Unreal Tournament Mods

How to improve your ranking as fast as possible:

1. Make sure you understand how ranking works, what matters, and what doesn't matter.
2. Learn the levels by playing Single Player Practice alone and against bots.
3. Improve your fighting skills by playing Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch.
4. Don't switch teams while alive, it kills you, counting as a suicide.
5. Usually it's more effective to freelance and dogfight than to destroy objectives.
6. Offense is the best defense, spawn camping is a cheap but efficient way of scoring frags, while throwing off your enemies.
7. Don't hurry too much since the longer it takes to finish the first round, the more time you'll have the last round, more chances to kill the enemy.
8. However, you should make sure that your team eventually wins, that also affects your rating somewhat.
9. The more opponents, the more potential frags you can get, but don't let them outnumber you too much.
10. Grab resources to gain an advantage over both your enemies and teammates, only your own frags count, after all.
11. If you're under attack, stop and fight, try to kill all of your opponents.
12. It's better to kill yourself than to be killed by an enemy.
13. Avoid players who are a lot better than you are, but hunt down all the others.
14. It's probably better to disconnect than to lose the match.
15. It's definitely better to stay dead than to be spawn-killed by spawn-campers. Let your teammates deal with them. Respawn when you feel secure again, or look for another server, if your team can't cope with spawn-camping.
16. Try to be on the winning team, the one with the best players, so that you get more victories. Also you won't be ranked against the players who are on your team. Keep in mind #4 though.
17. Competing with an enemy team that consists of clan players while your own team only has random people can result in very bad games. Especially if your teammates are still newbies. Switching servers might be in order.
18. If you run out of ammo or low on health, or you want to be in another place as fast as possible, it might save you some time to respawn now instead of waiting until you die. It would also influence your ranking if another human player frags you. It's better to kill yourself, let a bot kill you, or be shot down by a cannon which won't count as suicide.
19. Avoid fast maps like HiSpeed, OceanFloor, Rook. Play Frigate, Guardia, Mazon, Overlord. Switch servers before such a level comes up if you don't want to play it.
20. Be a bad guy, a lean mean killing machine, show no mercy. Don't chat, typing is too distracting, but keep killing those who are distracted or away from keyboard. Every frag you can get matters, no matter how, so keep fragging.
21. A final addition, tactical team switching, it's better to switch (even if it means suicide) so you can follow your strategies instead of staying on your team and failing to execute your strategy. For example, in "Overlord" it's easy to get a lot of cheap frags by getting into the respawn location of the attackers when you're on the defending team, so switch if necessary so you can defend twice and not even risk being spawnkilled at all. This is very effective but also one of the lowest ways to improve your frag count.

As you hopefully realize by now, being a ranked player means being antisocial, acting like an idiot. And that's basically what you are, a selfish person, not really a teammate since you don't care about your team at all. The more I play and the better my rank gets, the more I notice how stupid it is, how annoying it must be for those who play for fun. Yeah, to become a better player (rank), you should follow these guidelines. But to become a better player (character), you shouldn't act that selfish, it ruins the fun and teamplay aspects of the game. Spreading the word won't solve the problem, though, although most normal players will adhere to the commonly accepted rules. But the majority isn't the problem anyway, it's the minority of cheap ranked players who spoil it for the others, and they only care about their ranking. The only way to change their ways is by changing the rules, how the ranking system works, to discourage the antisocial behavior and encourage teamwork. ngWorldStats ranking should value destroying objectives as fast as possible much more than killing enemies. The defending team will hardly score that way, of course, but the game is called "Assault" instead of "Attack & Defend" for a reason. Right now, it's not too different from pure Deathmatch, with a notable exception: Most players don't realize it so they fall for those who do - easy prey, cheap frags, and better ranking... Personally, I'm disgusted by my own actions, because they are against my real attitude: Fun, teamwork, fun... Unfortunately I am forced to play like an idiot to get a better ranking!!

I've disabled ngWorldStats logging now that I'm the number one, basically I want to "retire" now that I've played "professionally" for a whole week, to be free again and play properly without having to think about how it might affect my ranking. Good riddance, stats, welcome back real play. And by that I mean FUN!! I realize that my "competitive" playing probably has spoiled the fun of some other players, so I'd like to apologize for my little experiment, hoping the flawed ngWorldStats Assault Logging will be fixed now that I'm publishing the "sure winner guidelines". Once assaulting is encouraged and camping is discouraged, that problem should be solved once and for all, hopefully.