I was reading the 6DOF poll threads and got to thinking, what if the game offered a persistent complex statistics system? For instance, it could track how long you were using each direction or how far you traveled in that direction (both?), per-axis rotation amounts (angular, I guess), per-weapon statistics like how often you shot \"before\" or \"after\" your opponent's position (tracking where the weapon flies in relation to the opponent, find the closest that the weapon came to the player and the direction, stuff like that), and so on. These kinds of statistics would show a very definite difference between experienced and inexperienced players. Obviously they could be linked to efficiency, which is the cumulative result of skill, timing, luck, and all the other factors of the game in accomplishing the goal of defeating your opponent. Also track damage done versus kill count. A person can hit everyone with the MD twice in record time with incredibly precision and still never score a kill; thus, opponent focus is important. You could also find ways to measure whether your persistence is too high or too low; when your enemy runs toward their base and you follow them into a dangerous situation, that's too persistent, but switching your focus between enemies at random isn't persistent enough.
For weapons, measure time between hits, time that a weapon was used in battle (so that just having it selected doesn't count for anything). Maybe time that the weapon flies after shooting should count as time that it's used, with a limit of some number of seconds so that shooting pointlessly in a large space doesn't affect it too much.
And then come up with intuitive displays for the different statistics. Normalize the lateral movement axes amounts (left and right are counted as different axes, this is important because many people have a bias to one side or the other that can result in death) and display them as bars, then with real unit amounts if feasible given the measurement method (I think tracking both time and distance traveled is a good idea). In the stats, show the statistics that are locked out too.
Let the player know when they first run the game that there is an advanced statistics system, and ask whether they would like to see the stats screen after they play a game, and include a \"Remind me later\" option or something. Maybe if they aren't doing so well, then even if they select \"Never bother me again\", pop up a window that shows what they're doing wrong and how the statistics system could help.
Another idea that would be harder is finding a way of tracking lateral movement in relation to different players. This could also be used as a factor in determining who the player is attacking, although obviously not so much for new players.
I liked the idea of limiting what weapons a player could use in games with lots of noobs in them. The weapon statistics could be used to bias a game against experienced players more dynamically, so that a player who prefers a gun that gets blocked later isn't inherently given an advantage. And perhaps limit experienced players in different ways, such as increasing reload times or decreasing damage, rather than outright blocking use of certain weapons.
I wonder how hard it would be to have the game keep a demo of the entire time that a player plays, and they can choose to save it at the end for later review to see where they screwed up. And you'd be able to enable a stats mode that shows how people are moving at different times, what weapons they're using and their different stats with that weapon. This idea is probably going way overboard with it though.
For demo recording, you could allow the viewer to see from other perspectives as the demo is being played, though you'd need to have some kind of visual and positional limiting system to denote what regions the client isn't receiving much information about for sake of bandwidth conservation.
The ability to share statistics and such would be really cool, though perhaps it should be anonymous? If it weren't, it could make clan matches interesting. Perhaps also track and show some basic computer specs, average framerate, and input configurations. Hey, that'd be cool, to be able to try another player's configuration. I think less experienced players would find that interesting. It's not exactly privacy invasion because you can't really profit from this kind of information, but I'd give players an easy clickable GUI way to limit what information of theirs is displayed.
Such statistics would be well-suited to web apps, PHP and MySQL would work wonderfully for the job and would make it easy to view statistics both in-game and out without duplicating effort. Could a web client be integrated into the game? Use the rendering engine that Firefox uses or something.
Yeah, this is just random spew. Post your thoughts!
Complex statistics system
Moderators: fliptw, roid, CUDA
woop, just read the word 'lag' on another forum and had another idea 
Make it a server and client option (server enables it for client, client chooses whether to have it on or not. like HUD names in D3, only it remembers the client option rather than overwriting it with the server when the server's limits...) to have a lag position indicator that shows roughly the area you should shoot for a given gun, and perhaps changes its color or alpha (give an option between the two?) based on how likely you are to hit that person. Perhaps based on their movement statistics as well? So that if a player has a tendency to go in one direction more than another, color that side of the sphere with less alpha. Remembering the KISS principle, better to make having that much statistical detail an option, or just not implement it. Some sort of positional lag indicator would be great though. Even if instead of being predictive, it just shows a green translucent version of the enemy's ship based on where they were half their ping time ago, that would be very helpful (less helpful when the player is moving toward you, but then you don't have to do as much lag compensation).
Make it a server and client option (server enables it for client, client chooses whether to have it on or not. like HUD names in D3, only it remembers the client option rather than overwriting it with the server when the server's limits...) to have a lag position indicator that shows roughly the area you should shoot for a given gun, and perhaps changes its color or alpha (give an option between the two?) based on how likely you are to hit that person. Perhaps based on their movement statistics as well? So that if a player has a tendency to go in one direction more than another, color that side of the sphere with less alpha. Remembering the KISS principle, better to make having that much statistical detail an option, or just not implement it. Some sort of positional lag indicator would be great though. Even if instead of being predictive, it just shows a green translucent version of the enemy's ship based on where they were half their ping time ago, that would be very helpful (less helpful when the player is moving toward you, but then you don't have to do as much lag compensation).