify it. You observe and attest to it.

In my WoW raids, I see who's dying a lot, who fails to act without proper direction over the microphone (or isn't acting properly at all), who isn't pulling on par dps. There's no way I could have a measured metric for this...I simply got to learn each player's capability over time. I've been raiding for 2 months now...that's about 100 hours with these people, and I only have a slight idea as to their capabilities. What I've been noticing this past week is that many of our players can do well when properly directed, but once the raid leader stop giving out instructions, they just fall apart.

For shooters, there are too many skills that just cannot be quantified. Outside of pure aiming and mechanics, you've got: situational awareness, cognitive ability, planning tactics, adapting to the unknown, learning efficacity, sense of timing, etc...

Also, what game are you even playing? I've never really heard of any game where camping was a legitimate threat in competitive play.
 
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ryken said:
I don't think there will be any way to statistically measure the skill of your players that will be both (a) reasonable to do in your spare time and (b) more accurate than your gut.

I would offer this advice: people tend to perform better and care more when they are doing jobs they enjoy. They also tend to enjoy jobs they are good at.

Make a list of players. Rank them by your gut feeling of how they perform. Ask them what they like to do the best, and that should give you a good idea of where to put people.
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I'd have to agree with this. Too many factors to consider. But kills:death ratio is a good metric. Ultimately, tactics/role aside, FPSs are win or lose. Whoever wins more and dies less rates higher, but I'd say that's hard to tie to skill. Could me luck or circumstance.

Ex: Someone who is terrible at FPS may rate low. But if they played me they would probably rank pretty high. Ha! :D
 
You can't really quantify or measure skill.

It's an intangible and subjective metric, that gets even more convoluted when you're trying to measure individuals in a team game.

Ideally, you simply put your people in their best roles, and execute your plan.

In team games it doesn't matter how great the individuals are, it's how well they can operate as one.

I'm trying to put down some sort of ground rules they can follow when they're on their own.
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Coordinate and Operate as One Unit.

When attacking, attack at the same time, even if it's multiple areas. (Barring of course distracting tactics)

When defending, ensure clear communication.

Most maps will have best practices, make sure everybody knows what they are.
 
skill and tactics are different things. I view skill as your reflex ability and coordination. And tactics is your ability to know where, what, and when you should be doing at any given moment to help your team.
And IMO an elite player is not just one who has a good measure of both of these but consistently has proven to be able to pull off difficult feats in a game like making a game tying capture while killing off half a dozen enemies in the process. Players that are only good at sitting back and padding up easy kills hardly impress me.
 
eon said:
skill and tactics are different things. I view skill as your reflex ability and coordination. And tactics is your ability to know where, what, and when you should be doing at any given moment to help your team. And IMO an elite player is not just one who has a good measure of both of these but consistently has proven to be able to pull off difficult feats in a game like making a game tying capture while killing off half a dozen enemies in the process. Players that are only good at sitting back and padding up easy kills hardly impress me.
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Precisely. Well put, this is exactly how I see it.

I have been playing Killzone 3 recently (among other console games) while I wait for my new motherboard, and I constantly hear people brag about how many kills they have in an objective based game mode. Irks the hell out of me!
 
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It's not as simple as one thing. You're going to have people that are good campers, people that are better at assaulting, people that are better at outmaneuvering, etc.

What you want to do is come up with generic effective tactics based on these people's actions. So you could fraps their play sessions and choose the most interesting and effective. That way you can say "yeah, you're good at rushing people but you're not good at holding back when necessary and camping. Here's how you can do that". Get some level maps and draw up maneuvers and scenarios like on a football play book. Then practice these and tweak them.

Some good examples of this: how to take out that sniper in X building, how to suppress people(it's possible without lame supression mechanics but it takes teamwork) and outmaneuver them, how to outflank people or tell when you might be getting outflanked(I noticed this is based a lot around timing on some CS and DoD maps for example).

I think leadership is pretty easy to grow in game vs real life because you can practice it much much more. Why not assign team leaders and squad leaders and let them go at it? When they're in-game be very hands off and just give them a mission. If they can't think on the fly and respond to new situations then you want someone else. The grunts should be the guys that are skilled with their weapons and know the playbook well enough to follow orders correctly. The leader needs to know when to throw the playbook out and do something different because they're faced with an unplanned for situation. You can set them up training resources and a team and if they aren't performing after a couple weeks you can always swap someone else in.

Overall I would track skill based on how often your team wins against other teams, how ugly/elegant the wins/losses are, how good morale is within teams, things like that.



Most of my planning experience came from WoW, where someone thinking of tactics for a boss fight was critical, as was everyone doing their specific role correctly. So even if we had someone who was skilled individually, they could always ruin the raid by doing something stupid or not following orders.

Don't get caught up in standardized metrics. They're useful imo for individuals to rate their success, but not so useful for comparing others. Your camper type person might have the best K:D ratio and your rogue might have the highest DPS, but if the camper doesn't maneuver well then he may be a bad type of player to have, and if the rogue requires so much healing that you need extra healers and thus lose additional DPS then your overall DPS is actually lower. It's about how everyone fits together as a team.

I think of it like myself at basketball(in middle school, don't laugh). I was absolutely horrible at scoring but I played every quarter because I was tall and fast and caused a lot of turnovers. This helped our team win. If you were just looking at stats you might replace me with someone who scores 8 more pts per game on average but then the other time might start scoring 20 more pts per game and then your team would be worse off overall.
 
I think skill IS something you can measure and quantify, but to get better results than just observing would take a ton of time and effort. Think about baseball, we can measure how good a pitcher is with statistics, and do so accurately. The problem is doing so is an enormous task.

You could make a list of 10-15 stats for each "position" on your team, and then keep track of it all, and it might help you. But do you really want to try and count all of that. You'll be a bean counter and not a leader.

In other words, it's possible, but not worth it.
 
When attempting to measure the skill of a player, one must take into account multiple factors for the result to be accurate. For example, if one were to calculate the skill of a player seasoned in long distance rifle combat, several factors would have to be considered:

- The K/D of the player
- The value of the players efforts measured against his foes and teammates
- The perceived skill of the player from his own perspective and that of bystanders.
- The number of homosexual men the player has slept with

(that's right, camping is gay, I fucking hate campers)
 
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