Pyro,
Will a player's score ever go DOWN? Way back in 1.03 (?) the scoring system had a sortie weight, where until you got about 50 sorties, your score was almost guaranteed to go up becuase there was a sortie count weighting (sorties divided by around 50 until it hit a 1/1 ratio). After that, it was "fully weighted" and could go up or down based on the player's performance.
I think that this was a nice feature, as it had 3 critical features.
First, it prevented someone from having a single awesome sortie early on, thereby capturing the top spot with an untouchable score.
Second, it truly showed long term performance. If your performance improved over the score TOD, your score would go up. Gunnery, K/D, total kills, etc. were all factored in so improvements in even only one of these would be reflected in the score.
Third, it prevented people from "buying their score". After that first bunch of sorties, merely flying around didn't help a bit unless the player actually did better on subsequent sorties.
I know that this formula isn't conductive to getting and keeping paying players in the arena (you guys GOTTA make money otherwise you can't make a game for us to play), but it helped ensure that the most skilled players got the highest scores. Add in some sort of score reward for those less skilled players who are willing to play endless hours, but please balance it so a truly talented player can get the top score without spending a few hundred hours online each month.
I didn't really like that old modifier for kills/time spent online, but maybe a stronger weighting for kills/sortie would help differentiate between those who earn score by flying thousands of sorties and those who are more effective killers on each sortie.
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eagl <squealing Pigs> BYA
Oink Oink To War!!!