The Scoring System

[Braegh]

Is the scoring system as it is a reasonable indicator of individual player skill over multiple rounds, or it is too dependent on how many times you get traitor/detective to be accurate? I have noticed a couple of players on the servers I play on regularly hold the top positions on the board at mapchange.

On the other hand, I have seen both others and myself score 20+ points in a single round as Innocent on what I believe was a 16 player server. Traitors with such scores are rather uncommon if I'm not mistaken. Is there a list of scoring triggers anywhere?

With possible instakills going around, number of deaths doesn't seem like it'd be a good indication.

[Bad King Urgrain]

The scoring system:

As an Innocent
Basic scoring

[li]+5 for every Traitor you kill.[/li]
[li]-8 for every Innocent you kill.[/li]

Team bonus

[li]+1 for every Innocent player alive when the round ends (includes yourself).[/li]

Individual bonus

[li]+1 if you survived.[/li]
[li]-1 if you committed suicide.[/li]
[li]+1 for every corpse you identified.[/li]

As a Detective
Basic scoring
Same as Innocent.

Team bonus
Same as Innocent.

Individual bonus
Same as Innocent, except:

[li]+3 for every corpse you identified.[/li]

As a Traitor
Basic scoring

[li] +1 for every Innocent you kill.[/li]
[li]-16 for every Traitor you kill.[/li]

Team bonus
If the round ends before the time limit is reached:

[li]+1 for every Traitor player alive when the round ends (includes yourself).[/li]
[li]+0.5 for every Innocent player dead when the round ends, rounded up.[/li]

If the timelimit is reached (which is a Traitor loss), these rules are used instead of the ones above:

[li]-0.5 for every Innocent player alive when the round ends, rounded down (as in: -0.5 becomes -1 etc).[/li]
[li]+0.5 for every Innocent player dead when the round ends, rounded up.[/li]

Individual bonus

[li]+1 if you survived.[/li]
[li]-1 if you committed suicide.[/li]

[GrayScare0]

The scoring system is not a good indicator os individual skill; I will list a few reasons why.

-Detectives get three points for identifying a body.  Innocents get one.  These points can stack up very quickly.  The benefits of being detective often have to do with longevity or identifying traitors (health station, body armor, DNA scanner, binoculars, confirmed innocent status and the resulting authority, etc).  As a result, the detective has a greater chance to identify bodies AND kill traitors, plus he gets more points for the identification (and a credit bonus for the traitors).  Detective is merely a powerful version of a confirmed innocent based on chance.  Yesterday, I got 34 points in one round as detective with somewhere between 12 and 15 players (with the possibility of more had I not ordered innocents to identify some of the bodies).  In the same scenario as innocent, I would have had considerably less points.  Assuming you play a good confirmed innocent, it's all up to chance there.

-Traitors have less opportunity to score points.  Basically all they can do is kill (and I think stay alive as well for a bonus) for their points, and unless they actually win, detectives/innocents that kill the traitors get far more points far more easily (7 points for a traitor kill!).  Not all kills even count as traitor kills, too; many types count as suicide or are otherwise not credited.

-Killing a baiter or RDMer seriously damages your score regardless of how treacherous they were.  Generally not a huge concern, but it can be.  Dealing the finishing blow is all it takes to kill your karma and score.

-There's little direct advantage, in terms of score, to wounding or calling out a traitor.  Yes, the innocents winning alone gives you a team bonus depending on how many innocents survived, but dealing that final blow to the traitor makes a massive point difference.  Maybe you engaged yourself in several minutes of detective work to narrow down the suspects and subsequently called the traitor out.  The game has no way of knowing this.  Of course, the same applies to random call outs as well.  Still, the ultimate objective for innocents is to deal the finishing blow to traitors for the points.

-There are still very many scoring exploits.  If you want someone to fail, bait them and watch their score crumble.  Run into their incendiary.  If you can't win as traitor, it is still advantageous in many scenarios to wait the timer down (despite the fix BKU implemented a few months back).  If you can't identify traitors as an innocent/detective, go around identifying bodies that were already confirmed dead by a traitor's kill list (by the way, there should really be a log of who identifies bodies and what the resulting kill lists are; considering they're announced anyway and they fly by so quickly, especially when a traitor is killed and his/her body is checked along with a heap of corpses of his/her victims).  Another way to screw others over as an innocent is to defuse a high timer C4 around a bunch of people, ideally with no warning.  The kills will be given to the traitor.

It's impossible to really have score represent skill perfectly in every scenario, especially due to the first, fourth, and fifth reasons I listed.  The obvious fix would be to lower the detective's identification bonus down to one point and maybe lower the points for a traitor kill down to three or four something like that, or maybe to make it dependent on what the traitor has done (how many credits he had on death, his kill list, something like that) or how much damage you did plus a smaller kill bonus.  I'm not a hundred percent sure.  But it needs to be much lower in most situations.  In practice, if you are decent at the game, you will most likely rack up far more points as an innocent (or, better yet, detective) and have to work at it far less.  That's perhaps the one redeeming quality of going custom (one hit kill knife for a free, effortless kill) or playing on a server that has several unnecessary protections for the traitor (need to warn three times before killing, buy menu is never a reason, etc), but I still would rather be able to kill obvious traitors without them having unnecessary advantages over me.  Best solution in terms of server administration is to ban ghosters and baiters as soon as they are identified.

Edits:
Ah, BKU posted while I was posting this.  Maybe some details in my post are incorrect, I don't know.  But they are backed with plenty of practical experience.

Also, committing suicide as traitor can be a very effective means of point denial.

Before there's an issue, by the 7 points for a traitor kill, I was referring to a commons scenario in which you kill one traitor, ID the body, and survive the round as a confirmed inno.  Maybe.  I'm not sure, actually, as in almost every scenario that I kill a traitor in a round, I get 7 points for each kill.  Perhaps it is a coincidence?  It just always averages out to that; that seems to be the standard (in addition to small bonuses for innocent bodies identified).

The inno-inno kill penalty is way too high in my opinion.

Sorry to edit so much, but another very helpful fix would be to increase the penalty of suicide as a traitor.  Yes, this would lead to problems when the suicide was not a true suicide (being killed by an innocent shooting the barrels in richland, for an example), but you can't account for all those situations, and it can easily kill rounds by denying the kill for the innocents AND avoiding the penalty for the timer running out.

Giving us convars for these events and others would be amazing, but I understand that development is essentially over now.

[Bad King Urgrain]

I don't think score convars would be used much in practice. In addition they have to be synced to the client, which makes it almost easier to just edit the code if you want to change it. It's all quite easy to do, in a single file (scoring_shd.lua).

Dealing the finishing blow is all it takes to kill your karma

False. The amount of damage you deal to someone is a far bigger part of the karma penalty than the actual kill.

Killing someone who is at 5 health costs you less karma than simply dealing 25 damage to someone without killing them.

This is not relevant to scoring, but it's important to note.

[GrayScare0]

My mistake; I distinctly remember hearing that at one point, but maybe it's either changed or I was confused and it was regarding score.

Edit: If T-T is -16, what about I-D or D-D kills?  Those are just as bad.

[moarx]

My mistake; I distinctly remember hearing that at one point, but maybe it's either changed or I was confused and it was regarding score.

Edit: If T-T is -16, what about I-D or D-D kills?  Those are just as bad.

Generally I-D or D-D results in a kick/ban from the server you're playing on.

[GrayScare0]

Generally I-D or D-D results in a kick/ban from the server you're playing on.

So do T-T kills.

[Bad King Urgrain]

Edit: If T-T is -16, what about I-D or D-D kills?  Those are just as bad.

No specific scoring for those. The above is exactly how it's in the code, nothing more and nothing less.

I don't really think score is going to encourage or discourage anyone on the matter of teamkilling Detectives. Either you're already a troll or it was truly an accidental kill.

[GrayScare0]

Of course.  I know you were merely pointing out the facts; I was merely discussing how it plays out, and I thought (and still do think) the same applied to traitor on traitor kills.  Traitor and detective are both power roles.

[Bad King Urgrain]

I guess part of it is that 99% of the scoring code was written when Detectives didn't even exist yet.