I’d say you’re both wrong. K:D is a 100% accurate indicator of how much you’re contributing to your team if you’re only looking at team deathmatch modes. How much you’re contributing to your team is certainly one way to define “skill.” But if your definition of “skill” is more mainstream (i.e. how good you are at pwning n00bs) then a more advanced metric is required. For this I like the two stats they put up on the TDM leaderboards. It shows you K:D and score-per-minute. These two stats can be combined to paint a fairly accurate picture of a person’s skill. As LOUNE notes, it’s not very useful looking at K:D alone. Yes, anyone can get a good K:D by camping. However, the camper’s score-per-minute will be low.
I disagree with the proposal that assists should be a positive factor in assessing skill. An assist means you failed to finish somebody off. The guy who noob-tubes from the corner of the map for the whole game is going to rack up a dozen assists while his more skilled teammates are actually getting the kills. He’s not really adding anything because nine times out of ten they’d be getting the kills anyway. He’s just racking up a useless stat.
I’d also dispute that a win percentage is a good indicator of a person’s skill. If you’re a mediocre player but you play with a really good team every night, you’ll have a high win percentage. I play with a good friend of mine several times a week who is absolutely horrible. His K:D is around 0.5 and his score per minute is like 100. But his win percentage is ridiculously high. Because he plays with a few guys who are far above average, and rides their coattails. Conversely, if you don’t have any friends who play your game, your win percentage is going to be around 50% unless you’re good enough to be a consistent game-changer all by yourself. Which doesn’t apply to anybody in the middle 80% of the pack.
(The above applies only to TDM game modes, which is pretty much all I play.)
Really, with Black Ops, because the weapons are so lethal, assists tend to be a measure of how bad your connection is in any given game, however, it’s a positive thing to throw in because you’re still contributing to your team’s success. You don’t get the assist without someone on your team getting the point, and that certainly is a positive factor.
The guy that tubes from the corner of the map takes themselves out of contention for everything. That person, doing literally that, is neither a good player nor will end up with good stats to change that. You’re still going to have to move around, and if you don’t look at the heatmaps and stay out of high traffic areas and don’t get into major firing lanes, you’re going to get smoked, again, because the weapons are so lethal.
I think total number of kills combined with KDR provides a better reflection of performance. KDR greater than 1.00 means you’re providing more points for your team than you’re giving to the opponents. A guy with 12 kills and 3 deaths has done more for victory than the guy with 15 kills and 10 deaths.
Right now, I’m back in combat training trying to unlock properks by getting the challenges. Really ramps up the difficulty when you have to kill guys in a specific way rather than the most efficient way at the moment. Of course, since none of the challenges I’ve completed against humans apply in CT, I’m having to do things over. And I’m beginning to appreciate some of the perks that I’ve previously ignored.
Yes, but the guy who goes 12-3 gives 3 fewer kills with 7 fewer deaths, making it more likely that the team will win. While he contributes a bit less to the win, he contributes MUCH less to the loss. Sometimes, when I am having a horrible game but the team is very much in contention for the win, I’ll try to hide so that the team has a shot at winning. Since I’m not helping with kills but dragging them down with deaths, it’s enough that I don’t die anymore.
One other thing: I’m a very methodical player. My scores typically end up fairly low compared to the top scores, and my score per minute is usually mid-pack in every lobby leaderboard. I’ve been playing this game for a while, I’ve seen all the videos, and yet I still can’t figure out how the really good players do it. If I go out running and gunning I get smoked, but these guys will run right into a spawn point and kill everybody without getting a scratch. How is that possible?
I’ve been smoked more than once by people who seemed to know that I was there- I was running Ghost and Ninja, had a silenced weapon, and was crouching and walking slowly, and yet they came around the corner and popped me before I could even react. Either my ping totally sucked and I was a sitting duck, or they knew I was there / had aim assistance.
Talking about anything other than TDM or FFA, K/D is meaningless.
I’m Prestege 1, lvl 50 and I’m an average player by most accounts. I most often finish middle of the pack, sometimes bottom of the pack, and very rarely top 1-2.
That said, I play a lot of Domination or CFT and my K/D will sometimes be .33, but I’ll have 7 control points captured and a handful of defends, or 1-2 flags captured. For these game modes, that is effective enough to win fairly often with a decent team.
Map knowledge, heatmaps, and staying out of the firing lanes coupled with a favorable connection. Also, having a team of folks that are all drawing attention help. Also realize that what you’re seeing in montages and gameplay videos is cherry picked. You don’t see the bad games.
I don’t want the thread to devolve into it, but not all console games have this connection bias. Modern Warfare 2 and really, even Modern Warfare 1 were pretty rock solid. The Halo franchise has exceptionally good multiplayer. Black Ops is a notch under these, but not a big notch. There’s enough of a notice of lag where you can tell, but it’s not overwhelming. For Blops, there also seems to be a West Coast bias, in favor of who hosts the room. You live in Pittsburgh (right?) so that can contribute to the problem. If you can’t have host, then you at least want to have a good connection to the host.
That’s not necessarily true. There are some high traffic areas on each of these maps that you’re not going to run blindly past. You’re going to check them out each time you walk past. Even a difference in ping, and even a pretty sizeable one, won’t give you away around a corner like that.
Another way to look at it is that the first team that gives up 100 deaths loses. Preserve your lives and don’t throw them away. Discover ways to be successful that increase the timespan of your average life and start dropping theirs.
Well, it sure feels that way when you put at least two solid hits on the guy before he starts shooting then you go down with a single shot. And it seems to happen A LOT.
If one of the players is hosting the game on their machine, it’s impossible not to have the “connection bias” - at best you can artificially create lag on the host by delaying the resolution of what they do to simulate lag, but I doubt any game actually does this.
But in most cases, the person who gets the point would have gotten it anyway. Because, as you note, the weapons are so lethal in this game. So an assist is a contribution to your team in statistics only, rarely in practical terms. And it’s also a sign that you couldn’t seal the deal. So all-in-all not a good indicator of skill.
I disagree. The guy who sits in the corner of the map (or the corner of a room) ready to noob-tube anything that comes by will end up a typical game about 5-2. That’s a 2.50 K:D ratio, which is pretty impressive. He’ll also likely get a bunch of assists, because explosives tend to breed assists, and anyone who camps like that probably doesn’t have the skill to seal the deal. So they’re a bad player in that they have very little skill, but they’re a good player in that they’re contributing to the team total.
If you mean that lifetime total number of kills is a good indicator of skill, I have to disagree with you. That’s just a good indicator of how much you’ve played.
If you mean total kills within a particular game, combined with K:D, I agree with you, but I think it’s simpler just to call it a K:D differential. E.g. if you went 12-5, you’ve got a +7 differential, and if you went 9-10, you’ve got a -1 differential. You’re correct that this is the most accurate indicator of how much you contributed to a particular game. The guy who went 12-1 contributed more than the guy who went 30-22 contributed more than the guy who went 5-10. The only x-factor is the guy who calls in team-helping killstreaks.
I wish the game kept track of your average per-game K:D differential. I’d much rather have that stat than K:D ratio on the leaderboards.
As others have pointed out, you are mistaken. Another (much more complicated) way to look at it is that when time runs out or when one team hits 75 kills, the winning team will be whichever one has the positive cumulative K:D differential. So having a big positive K:D differential is more important than having a lot of kills.
“Contributing to the loss” isn’t a thing. Even if it was, it doesn’t diminish the contribution to victory. Minimizing your deaths just shifts the burden of actually winning the game to other players. You can’t blame them if they mess up, since you weren’t doing shit to help.
It doesn’t matter if you put your team more in the black for whatever since it doesn’t matter if you win by 1000 points or 10 points. You don’t win once you’re 1000 points up on the other team. You win when you reach the goal first.
You cannot win if everyone is trying to avoid dying. Playing the game requires getting into gun battles. If you’re playing defensive, you’re going to lose because the aggressive team always has the advantage in an encounter thanks to grenades, pre-aim, and pre-fire.
Win or lose, the 50-40 guy is way more valuable than the 15-3. If you play for KD, you’re probably not helping the team. You’re just cream skimming kills.
A death in TDM is equivelant to scoring for the other teams. A 50-50 player hasn’t contributed because while he’s raced ahead to getting his team points compared to a 15-3 guy, he’s equally raced ahead for the enemy team.
Now, in some strange abstract way, a team full of guys going 50-50 along with one guy going 51-50 will beat a bunch of 15-3 guys in a race - but this is of course nonsensical because your team can’t go 50-50 against another team that’s going 15-3 … every kill and death are mirrored on the other team.
The 15-3 guy is keeping the other team from winning the race by only dying 3 times as much as he’s not racing ahead in the race with more kills and more deaths.
Consider it as just a 2v2. The match consisted of 118 gun battles and Team A won by winning 65 of them. Player 1 went 50-50 and Player 2 went 15-3. Who contributed more?
For the most part, you enhance your KD by staying out of the action. Staying out of the action should never be a positive factor for a player. That’s detrimental.
Okay, so then you’d also argue that the guy who gets 40 kills and 50 deaths is more valuable than the guy who goes 15-3, right? Since K:D doesn’t matter, and only the number of kills you get matters, right? Do you see where this is going? If you go 40-50 in a game, you’ve moved the other team two thirds of the way towards victory. Yes, you’ve also gotten 4000 points towards victory, but that’s not enough to mitigate the damage you’ve done by giving the other team 5000 points.
Imagine a TDM game where there’s somehow no score cap, and 5 players on one team have gone 50-50 each, and the sixth player has gone 1-2. Guess what? That team loses when time runs out. Or imagine a normal TDM game where you’ve got a team of five people who each go 15-3. Guess what? The game’s over – that team has won. Final score 7500 to 1500. An absolute crushing victory.
K:D differential is the only mathematical factor in a victory. If your team’s K:D differential is negative, you will lose. Mathematical fact. It will not matter how many kills you got. So the more positive your K:D differential, the more you help your team. So the 15-3 player (K:D differential +12) has helped his team more than the 30-20 player (K:D differential +10). QED.
Player 2 did. Because Player 1 gave 50 kills to the other team. Essentially player 1 contributed absolutely nothing.
While it is possible to increase your [noparse]K:D[/noparse] by staying out of the action, it’s also possible to do so by being a skilled player who is aware of the importance of not dying.
I dunno, man. I see it as the equivalent of Player 1 being the guy who goes in, gets the flag, carries it back halfway across the map, gets fragged, then Player 2 picks it up and caps. By being in 82 more battles, it almost certain Player 1 was basically playing a 2v1.
Can we agree that low KD means you’re bad and low volume means you’re bad? I’d definitely agree that neither player should be particularly proud of themselves.