Time to ditch the stats?

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

It may not be slowing down the game, but keeping track of all this garbage certainly isn't improving performance. Not to mention the code base.

And  most are either meaningless, wrong, or misleading.

Lets look at a few Profile stats as examples:

Gross Income - gross income of what? 95million what? its not credits, not plat, just pointless.
Ciphers solved - well it includes using a cipher. hardly a meaningful "solve"  - and that of course skews the cipher time. And who cares.
Eidolon Terralyst Kills/Captures... just flat out wrong - no idea what its tracking - says I killed 396 and captured 2. Aside from being completely wrong and backwards as I've captured FAR more than I've killed, it can't even be flipped - As I know i've killed more than 2.
Weapon accuracy - we know thats meaningless - doesnt count hits on crates I was aiming at, nullifiers, doesn't properly account for multishot (love those missions I finish with over 200% accuracy)
Heals: 2.6 million - Um what? is that every pulse of Arcane Pulse + each individual tick of trin well of life + who knows what else? useless.
Scans - Really? Does anyone care how many times they scanned Clem?  And even if they did, leave it in the codex. not profile stats
Missions Failed: PoE BUGties would like a word with this alone.

Mission summary stats are no better:

Damage Dealt: I could be EV trin on nightmare EV 1 pherliac pod and out DPS everyone else on team if I do nothing else. Or sit in a bounty shooting ships as they leave helping nothing, killing no one, and have top damage dealt by far.  Should be renamed Salt Spread To Be Added To Tears When Crying For Nerfs Later On Forums - Although I admit that might be a bit long to fit in the limited area of the Progress & Rewards screen.
Damage Taken: Be a squishee frame, take 1% of damage and be the only one to go down.
Upgrades Received: who cares how many mods people got? I just care about what mods I got, and I can see that.  Me having 10 upgrades, and them one  doesn't tell me they picked up that vengeful revenant and I didn't
Fire Accuracy: Doesn't work with multishot, doesn't count shooting at breakable items one was aiming at, doesn't count nullifier bubbles, etc etc. 
 

I can't help but think all these stats behind the scenes, getting bigger and bigger, taking more and more resources, compute cycles, host syncs, code maintenance...for nothing.

 

[visiblenoise]

You can argue that a lot of these stats are not nearly as meaningful as when they were introduced, perhaps...but I would be surprised if they're causing performance/resource issues.

[Lewdcifer]

I mean... where's the causation between this and game optimization?

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

1 minute ago, visiblenoise said:

You can argue that a lot of these stats are not nearly as meaningful as when they were introduced, perhaps...but I would be surprised if they're causing performance/resource issues.

Death by a thousand cuts. And they just keep adding more. Which is just that little bit extra code to be loaded, that one extra variable to track (or perhaps overflow), that one extra piece of data to sync between clients.  Then, when its time to update, that one little bit of extra code to be reviewed.

Then its that one extra Forum post to review where someone complains that they killed 20 Terralysts and captured 500 and it says they KILLED 400 and captured 2. (a stat that was meaningless and flat out wrong the day it was introduced LOL)

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

4 minutes ago, elcion said:

I mean... where's the causation between this and game optimization?

There is no code I know of where doing a calculation and storing the value is faster than NOT doing it. Or where a larger codebase is easier to maintain than a smaller one.

There is no code I know of where SLOWER is OPTIMAL.

And there is no code I know of where calculating something WRONG is OPTIMAL.

And since - especially in this case -  two wrongs don't make a right, SLOWER and WRONG is definitely not OPTIMAL.

Perhaps if they were at least meaningful, and accurate, they might be worth something.

 

[krc473]

8 minutes ago, (Xbox One)Tucker D Dawg said:

Then its that one extra Forum post to review where someone complains that they killed 20 Terralysts and captured 500 and it says they KILLED 400 and captured 2

First day: 180 captured, 120 killed. Second day: 27 captured, 69 killed. Third day: gave up. I have used far more brilliant shards than captures I have made...

 

If DE cannot make the stats accurate, then they should remove them. Why should people be judged on stats that are simply wrong? (example: H> Ediolon Cap, must be EXP, will check stats). Most of the stats are not required (I would keep "most used" and "event participation"), most of them are probably not accurate. Any stat that DE cannot assure us is correct should be removed, simple. As you say, there is a lot of useless and meaningless junk in the stats page, all of which takes server space (which DE tells us is a restrictive factor). Why not remove all of the pointless stats, and then have a little more server space?

Edited February 20, 2018 by krc473

[Drasiel]

to be fair the eidolon capture versus kill stat was bugged. It would count captures as kills in the stats. This was fixed but there was no way to retroactively correct the stat.

I feel you are being very hyperbolic in regards to the "performance hit from text stats" if you are not being hyperbolic what are you using to run warframe? an analytical engine made by babbage?

[Lewdcifer]

I mean I'm not an IT dude and I know next to nothing about coding and servers and all that stuff but it this is like the case of deleting word documents to free up your space.

Well, meaningless = should be remove I can agree

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

3 minutes ago, Drasiel said:

I feel you are being very hyperbolic in regards to the "performance hit from text stats"

As I said in the OP, it may not be noticeably slowing it down, but its not helping.  And "Performance" is not just in end game experience, networking issues etc.    I can't count time times I've seen programs crash because the programmers didn't anticipate properly the upper bounds of variables, and the hours wasted trying to see why the code is crashing. And countless other ways little things like this become big issues.  Or having to reformat screens to make room for larger values. Or the the hours spent trying to actually make the data correct - only to be meaningless in the end anyway.  

Developer time wasted. And lots of it.

I suppose the more valuable questions might be: what stats are meaningful and worthwhile? What should be culled and what is missing? What should be cleaned up?

[taiiat]

there's no reason to remove Stats that you don't find useful just because you don't like them.

yes, Kil/Capture of Eidolons was wrong originally and counted all of your history as Kills. it does work now, though.
uh, do you know for certain that failing a Bounty actually counted as a Fail on your Profile? as far as i'm aware of, leaving Cetus always counts as a successful Mission and might even be disabled because of that but i don't remember specifically.
Mods picked up lets you know how well you or others were at picking up the l00t that was dropping.

still, 'remove this because i don't find it useful' isn't very compelling. it's not creating any major weight on anything, they're integers being updated with very small data that would have to be tracked by the game and your Account either way.

[kgabor]

Multishot or punchthrough really shouldn't count as +accuracy.

It makes Cernos Prime an MLG weapon that you can reach over 9000% accuracy with without aiming while in reality it't just a crappy shotgun with a charge mechanic and a bow skin.

[peterc3]

1 hour ago, (Xbox One)Tucker D Dawg said:

As I said in the OP, it may not be noticeably slowing it down, but its not helping.  And "Performance" is not just in end game experience, networking issues etc.    I can't count time times I've seen programs crash because the programmers didn't anticipate properly the upper bounds of variables, and the hours wasted trying to see why the code is crashing. And countless other ways little things like this become big issues.  Or having to reformat screens to make room for larger values. Or the the hours spent trying to actually make the data correct - only to be meaningless in the end anyway.  

Developer time wasted. And lots of it.

I suppose the more valuable questions might be: what stats are meaningful and worthwhile? What should be culled and what is missing? What should be cleaned up?

Ripping out code that has no real performance hit is a surefire way to cause things to fall apart. Would "removal" (whatever that means) not take more dev time than not touching it would entail?

You seem to assume that DE is full of amateur programmers. You are conflating your narrow knowledge of gaming code buzzwords with actual production code you have never seen nor will see unless you start working for DE.

[Miser_able]

1 hour ago, (Xbox One)Tucker D Dawg said:

Gross Income - gross income of what? 95million what? its not credits, not plat, just pointless..

It's supposed to be all the credits you've ever earned, but last I heard it was bugged as it didn't count a lot of stuff, such as credits from boosters. 

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

4 hours ago, Miser_able said:

It's supposed to be all the credits you've ever earned, but last I heard it was bugged as it didn't count a lot of stuff, such as credits from boosters. 

Since mine shows 95million, and I currently have well north of 350million credits and have spent over a billion credits, its not just a little off LOL- its more like it doesn't count the majority of stuff.

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

4 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Ripping out code that has no real performance hit is a surefire way to cause things to fall apart.

You seem to assume that DE is full of amateur programmers. You are conflating your narrow knowledge of gaming code buzzwords with actual production code you have never seen nor will see unless you start working for DE.

4 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Would "removal" (whatever that means) not take more dev time than not touching it would entail?

In the short term, yes.  In the long term, probably not.  In 20 years of technology, I've very rarely seen instances where leaving a mess in code wasn't a mistake that was paid for later.  The obvious exception is is applications with clear end-of-life.

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

5 hours ago, kgabor said:

Multishot or punchthrough really shouldn't count as +accuracy.

It makes Cernos Prime an MLG weapon that you can reach over 9000% accuracy with without aiming while in reality it't just a crappy shotgun with a charge mechanic and a bow skin.

Definitely not.  While with punch through, I will occasionally line up a shot knowing my sniper shot will go through both, the majority of the time its shooting into the masses, or through a wall, and getting a bit lucky - especially without knowing exact distances through objects etc.  I would argue that while adding punch through might be deliberate, the majority of targets killed by it were not "targeted"

Multishot is even worse - especially with something like heavy caliber where you really have no control over the spread.  Or even shot guns without multishot where the pellets kill the enemy to the left and right of your primary target.. You really weren't aiming at them specifically.

Even "accuracy" as a stat can be misleading: if the game only had single projectile, no punchthrough weapons would be off - I'm sure plenty of times I'll shoot at at enemy and miss my target but kill the guy next to him.  Thats not accurate - and often its a good thing there is no friendly fire LOL.  And there are still all the things I shoot that it doesn't count - crates, sometimes I shoot something when I'm chatting with friends: "you see that thing i'm shooting...", even the buttons in the agility test,

 

[TalesNexus]

7 hours ago, (Xbox One)Tucker D Dawg said:

It may not be slowing down the game, but keeping track of all this garbage certainly isn't improving performance. Not to mention the code base.

And  most are either meaningless, wrong, or misleading.

Lets look at a few Profile stats as examples:

Gross Income - gross income of what? 95million what? its not credits, not plat, just pointless.
Ciphers solved - well it includes using a cipher. hardly a meaningful "solve"  - and that of course skews the cipher time. And who cares.
Eidolon Terralyst Kills/Captures... just flat out wrong - no idea what its tracking - says I killed 396 and captured 2. Aside from being completely wrong and backwards as I've captured FAR more than I've killed, it can't even be flipped - As I know i've killed more than 2.
Weapon accuracy - we know thats meaningless - doesnt count hits on crates I was aiming at, nullifiers, doesn't properly account for multishot (love those missions I finish with over 200% accuracy)
Heals: 2.6 million - Um what? is that every pulse of Arcane Pulse + each individual tick of trin well of life + who knows what else? useless.
Scans - Really? Does anyone care how many times they scanned Clem?  And even if they did, leave it in the codex. not profile stats
Missions Failed: PoE BUGties would like a word with this alone.

Mission summary stats are no better:

Damage Dealt: I could be EV trin on nightmare EV 1 pherliac pod and out DPS everyone else on team if I do nothing else. Or sit in a bounty shooting ships as they leave helping nothing, killing no one, and have top damage dealt by far.  Should be renamed Salt Spread To Be Added To Tears When Crying For Nerfs Later On Forums - Although I admit that might be a bit long to fit in the limited area of the Progress & Rewards screen.
Damage Taken: Be a squishee frame, take 1% of damage and be the only one to go down.
Upgrades Received: who cares how many mods people got? I just care about what mods I got, and I can see that.  Me having 10 upgrades, and them one  doesn't tell me they picked up that vengeful revenant and I didn't
Fire Accuracy: Doesn't work with multishot, doesn't count shooting at breakable items one was aiming at, doesn't count nullifier bubbles, etc etc. 
 

I can't help but think all these stats behind the scenes, getting bigger and bigger, taking more and more resources, compute cycles, host syncs, code maintenance...for nothing.

 

Agreed.

When host rage quits or connection to the host lost, their only reason below:-

After hearing this, I found quit% to be demeaning itself for a long time, you know what I mean.  ;). 

Besides, my main profile shows lots of incorrect visual bugs which I reminded twice through customer support in previous years but till date, it never got fixed.

I guess I can comprehend now that one of the reasons dev choose to ignore it as it happens. Keep it rolling. 

Edited February 20, 2018 by IIWingSaberII

[Spectre-8]

[Azlen]

As said previously, people will find literally anything to complain about nowadays.