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Stealthscores and ranks


zergrush

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When it comes to playing stealth games I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I don't like killing nor even blackjacking which often leads me to redo missions a lot from start until I can get a clean run just right. Other people don't seem to care so much about this and just blackjack everything to victory with little concern for their performance or stealth scores. But then again, why should they care? They're not being ranked and a numerical score doesn't seem that important at the end of a mission. It doesn't award the player with a sense of accomplishment.

 

So personally I would like to suggest a small change to the end of mission score table, which, of course, would also be up to every individual mapper to control. Completion ranks from A to F according to time, kills, stuns, and loot, with a special S rank if completed in Expert difficulty. Other stealth games have done this in the past, like the Metal Gear series, but what inspired me to suggest this was a little yet amazing 2D stealth game named The Art of Theft. Here's how players are ranked at the end of every level:

 

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The "hat" ranks correspond to S, so save for the loot, I got a near perfect score at almost every aspect in this particular mission. I feel a similar system would also motivate TDM players to play engage more actively into stealth gameplay. Of course it would be up to the mappers and testers to determine the reasonable scores for each individual mission, but on the other hand, this would increase replayability by making player obsessed about finding that last piece of loot just to get that perfect S rank. Saving during missions could also influence the score, thus also motivating the players to practice more and more in order to achieve perfect runs.

 

All in all, I feel this is the sort of small change that could have a great effect on how people perceive the gameplay on TDM. When you reward players with something as simple as ranks or trophies, or whatever, they respond to it quite easily and motivates them to strive for mastering both levels and game mechanics as it happens so frequently with people who play games like Ninja Gaiden or the DMC series. They do everything for that perfect rank. And I think the same mentality could be reached here through this.

 

Any opinions on this matter?

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It has scores and total, but it doesn't have ranks and an overall grade based on them. Associating a rank, be it alphabetic (A to F) or symbolic (Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze) is what I feel it really makes the difference, and gets the player into the achievement mentality.

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Hmm.. I don't know if a letter A or F would motivate or bring much sense of achievement.

 

Your post provoked another thought, though.

 

The "when save/load" poll indicates a surprising amount of people justify save/load behavior with "I don't like getting poor stealth scores."

 

The poll is fresh and may change, of course, but let us think for a moment what this means. People are saving and loading because of fear of getting poor stealth scores. This implies they are not facing consequences, but are reloading if they botched something. Is this good? What good is all the elaborate AI behavior, intelligent search algorithms and alarm entities and things if..... most people just reload when "things get messy" or "if AI sees them."

 

This thought is alarming and makes me feel that a load / save counter is important addition to the stealth score. Can it be so that a stealth score, in fact, does a psychological trick for people: they want to get the best grade and play in not-so-enjoyable-way in order to get the best grade. They are not playing as they would want, but like the game 'forces' them because the game has an opinion how TDM is played 'properly' and rewards it with "good" grade.

 

Does this make any sense? Should save/load information be part of mission statistics and score? What *IS* the proper way to play TDM? What should be rewarded?

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Should save/load information be part of mission statistics and score?

 

We wanted to include that originally, but IIRC there was no way to track how often a player loaded a saved game.

 

And unfortunately, as long as TDM is not 100% bug free, it's problematic to penalize loading and saving.

 

One thing I still think is worth exploring (if it's even feasible) is to disable the quicksave key on highest difficulty, so that players are forced to go to the main menu to save a game...that extra hoop to jump through might reduce casual saves yet still allows players to save for important reasons.

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Hmm.. I don't know if a letter A or F would motivate or bring much sense of achievement.

 

Believe me. It does. Try playing Art of Theft. I went through the game several times just to ace the bloody thing perfectly, including the master mission, which is essentially going through all the game's missions in a single sitting. That implies memorizing where is all the loot, all the alarms, and know the quickest routes. Took me ages, but by jove, I got that perfect rank. I understand it may not sound that relevant for individual missions, but full TDM campaigns are finally starting to show up, and in this case, better ranks could also mean better inbetween mission rewards.

 

 

Does this make any sense? Should save/load information be part of mission statistics and score? What *IS* the proper way to play TDM? What should be rewarded?

 

Yes. Other games do this to. Saving/loading kinda leads the player to brute force a lot of situations instead weighing the decision and measuring risks. I'm totally for a save/load limit added to score. If possible, expert mode shouldn't even allow saving at all, except for specific checkpoints.

Edited by zergrush
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While making our mod we encountered the same dilemma. We implemented a ranking system but instead of using an "alphabetical" ranking system we decided on a "profession" ladder system, starting at "apprentice" and going all the way up to "master thief".

 

The system rewards stealth while penalizing the sloppy.

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Hmm...

 

@Spring

So loads cannot be tracked, but saves can? Why not add save count to end stats? It is not a penalty or anything, it is a stat like all the others. You gotta save so you can load, right?

 

If one had save stat of 20+ they've been hammering quicksave all the time, which certainly suggests the stealth score isn't worth much as it was save/trial/error/load cycle.

 

On save limits.

This is an interesting topic. Save limits can kill the game with frustration (hitman1) or it can make the game more exciting and interesting as failure has more profound consequences (hitman blood money).

 

It brings one more option to the player as they have to consider whether this point is risky enough to waste a save slot. Habitual quicksave spammers and reloaders might be exposed to new gameplay they are missing out presently and enjoy it.

 

Save limits should certainly be difficulty settings based on a certain map. Thus why not give save limit up to the mapper? Some mappers would not use it and allow unlimited saves.

 

Others would grant unlimited saves for map X on easy difficulty. Hard and Expert would have 7 and 3 saves, respectively. In the end, this limitation is quite similar to kill or KO limits and mission specific. Long missions would have more saves and so forth.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Save limits should certainly be difficulty settings based on a certain map. Thus why not give save limit up to the mapper? Some mappers would not use it and allow unlimited saves.

 

Others would grant unlimited saves for map X on easy difficulty. Hard and Expert would have 7 and 3 saves, respectively. In the end, this limitation is quite similar to kill or KO limits.

 

I agree. It's hard to picture a long mission like St. Alban's Cathedral without saving at least once, especially if you're doing it for the 1st time. It should be up to the mapper, as you said, but I also think there should equally be an option for implementing a limit of knockouts, or incentivate mappers to forbid the usage of blackjack on higher difficulties.

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Save limits should certainly be difficulty settings based on a certain map. Thus why not give save limit up to the mapper? Some mappers would not use it and allow unlimited saves.

 

I'm not sure it's possible to actually limit saves. You'd have to completely disable the main menu option, which I suspect is messy. There are also players that would balk at being told how often they can save...suppose your TDM is prone to crashing, or you only get to play in 20 minute intervals. It's a tricky issue.

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Shouldn't the stealth score be renamed to stealth penalty anyway? Because it's not a score (you shouldn't try to maximise it) but a penalty (try to minimize it). I think I saw one LP where the player was confused because he thought he did great with a high stealth score :D .

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I would not introduce save limits.

 

Let players play the way they like.

 

I certainly don't appreciate putting in months of work on a map's AI and then have a player run around KO'ing everyone the first time they see them. But if that's what they like to do, then fine. I only agree with "no KO" and "no Kill" objectives if they're there for a map-specific reason. ("Don't kill the guy guarding the vault, because you have to wait for him to open it so you can sneak inside when he's not looking.")

 

If Mission Statistics tells them they did N saves, and they want to do better than that, they'll try again. Most players probably move on to the next map.

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Shouldn't the stealth score be renamed to stealth penalty anyway? Because it's not a score (you shouldn't try to maximise it) but a penalty (try to minimize it). I think I saw one LP where the player was confused because he thought he did great with a high stealth score :D .

 

True. I think there was a discussion at some point that everyone should start with a score of 100, and negative events cause that score to drop. Like a test in school, the more bad answers, the lower your score. Like in school, and as suggested above, convert the final score into A->F if you like.

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I would not introduce save limits.

 

Let players play the way they like.

 

I certainly don't appreciate putting in months of work on a map's AI and then have a player run around KO'ing everyone the first time they see them. But if that's what they like to do, then fine. I only agree with "no KO" and "no Kill" objectives if they're there for a map-specific reason. ("Don't kill the guy guarding the vault, because you have to wait for him to open it so you can sneak inside when he's not looking.")

 

If Mission Statistics tells them they did N saves, and they want to do better than that, they'll try again. Most players probably move on to the next map.

 

This is why I believe A to F ranks help. They incentivate a behaviour without forcing it. In the end it's always up to the mapper, of course, and I totally respect that. But I also think limiting saves is also a legitimate way of increasing challenge.

Edited by zergrush
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Well I'm the one that retooled the Stealth Score to its current approach, so I should comment.

 

We did talk about exactly having ranks (Master Thief, Apprentice, etc...).

 

The reason it wasn't implemented was

(1) The design philosophy of TDM generally is rather minimalist & neutral with the gameplay, without popups or achievements or the game telling players how to play best. The stats don't grade or evaluate players. It just gives you neutral stats so the player to come up with their own evaluation if they care about it -- e.g., we give them the info to confirm they ghosted it under different rule-sets (Lytha style, basic, perfect, etc...), but different fans care about ghosting it in different ways.

 

(2) The same Stealth Score means different things in each FM (5 busts is great for a big FM, terrible for a small one), so the mapper would have to figure out where to draw the line for their FMs, and I didn't implement a way to do that because I didn't see most mappers doing it consistently, so it'd water down the meaning of the evaluation since it'd be different for each FM (for some Master Thief would be very easy, for others very hard), and we try to avoid that kind of mapper-driven inconsistency among FMs with features. (This is also what made the count-down-from-100 approach unworkable.)

 

(3) Finally though, the trend of discussion was that evaluations like this were good for things like Ghosting & Playthru threads, where people would take a screenshot of the stats screen so they could show everybody how they did it, and there could be some competition ... like the classic ghosting threads were all about. It just seemed better to let the evaluation happen among the fans, rather than the game preempting that with its own thing. The great thing about a community-driven project like TDM is that we're tapped into a fan community, and aren't like commercial games that take care of everything for the players and pretend fan communities don't exist and have their own meta-game thing going.

 

So for those reasons, the decision was made not to have evaluations and ranks of the type you're talking about. Ultimately they're not a bad thing, but they're better handled by the community as a meta-game thing than the game doing it for them. But even aside from that, it'd be unmanageable, bad design (Master Thief would be different difficulties for different FMs), and a bit counter to TDM's minimalist principles (the game having an opinion about how the player should be playing).

 

Edit: A no-save Ironman option would be interesting. Looking at the threads out there, most players that care about it can do it themselves, self-enforced, so it's not the biggest deal and not needed practically. The only reason that it might be interesting is that if there were an option to disable saves, then the stat screen gave a recognition that the player actually did it, and they could take the screenshot for proof they completed it "Ironman". I think I'd be favorable to that. But it should definitely be a thing players have to turn on only if they want it for the challenge & recognition, not a normal thing for the reason grayman stated.

 

Edit2:

Shouldn't the stealth score be renamed to stealth penalty anyway? Because it's not a score (you shouldn't try to maximise it) but a penalty (try to minimize it). I think I saw one LP where the player was confused because he thought he did great with a high stealth score :D .

 

Haha, that's a good point. The term Stealth Score was admittedly inherited from its previous incarnation, so it's not a bad idea. But it has sort of already become a known thing, too, so there's an argument that we should just stick with it at this point. After people play a few times, they get the idea anyway.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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But isn't the Stealth Score an instance of TDM passing judgment on how well the player did?

 

If we really want TDM to not be in the business of passing judgment, I'd say trim Mission Stats back to just that: the presentation of stats. This many kills, this many KO's, here's the number of AI that saw you, the number that heard you, the number that thought they might have heard something out of place, etc.

 

Players can snapshot their stats screen and compare with other players and reach their own conclusions and have their own arguments and flame wars about what's important and what's not. TDM provides the scoreboard, and nothing more.

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demagogue, given your reasons I would like to make a counter proposal. What if the mappers controlled the conditions for the rankings? Of course you're right when you say that different standards apply to different missions, but it is exactly during the testing phase of a mission that the mapper realizes the average time in which it can be accomplished, the min number of enemies that can be stunned, or if the mission can be completely ghosted, and so on. What if the option for ranks is implemented but it is left to mappers to adjust the standards according to FMs? It would also motivate mappers to go through another level of gameplay testing that could consequentially lead to gameplay improvements before release. And again, having this feature would especially be useful for campaigns.

Edited by zergrush
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..but it is exactly during the testing phase of a mission that the mapper realizes the average time in which it can be accomplished, the min number of enemies that can be stunned, or if the mission can be completely ghosted, and so on. What if the option for ranks is implemented but it is left to mappers to adjust the standards according to FMs?

 

As a mapper I'll just say that making a FM is a lot of work. In the end phases, when the mapper has done it all, I think motivation would be low for *EXTRA* testing only to set the par stat values per difficulty level right. I feel it would be likely mappers would just skip that part. Too much work for the meager benefit, I'm afraid.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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But isn't the Stealth Score an instance of TDM passing judgment on how well the player did?

 

If we really want TDM to not be in the business of passing judgment, I'd say trim Mission Stats back to just that: the presentation of stats. This many kills, this many KO's, here's the number of AI that saw you, the number that heard you, the number that thought they might have heard something out of place, etc.

 

We talked about this too. The Stealth Score is effectively the same thing as all the alerts, just packaged into a single number... It's throwing a bone to people who want to rank their performance but might not know, e.g., how does 3 searches compare to 2 suspicions and a sighting. Having it packaged into a single weighted number let's you know that. (But of course the raw number of alerts is there too.)

 

I realize there's a fine line between packaging stats and evaluating performance... But most people seemed on board that a single number and a neutral term like "score" was on the "ok" end of that, but using evaluative terms like "A+" or "Master Thief" was going too far. Anyway, it seems to be a popular feature so far.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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As a mapper I'll just say that making a FM is a lot of work. In the end phases, when the mapper has done it all, I think motivation would be low for *EXTRA* testing only to set the par stat values per difficulty level right. I feel it would be likely mappers would just skip that part. Too much work for the meager benefit, I'm afraid.

 

Again, that's meant to go along with testing, especially if you have other people to test your map. I understand it's a lot of work to make a map, but given this would be optional, there's nothing to lose by implementing it. And if people chose to adhere to it, it will likely result in more polished gameplay which, in the end, is what matters the most. The current stealth score system can still be maintained for mappers who might not want to buy into that, but especially for the sake of campaigns, I think it would be worth to implement an A to F rating system as an optional feature. Besides, even with older maps getting updates every now and then, the ratings can only get implemented later on, after the map has been widely played by the community.

Edited by zergrush
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Why is a campaign special in this regard?

 

Campaign missions may share certain points in common that go beyond the theme, be it level-wise or gameplay-wise, that make their missions more coherent and, therefore, easier to rank. Rankings may also be associated to certain advanced features such as money to buy more materials at beginning of each mission, or even bonus unlockables determined by how well you perform. Plus there's the feeling of satisfaction of "getting A+ in all that particular set of levels" because campaigns are all in all, games within the game. Mastering a whole campaign is far more satisfying than mastering a bunch of individual FMs, at least from my experience.

Edited by zergrush
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Shouldn't the stealth score be renamed to stealth penalty anyway? Because it's not a score (you shouldn't try to maximise it) but a penalty (try to minimize it). I think I saw one LP where the player was confused because he thought he did great with a high stealth score :D .

 

I got 271 makes me better than the lousy 21 I just got huh?

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It should be pretty obvious to people that if getting spotted gives you a particular numerical value, and those are added together, then then lower your score the better.

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