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| Why arena ranking promotes selfish play | |
| Posted By: Cody Miller <cody@haloreachisnotcanon.net> | Date: 10/5/10 4:05 p.m. |
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I believe that on principle, but not necessarily on a practical level, that the arena ranking system is flawed for team games in that it promotes selfish play, and penalizes players who try to help their team. In Team slayer, the goal of the team is to maximize the K/D ratio of the entire team. In arena, the goal is to maximize your individual K/D ratio. At first glance it might seem to be the same thing, after all, a player who dies less and kills more does nothing but help his team win. There is however a very important difference, that affects the way players approach optimal play. Maximizing the K/D ratio involves two thing: maximizing kills, and minimizing deaths. Maximizing kills turns out to work the same way in both arena and in regular team slayer. In Team slayer, helping your teammate make a kill helps increase the team's overall K/D ratio. When maximizing individual K/D ratio, this would be a wasted effort. However, since Bungie counts an assist as much as a kill, helping maximize the kills of your team as a whole also helps maximize your individual K/D ratio. So far so good. The problem comes with minimizing deaths. In team slayer, when a teammate dies this is bad for you, and bad for the team since the team's overall K/D ratio falls. However in arena, this has no effect at all on your individual K/D ratio, since a teammate's death has no affect on that. Thus, in arena a player has no incentive to protect his teammates and keep them from dying, whereas in team slayer he does! This is a divergence is goals! Every second you spend keeping a teammate alive and not getting an assist, is a second you waste in raising your own K/D ratio. Thus optimal play is to only worry about your own deaths, and not those of your teammates. So on principle, playing optimally in arena involves playing more selfishly than playing optimally in team slayer. Whether this manifests itself in any practical way remains to be seen. Discuss.
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