BF2's Persistent Scoring More Harm Than Good?

jasoncart writes "Persistent scoring (where your score is counted from one gaming session to another) is the norm in MMORPGs, but using it in arguably less mature genres such as FPSs makes for interesting gameplay. " From the article: "The most prized asset for the competitive, ranking-sensitive Battlefield 2 player are the helicopters. These fearsome death machines are almost ludicrously overpowered, in the right hands. They feature a gunnery position with a nasty cannon (best for troop takedown), and TV-guided missiles (best for vehicles). The pilot, whose job is to grapple with the newbie unfriendly control system, and powerful engine also has access to a bank of effective-in-quantity missiles. Newbies inevitably do get hold of them sometimes, to disastrous effect - they are pretty difficult to fly until you get your head around the control system. I'm reminded of a driving school car around my way that says 'Everyone had to learn once!' on the back."

It's called air superiority, folks.

[robbkidd]

The Helis are way overpowered, no doubt about it. It also keeps people from playing - you finally spawn (after the 10minute wait to finally join a game) and in 5 seconds a whoop-whoop-whoop helicopter sound is heard, and the screen goes red, and you die. That happens 30 seconds later when you spawn again. Then again. When you finally get into a tank, cool - now you're safe! Uh, no, actually you aren't...

Welcome to warfare. Air superiority matters.

Why, Zonk, why?!

[wbren]

Wait... what? This made it to slashdot's main page? I read the article, looking for anything that might be new, thought provoking or mildly interesting. What I found, however, was a rant about helicopters in BF2. It's the same type of rant you see all the time on gaming forums. It was fairly well-written, but the article really didn't even have much to do with persistent scoring. Mod me as a troll or whatever, but this really isn't slashdot material. It would find a better home on digg.com, a site without a traditional editorial system like /.

You're kidding me

[DingerX]

Keeping persistent score records results in score-whoring? Who woula thunk it?

Ah, yeah, brings back to mind the good old days of Air Warrior and Warbirds, before I even played them, where there was a "bomber" ranking for the most damage. Someone figured which hangars got the highest score, and would fly around the map bombing those. Or heck, before that, on that PLATO MP flight sim, I recall...

Basic law folks: when you make recognition A depend on artificial measure B, you generate experts in achieving B. "No child left behind" or "Battlefield 2" -- it's the same thing: you make everything depend on a test, and you generate good test-takers.

Of course, in a game where there are other metrics than the personal one, you won't get all score-whores, but you will get your share. Welcome to teh intardnet.

Re:Why, Zonk, why?!

[Admiral Frosty]

Well, not being a BF2 player myself, I found it interesting, even more so when reading the ./ comunnity's take on it.

Calm down, Zonk isn't apokolips. Yet.

Huh

[thesnarky1]

I think this article is somewhat one sided. It appears the author (who admits to being addicted, I feel his pain *grin*) only has bad experiences playing.

Yea, I see people standing in lines 3 or 4 deep to get a plane or some such, and it is foolish. However, I also think many players eventually realize that fundamentally this is a team game. Yea, 6 organized players can easily win if everyone else is just running around. Heck, I've been places with one other buddy, and we can quite easily orchestrate a victory just by knowing the map and playing off the fact that people don't know how to team play (think support and engineer at a good ambush point, or spec ops and support, or medic and sniper, etc).

But I also have played on servers where admins *are* around all the time, where people get booted immediatly for TKing intentionally, or not playing for the team, but padding. You just have to go find a good server. As far as that goes, also playing in a clan is wonderful. I'm a member of COT (Covert Operations and tactics) and everynight I play with two or three guys from it. We have our own TeamSpeak server, that allows for effective communication, and we use XFire to track each other and allies in other servers.

Basically, if you play by yourself, and ignore that nice new "favorites" button on servers, yea, its gonna suck a lot of the time. But if you play with people you know and can train with, and on servers where you know admins are real close, I think that most of the points made in TFA aren't valid.

In a well trained group, or even just a group good at team play, you'll have two good guys in the chopper, that's their job. No one else waits for it, as they're filling another role. This all comes down to the maturity of the player, and how much they'll play for the team and listen to the commander, versus playing for themselves and their stats.