I had this idea while looking through my SSF4 stats and I felt it didn’t tell me everything I really wanted to know. Like wins and win percentage is obvious, and letting me know how I win is cute, but overall the stats page is kinda light. For years fighting games pretty much tell you who you use most and how many times you win but I don’t find that terribly helpful or informative. Look at how FPS and sports games present a player’s stats and you will see how I’d like fighting games to extend stat tracking.
Imagine knowing how many times you eat counter hits? And how many counter you land? How about knowing either factor by either per-round or per-match filters? How about knowing how many times you whiff an attack? Like an ‘attack accuracy’ stat similar to FPS games tracking your accuracy. Knowing how many times you dash or jump would at least make for some interesting personal trivia. “Damn, I _________ way too much. Gotta tighten up.”
Of course, these stats should be publicly available on some connected community page. Would be great to vet certain players, though it’ll be compiling online match stats so it wouldn’t be a *totally *accurate image of a player’s skill and style, but it’d still be cool.
Medals:
And no, those titles in Street Fighter 4 do not count. I mean medals much in the same way FPS games have medals to collect based on your in-game performance. A Counter-Striker medal would be dealt out for every counter hit, for instance. Special Move medals, Super Move medals, Combo medals, and whatever gameplay quirk a fighter has could be collectible medals. After your matches you could view your medals or head online to that aforementioned profile page and check out what you have there. It would easy to implement too, as games already highlight certain actions with in-game messages (Counter, x Hit Combo), so it would merely be a case of tying that to collectible medals.
By extension, what some games have been doing is assigning certain titles to a player based on their habitual gameplay actions (Halo: Reach calls them commendations, UFC reveals habits in the Tale of the Tape screen). Perhaps up to three titles could be shown on a pre-match ‘card’ that let’s your opponent know what he’s getting into (not that the point is to provide intel, but that would be a naturally strategic observation). It also gives off a ‘sport’ feel before a match for these to be added to the vs screen, without adding another slide before a match. Something like “Heavy Handed” for fierce attack users and “Reverse Engineer” for guys use reversals often are examples. As with the other ideas this would be viewable on a public profile page. In my opinion this could completely replace the titles in SSF4 which I find pointless (as it was in CoDMW2 for that matter).
Not fond of the medals or titles idea, though. The ultimate goal in fighting games should be to win. Danging carrots and titles in front of people for getting lots of counter hits or doing lots of reversals just distracts from that goal.
I find it would be a rewarding post-session feature. People don’t play a certain way in UFC to get their tape to have a certain phrase, and I don’t play Halo/CoD/Battlefield thinking, “Gee, let me make this a headshot medal day.” lol People just don’t do that. It wouldn’t be distracting in the least, we have already examples in other games that people primarily aim to win despite these features. And playing to win isn’t something exclusive to fighting games.
It would be helpful if the stats could be compiled and electronically sent to email or something so they can be quickly organized and posted without alot of retyping or such too.
Wasn’t HDR suppose to have some sort of stats attached to your gamertag, PSN ID that was to be implemented well after SF4 cannibalized it’s popularity? Never checked to see if they got that going.
Medals make sense in a FPS but I don’t see much use for them in fighter. Stat tracking is a good idea though in the “Man I eat ____ too much” sort of way. A good way of seeing how your fairing and where you need to tighten up. A good way to really evaluate your own performance. I don’t see a reason for medals or titles though.
So no I don’t believe they should have any stat tracking or medals. If anything I think they should even do away with all ranking modes and stat tracking. Win ratios are pointless.
Virtua Fighter 5R has a very extensive stat-tracking system if you’re signed up to VF.net
It’s so detailed it’ll tell you how many times you’ve blocked or ate a low attack, how many times you’ve escaped a certain throw, how many times you’ve (un)successfully evaded an attack. You can also register players so that you can see your stats versus a specific player, so if I’m having trouble against some really good Sarah player, I can track to see what I’m doing wrong in that matchup only.
99 hit combos would equal winning. lol Seriously, you got it backwards; good players would compile these medals after the fact, players wouldn’t head in primarily to get medals. Your post is an insult to players of games that already do this. And note: Achievements/Trophies in fighting games are essentially a broad way of doing what I’m talking about (medals are basically mini-Achievements).
Can’t say I’m a fan of the medals. I remember at this pc bang I used to go to in high school, they kept track of stats on their CS servers, and one of them was attempted bomb diffuses. People would hop on the bomb holding the key to defuse it and get like 10 attempts or something like that a round, making their consistently the highest ranked on the server. If something doesn’t necessarily equate to winning, I don’t think any in game mechanism should reward it.
winning is winning. what i meant by my post was that “scrubs” (not all players, but scrubs) will try winning with a strategy like 99hit combo even if it isn’t the best one. so they will sacrifice possibly winning the match just so they can earn a silly medal for it. you can argue, “oh they’re just doing it for fun”, well why do you need to be reward with a medal to have fun? last time i checked, people have fun so they can have fun. and yes, i do think achievements/medals in current and past games are generally a horrible idea. not because they’re innately such a horrible thing, but because a lot of scrubs will go “i have 99 achievements, i am obviously better at this game than you are because you only have 2 achievements”. games like cod make me sick. people farming achievements rather than actually trying to win high rated matches.
I love how the OP doesn’t let anyone else have an opinion on this without going mental
I’m not one for stat tracking in fighters, could you imagine trying to control space knowing that you will get a bad mark because you threw too many blocked fireballs or used too many of a certain move to keep the opponent away?
You’re not reading the same thread, or have an odd definition of mental (odd enough to make you ‘laugh’ even).
From what I gather most of you don’t like the medal idea (and one fringe dude doesn’t even like the concept of ranked matches). At the very least some of you explained that you don’t like it in general, which is fine.
