I hope the stat tracking for Halo 2 Live is a bit more robust than the crap we've been seeing in other games. I really wish that the stat tracking balances encouraging great individual performance with great team performance. Most team deathmatches become less of a team thing and more of a let's see who can kill the most people on the other team. There's always that one jackass that has never played a minute of the single player campaign and plays the online portion hours a day. He knows every nook and cranny of every map and just runs ahead of everyone and gets like 8 kills. Since he isn't a team player, he doesn't even use the Live headset so he can't communicate with the rest of his team. When you look at the Bungie.net rankings (hypothetical), this dude is number one because he has spent 3,000 hours on the game and has like 5,000 kills. That's stupid. What about those of us with 9 to 5's who only play games a couple of hours a day? What if we are excellent team players and every team we play on wins a game? Shouldn't we be "rewarded" as well. There should be three ranking categories: Solo Score, Team Score, Cumulative Score. The Solo Score: This tracks how many kills you've gotten, how many deaths, kills-to-death ratio, shot percentage, etc. Then based on all of this, a solo score is calculated. Team Score: This tracks how many kills, deaths, and friendly fire incidents you've racked up. It also tracks how many times you've been on a winning team. It also calculates how many objectives you cleared compared to your teammates. If you run ahead and complete 8/8 objectives by yourself in a team game, you will be penalized. This forces the player to play as a team. If you complete an objective as a team, then you will be rewarded with a high team play score. Individuals get higher scores completing objectives as a team than if they did it by themselves. Again, this encourages team play and is good "team pressure." In real warfare soldiers depend on each other to save their lives. No one goes out to see how many enemy soldiers they can kill. They go out to complete an objective and if they work as a team, they live. The objective scoring system focuses on getting the objective completed as a team. If one guy has to defuse a bomb and you pick off the last Covenant guarding the bomb, you will get huge points when the objective is completed. The Team Score also rewards teams that finishes missions with no casualties. Since it will probably be rare, the points are huge. In fact, it should be the most coveted bonus in the game. This FORCES your teammates to watch your back. This will be huge in clan rankings. Cumulative Score: The Cumulative Score is the only score you see when you go to the rankings screen. This score combines your solo score with your team score. Then when you break it down you can see where the bulk of the score comes from. Two guys can be tied for first place with 20,000 points, but if you break the individual scores down, you may see that one guy has a Solo score of 17,000 and a Team score of 3,000 while the other guy has 15,000 Team score and 5,000 solo score. When looking for a clan member, you can just check these stats to see if you want this guy. Who would you pick? Definately the guy who knows how to play with a team. Of course the scores (solo and team) can be further broken down to see percentages, kills and other stuff. I think this is pretty simple. In short, a score shouldn't be how many hours I've played the game or how many kills I've got. It should be more. A guy who only plays 2 hours can be just as skillful as a guy who plays 200 hours a day. I just think the stats should reflect that. [Edited on 4/14/2004 8:53:36 AM]