Revamp of the Scoreboard System

[357th_KW]

With new recon mechanics inbound, I’d love to see a revamp of the scoring system.  The current scoreboard system gives a lot of detail for different types of ground targets destroyed for air to ground, but only lists aircraft destroyed for air to air, and has nothing for cargo or recon ops.  It would be great to see a system that gives some love to all four types of ops and include some improvements to get away from the all-or-nothing focus on destroyed targets.

 

Starting with ground attack, the reality for historical bomber and ground attack pilots was that they never really knew exactly what (if anything) they had destroyed.  The important thing was getting bombs on target and then getting back to base.  Under the current system, a group of bombers can attack a target and only 1 or 2 players could get awarded with most of the destroyed objects, while the others get nothing for their efforts.  This encourages danger-close, suicidal attacks because even a near miss is worthless to the player if it doesn’t destroy the target outright.  Conversely it discourages level bombing, as it’s much harder and more time consuming to make all those bombs count like you can with a low level attack.  I’d like to see ground attack switched to give credit for the weight of ordnance on target, based on the damage done rather then targets destroyed.  This way near misses and hits that only damage a target structure are valued.

 

For air to air, I’d like to see something similar - still show outright kills, but also assists and aircraft damaged.  Historically, US and British pilots were given “damaged” and “probable” credits and the Luftwaffe credited pilots for separating a heavy bomber from its formation.  In game, fighter pilots are only credited for aircraft destroyed or assisted destroyed (to a much lesser degree).  This encourages some undesirable behaviors where players are cutting in front of each other to try and “steal” kills, or taking suicidal risks to ensure the destruction of an aircraft.  After all, even if you cripple an enemy and force them to return to base, there’s no personal reward for the pilot.

 

For cargo ops, it would be nice to see a category for cargo delivered, and for paradrops delivered.  As for the recon side, it’s hard to speculate since we don’t know exactly what the recon system will look like yet, but hopefully we can get something along these lines for recon pilots as well.

 

Finally, the current system only shows pilot deaths in the negative category, and counts being captured as a death.  It would be good to see aircraft lost and see pilots captured separated out.  After all, being captured should be preferable to outright death.  And scoring a lot of air or ground targets is great, but if you’re losing your aircraft every time, it’s much less impressive and is possibly hurting your side.

[FTC_Davies]

In addition to your proposal I'd like an option for the server admins to be able to completely remove the ability for any player to look at the stats at all. It would give some niche servers the ability to add more immersion into their missions.