Zoraster

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.

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|TG-Mth| Zoraster | .

LordKelvin

A better statistic to track is your overall accuracy, total deaths (while holding the weapon), total time logged, and total kills with a certain weapon.

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Why MTG has lost any sense of balance:
Lotus Cobra

ninkybob

Oooohhhhh...
Someone has lied to me.

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MrJengles

Yeah, those would all be very useful...except I don't think there actually is a way to find total deaths while holding a particular weapon, that's half the point.

Although, if you really needed to...I suppose you could do total deaths divided by total time played (in minutes) for an average deaths per minute. And then multiply that by the time logged with a particular weapon...for a rough average of deaths while holding it.

Kills with that weapon divided by that average will be more accurate than the given stats anyways.

Oh and I just noticed how useless some of those stats really are...apparently I have no logged time using camouflage, even though it says I've used it (or stupidly named "unknown") over 84,000 times. It also says I've never used a motion mine XD

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Kaboodles

It's the same with vehicle K/D ratios, too. I suppose it could be a good measure of skill for the gunship though, since other gunships are your biggest threat.