In Response To: Why arena ranking promotes selfish play (Cody Miller)
: 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.
This is why I'm glad I mostly play arena with friends. The times I do play with randoms, I do very bad.
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