Kill/Assist Counting

[bigbutter]

Just some suggestions around counting a death as a "kill". I think its pretty lame to stab someone with a bullet, then 10 seconds later they zoom into a wall and you get a kill. Kills should be forced by the killer and not some random pilot error that has nothing to do with it. So with that I'm suggesting the following:

a) Kills are awarded to the last hit player up to 5 seconds. Otherwise the death is a suicide.
b) I don't think turrets should count as kills by any player. That should just be "killed by turret" instead of suicide

To offset the "cheapness" of someone running into a turret field after you've done all the hard work, assists should be given as much prominence as kills - that is displayed in the rolling log and have its own column on the scoreboard. Not sure if that's planned or not, just making the suggestion.

[Blank]

pretty good suggestion IMO!

[tmm3k]

I agree with this. Just turn crashing deaths or turret deaths where you got the last shot into an assist with slightly more XP. Not as much as a kill though.

[Snowsickle]

I like you, sir.

A+

Edit:

I'm not entirely sure how the kill assist system works currently, if it allows multiple assists or just the last person to hit a plane before you kill it. However my suggestion for incorporating them into chat logs, and for making the assist stat a little more meawningful, would be to only allow the last person to hit a plane before it is killed to get an assist. Then, to keep the extra spam in the kill log to a minimum, use something like "Snowsickle (Blank) killed Kildayen".

[lamster]

Good idea -- this will be in the next patch.

Regarding assists, currently up to 3 different players can receive an assist for a kill (an assister must have damaged the plane within 5 seconds of its death). Allowing only 1 assist per kill would make it easier to show in the kill log (probably still a bit cluttered tho) but also less useful as a positive feedback. I like that now pretty much anyone contributing to a kill gets a few points -- e.g. if you EMP an incoming bomber and your two biplane buddies immediately shoot him down you still get an assist credit. This also gives a small bonus for highly collaborative kills: there is much more total exp given on a triply-assisted kill than on a solo kill.

When a Turret makes the primary kill assisters will receive bonus exp to compensate (~71% of primary kill exp instead of the usual 42%).

[bigbutter]

To build on this:

One other thing I thought of was around players healing now that landing is in. If you mess someone up and they flee back to base, heal, and come back out, then someone else kills them, is that really an assist? I don't think so. I think this is where experience points come into play (and Lam has probably thought of all this anyways Assists and kills are about immediate damage and should be a little rarer. Experience gives you the cumulative stuff. So yeah, you mess someone up and they flee like a yellow coward back to base, that's fine. You don't get the assist/kill, but your bragging rights are assured because your experience column has ticked up.

That said, besides including experience and assists on the scoreboard, I think deatths should be seperated to "times killed" and suicides. The whole point of the scoreboard is to see who's really winning, and someone with a bunch of kills and not many times killed is your guy. Otherwise we'd be sitting around playing co-op.