A different classification system based on net results of the objects values.

[Crious]

I came to this game during covid carantine. Before that i was familiar with the previus il2 series. 

One of the biggest advantages of this game is the on line community especially some of the best in the world on line servers. TAW comes first in mind.

There are a lot of efforts put in the game from its developers and from teams running the dedicated servers BUT THERE ARE STILL  SOMETHING MISSING. 

What i am referring to is a way to calculate in the most accurate manner the individual's contribution to the on line battles.

Most servers calculate points in a way that most players dont understand or in inefficient base for objective evaluation-classification of the players and squadrons.

In my point of view the most and not necessarily the only way to measure someones contribution to the outcome of a mission appart from survival is the net result of his effort. 

To do that someone or a team (il2 developers?) has to research the actual cost of every airplane vehicle ship (more or less) in the game (infrastructures like buldings hangars bridges etc dont have to be accurate costs). This way servers developers would have a very objective way on how to measure anyone's performance in an online mission

Is it possible for the game engine to include this information (costs) once available making server's developers life more easy and players pleasure accordingly higher?

Thank you

[AndyJWest]

Ignoring for the moment the question as to whether such an effort would be an appropriate use of developers' time, I'd have to ask why you think that it would even be possible to find meaningful 'actual costs' for aircraft, vehicles etc. In wartime economies, under government control, the nominal 'price' paid for something may have next to no relationship with actual costs of production, even where such unit 'prices' even existed in the first place (I doubt they did in the Soviet Union, for example). And what about the costs related to training the crew? Even if you don't put a price on human life (which may or may not be a good thing to do), you surely have to put a price on replacement. Except you can't, because any such 'price' will just be guesswork...

[Crious]

Every material is translated to a value and if its not money it is units of something (material, man hours etc). 

 I agree that life cannot be measured unless you are an insurance company... BUT for the purpose of an online campaign i think thaf units of something related to object's estimated cost is the best way appart from the conquest of the map to evaluate player' or squadron's progress 

 

[BlitzPig_EL]

An Iowa class battleship cost roughly $150 million US Dollars at the time, fitted out and ready for action.

[Gambit21]

4 hours ago, 335th_GRAlbatros74 said:

Every material is translated to a value and if its not money it is units of something (material, man hours etc). 

 I agree that life cannot be measured unless you are an insurance company... BUT for the purpose of an online campaign i think thaf units of something related to object's estimated cost is the best way appart from the conquest of the map to evaluate player' or squadron's progress 

 

Nah - war is vastly more complicated than this. Fly the mission, make it home - Miller Time.

[=MERCS=JenkemJunkie]

We don't have the motivations that the real pilots did on their missions, so you'll see really strange decisions online compared to what the real pilots would do. So the question is if you want realistic gameplay is it the lesser evil to have a gamey scoring system, or to just accept the weird decisions. Looking up the cost of every unit in the game, is almost certainly too time consuming for 1C to do, but something more arbitrary could work just as well, the goal is just to motivate the players to play realistically. I'd just allow custom points, because the same object could be worth more on different servers.

[Panzerlang]

The only awards I've ever been interested in were a cure for my throat-ache. 😁

[=MERCS=JenkemJunkie]

It might not motivate everyone, but it just needs to motivate enough.

[357th_KW]

While I’m sure we all have differing opinions on how to score things, I think everyone would appreciate giving mission creators and server hosts the ability to customize the in game scoreboard.

[[CPT]Crunch]

Blah, who cares about score, bring more life to the war in things like Airfields, cities, roads, strong points, and industry with more activity.  It's the war stories from suspension of disbelief that are going to bring fresh life into any sim.

[=MERCS=JenkemJunkie]

Many do, people use the score to judge how they're doing. They should either be customizable or gone. Stats that don't really reflect how well people are completing the objectives causes many to ignore them, and just do what the scoreboard tells them to do.

[LukeFF]

It's really simple if you look at it from the Luftwaffe's perspective in terms of when it came time for medals: bombers (and probably also Sturmoviks) had the highest priority, everything else was secondary. 

 

In other words, go for the targets first that can cause the greatest damage to your ground assets. 

[=MERCS=JenkemJunkie]

Do you mean bombers should be priority targets? Preventing a bomber from destroying ground targets should be a very high priority and I'd target them first myself to, but all kills are worth 1, and nothing awards you for preventing the bomber from destroying ground targets. All kills are worth 1 in the scoreboard whether you intercepted an A20 before he destroyed anything, or killed a lagg in a late war map in a k4. Different missions have different goals, so a cookie cutter scoreboard for them all leads to problems.

[=MERCS=JenkemJunkie]

The scoreboard would be part of the defunct scaleform GUI no one at 1C wants to deal with right?

[Avimimus]

FWIW - The Soviet Union did have prices for its military equipment, and never did manage to move away from using currencies. However, the accuracy of those prices is open to question.

  

On 6/12/2024 at 4:43 AM, [CPT]Crunch said:

Blah, who cares about score, bring more life to the war in things like Airfields, cities, roads, strong points, and industry with more activity.  It's the war stories from suspension of disbelief that are going to bring fresh life into any sim.

 

I agree that knowledge of the stories (e.g. reading biographies, or unit histories) is really key to motivating interest in the genre.

 

That said, it is also sometimes good to reinforce the idea that success matters (even if, in real life, a single pilot couldn't significantly influence the outcomes of a war). So I can see some role for scoring systems. Reproducing the actual ones (like LukeFF alludes to) probably makes the most sense though -as does improving briefings to give a sense of urgency.

 

I could see how quasi-dynamic online servers, where outcomes do shift and there are 'victory' conditions based on units destroyed can be fun though.

[357th_KW]

You can already set your victory conditions in multiplayer however you like.  I typically use a “points” system where onKilled reports and complex triggers are detecting when players or AI or ground targets are shot down and destroyed and then they feed into different counters that trigger at different values, so a ship or a bomber or a marshalling yard or a fighter can all score different values towards team success.  I can even give the team credit for forcing a bomber to turn back and land, as opposed to just valuing outright kills.

 

The problem is that there’s no easy way to show this to the players, and so it’s both challenging to motivate players to play the mission objective in the first place, and tough to reward them when they’re doing the right things but can’t see it on the scoreboard.  Perfect examples of this are artillery spotting, recon, and cargo hauling.  You can build those into missions in a variety of ways, but there’s nothing on the scoreboard relevant to them.

Edited June 14, 2024 by 357th_KW

[firdimigdi]

17 hours ago, 357th_KW said:

The problem is that there’s no easy way to show this to the players

 

That's the main issue - any server doing such needs to have a website that players can view the fruit of their labour and that's even more work for a host using an entirely different skillset. And of course that website has to be updated on a timed schedule and not real time. The scoreboard in-game is pretty much just a deathmatch scoreboard, plus it only caters to individual players. So the ability to customize it, as you mentioned in a previous post, would be the only way to mitigate this; ideally with the ability to track at squadron level as well and not just pilots.

 

Edited June 15, 2024 by firdimigdi
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