I would like to echo some of the concerns regarding Tremstats.
Yes, it does lead to statwhoring, whether explicit or implicit. Efficiency is currently the most visible answer to the question of "how good are you?", even though the concept is incredibly flawed. Tremstats makes no distinction between killing 200 tyrants or murdering 200 grangers. It doesn't matter if you're a good dancer or just someone that plays during the morning hours when a bunch of random unskilled whitenames connect. It doesn't matter if you shoot things with a mass driver or stand in front of the alien base with a flamer until your gas runs out. Basing "efficiency" off a raw numerical count of kills and deaths is a flawed concept.
Efficiency, as is, leads to people doing ridiculous things to keep up the illusion of being skilled. People won't rush an enemy base, or they won't chase after injured opponents, or they'll use extremely annoying tactics just to ensure that they won't die. Dying is perhaps the most visceral thing to someone that looks at Tremstats a lot to keep track of their efficiency. Taking a single risk is akin to public humiliation. Before long, the atmosphere of some public games feels like that of a terrible scrim. Nobody leaves base, they just camp and wait for the other team to arrive.
Long gone are the days when doing something stupid, yet entertaining like rushing the enemy base naked with a grenade didn't negatively impact you at all. One might say, don't pay attention to Tremstats. Don't pay attention to your efficiency. But even the best amongst us fall prey to the lure of seeing your "skills" in numbers. Who doesn't like to see how "good" they are? Don't you feel great after seeing your >1.0 efficiency? I can personally say that I check Tremstats very frequently and it has changed how I feel the game plays. I don't do any of my stupid tactics unless I'm on another qkey. And you know what? It's a whole lot more fun being able to grenade rush naked when you don't have to give a crap. And it's going to be much more easier to not give a crap if the crap is not there in the first place.
Yet, we do not need to necessarily kill off Tremstats. I wouldn't say Tremstats is killing off Tremulous, but it's dragging down the amount of interesting players and play styles. What can be done? I'd personally say get rid of efficiency and the deaths column, as others have suggested. The kills column should probably be kept, but at the same time, it would be best to place a percentages column next to the list of kills by weapon type. It would give your kills with that weapon as a percentage of your total kills, which would give a better indicator of play style. Or, perhaps, replace it with a list of the types of enemies you've killed, and how many? The auto-generated graph at the bottom could be replaced by a bar chart of kills by weapon type, or perhaps a chart of activity by hour of day, similar to the forums? Regardless, I'd like to see Tremstats more as an auto-generated "profile" page for a player than a sort of "look how much bigger my dick is than yours" page. The more percentages involved, the better.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
