Posted by: Drakan
This rating system is the ONLY thing I find that lacks in Reach. The rating seems to put more emphasis on how active you are as apposed to how skilled you are.
Although Assists are definately essential in a team slayer game, they shouldn't give you more than deaths take away. On top of that, deaths should take away as much as kills give you. When you compare kills to deaths in a game of team slayer where a kill gives your team a point and dying gives the other team a point, they should both carry the same weight. It makes no sense in a team game that a death takes away half of what a kill gives you and makes no sense that it takes away half of what an assist gives you.
I think it's very important to stress what Drakan has stated here. Intuitively, deaths and kills are equivalent mathematical factors in any Halo team slayer match. Drakan already put it in the simple terms that explain why. Kills and deaths both equally affect the outcomes of team games.
If you get a kill, it gets your team one step closer to a victory. On top of that blatant contribution, a kill also takes a player of the opposing team off the map for a certain amount of time, allowing (if playing as a team) your team to play 4v3 for that time. This 4v3 time then accumulates over the course of the game and can have a major influence on the outcome.
Furthermore, if you get a death, it gets your team one step closer to losing (not 1/3 or 1/2). It also takes you off the map for a certain amount of time and allows the other team to accumulate some 4v3 time against your team. There's simply no logical explanation for counting deaths for less than kills in the scoring system. If Bungie wants to use the rating system to promote much more aggressive play, then that's their prerogative. BUT, it is by no means a logical system simply from the standpoint of determining which player had the most positive affect on the outcome of the game, which is what a rating system for Halo should determine.
Assists are more of an actual argument- you would think that since you must inflict 40% damage on someone in order to get an assist, the associated multiplier for assists would simply be 0.4 rather than 1.0. However, there is a logical argument that in a team game, getting those initial shots on a guy to damage him is more difficult than finishing the job. Still, I think rating assists as equal to kills does not intuitively make sense- the point here being that a player did not get the kill. I have to experiment more with this, but I think a multiplier of 0.8 would be more appropriate.
The rating system is also flawed in the sense that like someone said, the highest score possible using this formula is not 2000, but 1844 (a perfect game would obviously be considered some combination of kills and assists that add up to 50, and a death total of 0. that game = 1844).
Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to get some of these thoughts off my chest. Hope some of you (and maybe those of you at Bungie) find some value in what I just said. I'm continually experimenting with the system to determine the most optimal way to figure out, like I said, which player had the most positive affect on the game. I really enjoy the game and can't stop playing arena!