I would consider myself a moderatly good pilot. I could beat a lot of VO's population. But because I learned PvP when I was combat 5, my Kill/Death ratio is far below what it should be (compared to other playes) which is very hurtful to my self esteem. I have alts who I knew what ships I wanted and thus didn't bot them to combat 8. Because of this they have low ratios and sometimes people won't even fight them!

Now maybe instead of complaining I should just kill the 5k bots on each of my characters that'll get me to a "reasonable" ratio, but I'm sure that I'm not the only one who doesn't like it. Its a midjudge of combat skill in the same way as you can't judge someone by their licenses.

For players like Apex, who I'm infinitily jealous of, that have K/D ratios in the 70's last I checked, they don't need the stat looking at them whenever they hit K, they can just do the math themselves.

If someone cares about their ratio, they can easily figure it out, but the way it stands at the top of someone's info grants it more importance than it deserves. I know I shouldn't care about it, but the way it is so prominent I feel like I need to, and thus every death before I get 6.78 kills is that much more angering, and I and I'm sure many others, don't play this game to get angry.

Yes. While I'm still in the mid twenties, when things are removed from stats the players worry about, the game becomes more fun. No, I'm not saying to remove licences, but statistics can be flawed, and easily misinterpreted.

LOL My kill-to-death ratio is almost 6! Woo-Hoo!

If you take PK's ONLY into account I am 6 the other way, or six times more likely to die than kill another player. Or you could say that I am batting .164.

Hrm. Apex has an overall kill-to-death ratio of 36, and a PK-to-Death ratio of 3.5, so he's batting 3500, which means that for every 3.5 people he kills he dies once.

Yeah that sucks. DAMN YOU APEX! How dare you be better than me!?!
Har.

I agree about the K/D ratio. Is there really a purpose as to why we need to know how many times we've died? It might be cool to see how many bots or players we've killed over time. But something negative like the number of deaths sort of makes some people feel bad when they've let it happen so many times. It is by no means a true representation of skill and It does nothing but tarnish a player's record.

Anyway, less stats to worry about equals less agitated players. We should focus on character progress, not previous records. Sometimes I too get kind of obsessive about keeping a clean record. I know I'm not the only one either. After all, this thread was created right? So put me down for the removal of K/D ratio also.

I'm against this, for three reasons:

A) Having a record is a good thing, it helps foster friendly competition as smittens illustrates, and more information is always good provided it is relevant. K/D ratio definitely seems relevant, PK/D ratio would be even more relevant. I think it makes the game more fun to be able to keep score.

B) The K/D ratio is already in the game, and taking it out would be yet one more uneccesary task for the devs.

C) The simple fact is that it may be one of the few things remaining that give pause to players considering allowing someone to kill them 50 times for the bus hunter badge.

There are ups and downs to having K/D ratios, I don't like them and think that they should be axed. However, Phaserlight, you bring up some good points. It would be harder on the devs to take it out, and more people would be bus killers. I realy don't know which side to support...

I'm kinda in the middle too.

Some people like having some kind of ratio so they know how well they're doing, but it also gives misinterpretations about the player.

My ratio is around 240, so people would look at me and say "Whoa! He must be good!" When in reality I'm only a moderatly skilled player when it comes to fighting.

I never cared about statistics...

Heh, I could care less about the actual STATS as well, looking at my stats most people would say, DAMN LeberMac SUCKS! I could easily DESTROY him! (Unless of course I am MacGuyItani)
When in actuality I think I am at least an average pilot.

Ah well, so be the stats. I need to get my 100 PK medal, tho.

In fact, the ONE indicator of how dangerous a certain peson is is whether they have a 25 PK/100 PK medal or nothing. I think the PK's are the only real indicator of someone's combat skill. I wish we could distinguish PK deaths from "other" deaths. Now THAT ratio would actually mean something.

no! dont go! its fun to see how low i can get it :)

NOW WAIT JUST A DAD BURN SECOND HERE.... YOU MEAN TO TELL ME... THAT EVERY TIME I TYPE "/EXPLODE".... I'M MESS'N WITH MY DAD BURN D/K RATIO... ... .... ... ?

THAT AIN'T RIGHT!!!

j/k

like... who cares.

Regarding Phaserlight's point A which a couple of you have supported, if you want the competition associated with it then how hard is it to grab a calculator and check? Its just the fact that its stuck right at the top of your info that I think makes it seem much more important than it is.

Phaserlight B and C, those are good points for keeping it. Also it keeps one from leveling up a n00b character by getting the combat from an "older" char, although with BP I guess that isn't needed anymore. I'll think about this though...

I never cared about statistics...

I'm with you here :)

The only thing I even pay attention to when it comes to stats are the pk's and legitimate duels.

I used to care about my K/D ratio when I was new, and I managed to keep it over 100 for a long time, but lately, I found that /exploding for trade missions and getting into wierd fights with people in a bus is much more fun! :)

If someone wants to change the K/D thing, cool, but I really don't care much about it. low-priority for me.

Phaserlight, in response to your point B, I was thinking about it, and yes it would use dev time, but if the VO population decides they don't want it...

I mean Cap ships take a long time to put ingame, but people want it, so its happeneing.

But is it really that much of a problem to warrant spending time removing it?

From the sounds of this thread some are for it, others are against it.

I hardly even notice it, stats don't really matter, I say leave 'em be.

Personally I don't care whether the K/D ratio is there or not, but I really want to see where I have my home station set to on my char info screen, and I haven't heard anyone say that they didn't want that, so hopefully the devs will eventually go in to the char info screen & add that, and at the same time they could probably take out the K/D ratio without it taking much additional time.

But if some people do want the K/D ratio, I don't see any real reason to remove it.

The only legitimate excuse I see is that it keeps people from letting others kill them for the bus hunter badge. If someone wants it to check their stats, again, they can just use a calculator.

on the other hand, in time of multigpu videocards, and multiprocessor motherboards, why do we need to go and use a calculator, if the game provides it for us.

We are all inherently lazy you know.

cheers

The thing is, neither PK/D or K/D mean anything. If someone wants to get a good PK/D ratio they don't have to be a good fighter, they only have to know how to gank people. Semantics possibly but I think there's a bit of a difference between those two possibilities.