Tuesday 7 February 2012

Call of Duty Elite - ways to improve it.

Other than the obvious speed and performance issues of the elite website, here are a few things I feel that should be considered for future updates.

Stat Tracking:

As someone who really likes to look at numbers and analyze things, it would be nice to be able to export the recent match data in some text of excel format.  So I can have some e-bragging rights, or at least look at how I've improved month to month, week to week, etc etc.  The data is there, but I just can't easily get it out of the site and into a format that I can work with.  It would be nice to be able to see how well I perform on a map level.  So I can see which maps I do better on versus others, and determine if I need to change my gameplan around for those maps.

Competitions;

A few things can be improved here which in my opinion will make it appeal to more people and make it a bit easier to police.


1) Specific competition playlists.  this way you can seperate things, and have set rules.  For example, the Free For All competitive playlist would not allow for "join in progress".  Thus reducing, if not eliminating any chance of team work or boosting.  With a specific playlist, you can also limit people joining late.  Give a 30 minute window for people to join in the playlist, and thats it.  If people quit early, they leave the competition.   I tried out a domination competition, and found it hard to deal with "randoms" who just give up, or just plain leave.  It makes it really strange how the winners can even get consistant lobbies, and also get groups of people who don't give up and actually keep going for the objective. 

Also, you can also set certain conditions, like ending the match early if too many people quit, and make the wait time between matches shorter like an express lobby.  You can also make it so that the people in the lobby change after every match.  So a 6 man group will get a new group of people to play against after each match.  This might not work so well with the current winning conditions (i.e. most captures, most defends), but that can change with my next point.

2) Change the winning conditions, instead of a simple number of total captures or defends in domination, it should just be total scoreboard points after a set amount of time.  This way, you are not penalized by entire teams backing out when they are losing, thus wasting time of the people involved in the competition.  Another competition which may be added would be using the score difference between the two sides as your score for the competition, and you have to accumulate as much as possible of X amount of games or within a certain time period, with potentially a cap on games.  This way, you are not relying on the efforts of the other team to get you to the top of the leaderboard.  You can go out and get points on your own.  Bonus points can be offered for winning, versus losing, to put more emphasis on that. 

3) Limit the number of prizes won by a single player.  TV and Radio shows do this, they limit you to winning 1 prize from them every 30 days, 60 days or whatever.  This would help open up the competition to more people as its already well known that there are a few "clans" that are specifically playing for these competitions only.  The idea with elite is to get more people involved, and not give a select few who put in the extra effort to win everything all the time.  Its in the best interest in the community that we spread things out, and get more people winning, and spreading the word to non-premium members to join up.  I would even go as far as saying there should be some secondary prizes given out to the top X amount of players, or even pick a random player from the gold teir to win something, not just a digital badge. 

These competitions are supposed to add to the fun of the game, but right now, it seems to have bred a different monster.  You have boosters, who somehow think they can actually get away with cheating a system that tracks your every kill and position.  Some people are just too stupid I guess, but the consequences should be much harsher in my opinion to get through these people.  Then you have the super teams who do nothing but play the competitions and kill it for the regular people who want to try to take part, but have no hope in winning because they are either on their own, or just get into bad lobbies, or in my case, can't even get a match for 10-15 minutes at certain times.

Elite as a platform has lots of potential, hopefully it gets more functionality in it to take it further.

No comments:

Post a Comment