I know this is pretty basic, but I've heard a lot of misuse of the Weapon K/D ratio. For example, "using weapon A like this is the best! I've got a 8:1 ratio with it." or "well, Weapon A actually DOES work well. I'm 5:1 with it! compared to my K/D ratio with Weapon B where I'm only 1.5:1"

But here's the not-so-secret secret about it: it's not showing you your K/D ratio while you're using the weapon. That would be much too useful.

No, the Weapon K/D ratio is actually the number of kills you've made with a certain weapon compared to the number of times you've been killed by that weapon.

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So what are the consequences of this? Frankly, it makes these K/D ratios pretty inconsequential. The reason is that it's entirely dependent on what weapon you USE not how well you use it. To illustrate:

Say I love playing engineer. Fall of Berlin? Engy. Cerbere? Engy. Camp G? Engy. And of course, Shuhia? Engy. I just love that smg. I play a lot of infantry maps where somewhere in the neighborhood of 90+% are playing something OTHER than engineer.

What's the result? My SMG K/D ratio will be through the roof. My overall K/D ratio could be 0.5:1, but because I'm using it to get tons of kills, and all my deaths are from vosses, clarks, apcs, etc. my K/D ratio will be astronomical.

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What's this mean for those of us on the forums? Weapon K/D ratios are nearly meaningless. Saying that the Clark RDX isn't useless because "I have a pretty high K/D ratio with it" is saying nothing because if no one else is using it, of course your K/D ratio is high. Conversely, even if you're an amazing player, if your weapon of choice is the Voss, the K/D ratio is not going to be one of those amazing 16:1 ratios.

There are two potential comments about this I'd like to address:

1. "Yeah ,but if you're better, then the K/D with the weapon will be higher" This is true, but it's still impossible from a comparison standpoint.

2. "Why are you talking about K/D! Don't you know that's anathema in TG?" Two responses to this really: First, K/D ratio in general is still pretty essential because it can roughly correspond to tickets earned for your team to tickets lost for your team (though only roughly... sniper's K/D is a lot less indicative than a shotgunner, for example) Second, I'm responding to things I've seen pretty frequently in the forums.