Please No Win/Loss Tracking

Well, is there anything wrong with restricting the viewability of wins, losses, and whatever other statistics there are (because statistics in a vacuum are fun indeed), to the 'owner' of said statistics? So that only you yourself can you your own statistics?

Not at all. If you want to hide how good/terrible you are then that's none of my concern.

To many people, myself included, stats are fun. Maybe I am a stat whore, I don't know your definition of that term so I don't really know. If your definition of that term describes a person who hurts the game for others due to his stats-obsessed thinking I can counter that with stats: My do-not-play rating on FA-Playertrack was always 0%. (btw: lol, that thing is still online xD) Meaning nobody ever felt put off by my behavior.

Having an option to hide stats from the public eye is weird in my mind, but I don't see a downside to it.

Are you trolling? What game exactly did you play that had this problem? Especially random pub-games are totally independent from win-loss ratios, since win-loss ratios are usually only a part of 1v1 ladder play. What might influence public games is a global rating that is influenced with every game. FAF has this and it is quite helpful to players of all levels to get balanced teamgames. I've never seen anyone get aggressive about it.
I can ensure you that the problems you are foreseeing are non existent in FA. They may be existing in other games, but I would guess that the average TA/FA/PA player is old enough to be a half-way decent person.

Command & Conquer Generals (and Zero Hour, and I suppose Tiberium Wars and the other games after it as well, although I can't be as certain of that as I am of Generals and Zero Hour) suffered a lot because of ranks / stats.

In MWO, we actually used to get quite a few people that would drop out of a game right before they were about to die so the kill wouldn't count against them. Now, that's more of a K/D ratio, and W/L isn't necessarily affected by if you die in that game, but it still shows how people can be unreasonable when stats are in place.

Then again, that's an FPS. This is an RTS. And it's not starcraft. That kind of gets rid of a few of those people automatically.

A fair point. I don't think Planetary Annihilation would attract many of the people who care about wins and losses to such an extreme.

how competitive people are is a function of the quality of competition, starcraft 2 has a very high level of competition

I can't comment much on the behavior of people who player shooters, since I've rarely played them online more than a few hours.
However I've played around two thousand Starcraft 2 1v1 ladder games and like 500 2v2 ladder games and problems rarely occurred. In fact I often found quite nice people on ladder. So I'd say that SC2 has a community that's pretty okay. People could not do much apart from flaming anyway and that's solved by blocking them.
Same thing for SupCom: 99% of the people were usually nice.

I've never played CnC online. How were stats implemented that they possibly could hurt anyone to such a degree? In a 1v1 ladder people pretty much only can flame if a reasonably policy on disconnects is applied.

ladder anxiety is the biggest problem with SC2, i never played the ladder much but I did play halo competitively and can confirm losing at lvl49 sucked.

in FAF the separation of rating from ladder is really nice and i never experienced anything like that, granted i play casually.

Well, it was more like 'you haven't won enough games, I'll kick you'. There was a badge next to your name (based on how much games you played, I think... Unsure), and then you could say wins / losses / disconnects. But I'm unsure, really. It's a long time ao, and I didn't intensively play it online or such.

I don't see why the game needs to hide information about player record. It serves an informative function about player progress and improvement. The psycological side effects of w/l ratio have an easy solution: have 2 separate matchmaking queues : 1 for "casual" players and second for "competitive" players. Games are recorded only on the "competitive" one. If player pool will not allow such division then just put a tick for public profiles or whatever, or go the sc2 route and display losses only for high ranked players.

in FAF only ladder game W/L is displayed, that seems okay to me. you still have a non-ladder rating for custom ranked games.

That's comparable to the rating that FAF displays, but a rating ofc is far more accurate than a win-loss ratio. I don't think such a "I kick you if you are rated too bad" is a problematic behavior. It sucks to play against (or even worse play together with) people who don't know left from right. It sucks for the weaker plays just as much get stomped without any chance. A displayed rating (or a badge for X games played) helps to prevent such situations. Ofc a rating as in FAF is far better to determine this and balance teams accordingly as a plain win-loss counter. A win-loss counter really is just a rather meaningless stats that's fun to people like numbers.

Make win/loss hidden only to the player, have only the ranking shown like in FAF.

I love the competitive aspect of games like Starcraft 2 and RTS's in general. I think there should be custom/unranked games you can play like in SC2 that don't affect your actual ranked win/loss ratio or score. So you have a choice to either play a casual/unranked match or a ladder match in which your wins and losses are counted and displayed.

Anybody remember PlayerTrack for FA? It shows info about how good are you in land, navy, air, eco, using resources, killing acu, experimentals build.

Fa iis game where most people dont want to play ladder games (i think). Team games for me gives much more fun. But what if you played damn good, but your teammates lost or disconect, and becouse of that you losed too? -10 points

I want to see something new, that will reward you for things that you do good. Ok a lost navy, lost air, but my land forces was good, and i almost win with it. Now? -6 points. What i want? -1%navy, -1% air, + 1% land. Or something in that way. No - points and text "you lost!"

There was also w:l, disconects and rank based on how other players rate them. W:l was not important, but if someone have 60% of disconects everyone have right to dont play.

So... Ranked and Unranked.

Doesn't that usually work?

I subscribe this. Even starcraft 2 doesn't have this count. I remeber the same situation you explained with Red Alert 3, poeple could kill just to not have a +1 kill in their stats.

Just track the wins only. Makes people feel good, never bad.

Using Trueskill on a commercial project without a microsoft license is a problem. But they could use glicko, which is similar, though not as well-suited for multi-player matches like FFA or 2v2v2v2 (glicko is fine for duels).

Colin, so that is why I could not tell Forged Alliance Forever tracked win/losses - it is so inconspicuously hidden in the client that no one can bother to find it.

I already named at the begining of this thread two games which online suffered greatly from stat whoring - Command & Conquer: Generals and Dawn of War. In Generals, every game was recorded - there was no distinction between ranked, match ups, or custom maps. Accessing and reading someone's stats profile was also as simple as right clicking their username. It was not even possible do disable ranking in games until its expansion pack, Zero Hour. It was possible though to avoid taking a hit to your profile by unplugging your computer. Dawn of War is a similar case, and you can not turn ranking off. The effect this had was almost every game host you encountered either wanted you to switch to the other team or kicked you based on your win/loss record - and naturally, no one wanted to be paired with poor players - increasing the amount of joining and leaving before games could actually start. With this point of reference in mind, I hope my position becomes clear.

"E-peeners will e-peen", "maybe this open system is good so I know which players to avoid" - no. The playerbase could not have behaved the way they did to try to maximise their win count if there was no win/loss record to maximise in the first place. Sharable records means other players judge you. Private records means the game judges you. And do not tell me something far-fetched like they will just write down their wins on paper - that is not remotely the same thing.

Thinking about avoiding names is not something I want to do for every name I face online. That would get tiring very fast. I would lose interest in playing online if I had to hold a grudge against the playerbase instead of just playing games.

Unlike other online features claimed to be open to abuse, which are either intrinsic to the online game(ranking) or atmosphere(chat), or where you can sort of see their appeal(custom emblems), the value of tracking win/loss is dubious at best. In terms of fun, it is more of a cause for frustration and stat anxiety. I do not believe anyone genuinely enjoys hosting rigged games to maintain their win/loss threshold. As an actual measurement for player skill, it is downright useless, because - assuming the ideal is a perfect matchmaking system pairing players evenly - the vast bulk of the playerbase(until you are among the very top as to be nearly unsurpassable, or the very bottom as to be hopeless) will perform at around 50% - despite there being a vast skill disparity.