1. How about team DI?
Description
This article is from the netrek Frequently Offered Clever Suggestions list, by Tom Holub doosh@best.com with numerous contributions by others.
1. How about team DI?
Problem: Too many rank scums out there for themselves. Need to add an
incentive for team play, so that they will get more DI if their team
does better.
Proposal: Change the DI structure so that you get points for stuff
your teammates do. Alternatively, change it so that you get points for
different "team stuff", like taking strategically placed planets or
killing carriers.
Why not: Most "team DI" schemes will cause people to switch to the
team that's winning, because that's where the points are. It is
possible right now to see the players on each team before making the
initial team selection; this would make unfair teams the rule.
Changing the individual values of things is difficult when you
consider how the current DI scheme works. "DI" is simply the sum of
offense, bombing, and planet ranks, multiplied by the number of hours
you have been playing, and then adjusted according to the global
average. There are no fixed DI values for doing certain things; just
your relationship to the rest of the people on the server.
If you try to reward players on teams that are doing well, people will
quit when their team starts to lose, creating a steamroll effect (all
the clued people join the winning side, all the non-clues stay on the
losing side). Keeping track of planets won/lost during a game is a
nice idea, but will lead to a lot of quit-scumming when the other team
is taking a planet or two. Rank scums will always be scums; you can
change the rules but they will always find annoying ways of working
around them.
Killing people with armies gives you (5*armies) bombing credit, and
taking core planets is worth more than other planets, so the
incentives exist; people are simply unaware of them or feel it is
easier to do things the scum way.
Incidentally, DI works like this:
* There are three factors: bombing (the number of armies you have,
bombed), offense (the number of enemies you have killed), and
planets (the number of planets you have taken). There's also
defense (number of times you have been killed), but most servers
have done away with the defense criteria since ogging became
popular.
* The server takes these values, considers how long it took you to
get them, and then compares that against the server average. From
this you get "ratings", where having a 1.0 bombing rating means you
bomb as many armies per unit time as the average player, 2.0
ratings mean you bomb twice as many, and so on.
* The bombing, planet, and offense ratings are added. This gives your
total ratings. An average player would have 3.0 ratings.
* The ratings are multiplied by the number of hours you have spent in
t-mode on that server. This is your DI.
Hitting 'U' (shift-u) while playing brings up a chart showing what
ratings and how many hours you need to make a particular rank. You can
also promote if you don't have the ratings but have twice the DI, or
if you're ratings are two points down and you have four times the
DI. You can't be demoted.
Many players are under the misconception that you "get DI" for doing a
particular action. You don't.
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