Reworking the scoring system

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Having just spent a couple of days grinding my way to the top of the high scores list (3.5 million. I know it's possible to get up to at least 4-5, but I couldn't get there this time), I thought I'd share my thoughts on the way the game awards points to players. Scoring isn't a big thing, but it's something...and I think it could use a rework at some point in the mid-long term.

Currently, the system the game uses for scoring is quite simplistic. Points are earned for killing enemy ships. This works well enough, but there's a lot more to this game than just shooting things. And while shooting things is very fun, and grinding up a high score is seriously difficult (I died three times, then ended the game earlier than I'd expected because I couldn't get insurance again), it'd be nice if the scoring system got reworked for this.

Here's some of the things the game doesn't award or deduct points for:

-Friendly fire incidents (and "friendly fire" incidents). This is fair enough, although if we ever get the ability to play as an outlaw it would be nice for this to be reworked. It's worth noting that if a player goes insane and kills everything in the game, a large proportion of these things will not count towards score. (Actually that would make a fantastic achievement/regret..."Made Apotomo's vision od destruction come true".....anyway, not important right now)
-Not-so-friendly fire incidents. If a station is hostile, or aggravated, the guards will attack the player. In some cases, these stations will send out units specifically hunting the player. But because they're green, you get no points for killing them. I believe that if it's trying to kill you, you should get points for killing it. Sure, it's exploitable, but most station aggravations happen accidentally anyway.
-Enemy stations. Personally, I think these should award score just like killing an enemy ship. Some stations are quite hard to kill, and others have great in-universe significance when destroyed.
-Quests and missions.
-Economic activities
-Time spent in the game (this would be hard to handle though, especially as the content is fleshed out with expansions)
-Conducts
-Deaths with insurance

Personally, having had a lot of fun in this game mastering the economics and learning how to make money, I think it would be awesome if part of the score (doesn't have to be a huge amount) was based on our profiteering and trade activities. Some conducts are quite hard as well, and could use a little reward in the scoring (not permadeath though. That has the bonus of "not having your score slashed by a death") Likewise, recognising particularly challenging missions with a score boost as well as an "achievement/regret" entry would be kind of nice.

Time spent in the game would be hard to handle, but I figured I'd throw it out there. If any effect on score is given, it should scale back over time, so if you're doing a slow playthrough you can ramp up your score....it's just a little harder.

Insurance is currently an exceptionally useful tool for grinding a score up. Without CC (as in my last run) you are basically farming luminous drones, ranx, and ares (from shipyards). While the former two are easy, the latter is exceptionally dangerous and it's easy to get killed.....but with insurance, you can die up to three times before having to risk an end to your run. Having each insurance use cost a small percentage of score would be suitable...maybe 10%?


This would allow scores to get pushed up, and allow "normal" playthroughs to end up in the top 10 or 20, as opposed to needing to farm NPCs for points in order to get into the high scores. At present, a score of 1-1.5 million points is achievable by a normal player in my view. Two million requires significant farming, whether for score or loot. 3 million requires exhaustive farming over a period of many hours (for me? Two days of farming, with breaks to rest every so often, pushing game time past 21 hours). Four million and up forces a SAN check. Allowing combat to only be part of what makes a high score would help with this. Players such as myself routinely end up with over a million commonwealth credits. if those gave one point each, that creates a significant boost to the player's score. Likewise, Rin count could be useful. It might be possible to exploit this, but as long as losing money/going bankrupt cost points, it should be fairly reasonable.

Finally, I believe the scoring for enemy ships is out of whack with their difficulty. Capital ships give far lower scores than gunships compared with the difficulty and danger of killing them. I'd suggest upping the scores for such ships to bring them in line with their actual difficulty (this makes phobos/deimos farming an even better score grinder, but they are dangerous to farm). It's also worth noting that I don't think Xenophobe worldships show up in the kill-list on stats....I spent 20 minutes killing one with a plasma torch and I'm rather annoyed that it doesn't seem to be on my game record. That was hard.

In summary, I think that scoring should be moved to factor in more non-combat activities, as well as rewarding station destruction, missions and capital-ship killings more than farming lighter ships.

There's a few other things I've spotted in this run, and I'll be putting them up in other threads soon as well....farming things for hours on end means that incidental occurances become regular enough to spot patterns, so I've done some fun testing on this one.

(And before anyone asks.....I am not planning another high-score run any time soon. I am confident that I can reach 4-5 million if I want to, now I know the tricks required for point-grinding. But first, I'm going to have some normal playthroughs with CC and get away from the grind.)

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Another thing, as pointed out by AssumedPseudonym: There appear to be two entirely different high score lists:

The main site tables

And

The multiverse tables

Of these, my game only shows up in one of them (the multiverse table). This means that either it's not eligible because of extensions (which poses a problem, since the only extension that actually altered the game was the OST....and that's going to make an ever-increasing number of people ineligible for that board), or because the high score table on the main site is bugged/no longer updated. Some clarification on how these two tables work/don't work would be handy.