Why KDR should stay

it's a stupid thing that shouldn't be therem agreed.

I still don't give a **** even if it was not there, but since it's there.. I guess I do give a ****. Dunno.. if it wasn't there I might blackjack a bit more and who would laugh then?

Yes but...
I drop on the enemy AMS, put 2 mines and the sundy dies with me because they are shooting me. I don't kill anyone else. My KDR is 0/1=0
In the while you mow down 4 people before dying . Your KDR is 4/1=4.
I stopped the spawning but my KDR is abysmal. You just slowed down the invasion but your KDR is better.
I know KDR is a good measurement of combat skill, but combat skill is just a part of the game. If I don't give you ammo, you cannot kill. If you are dead and I cannot revive you, you cannot kill. If the enemy AMS is still up you can kill anyone you want but at last you can be overrun by superior forces. And without forgetting the destruction of vehicles.

That's true, it's definitely not the only metric for player skill. It's also pretty damn easy to statpad KDR in this game. Even so, I have no problem keeping a decent KDR even though I'm going on suicide rushes, playing support, etc. To me, none of that stuff factors into whether I should be dying more often or not. It might not measure how good of a medic I was, but it still lets me keep track of my general efficiency.

In fact I think you should have KDR as your private stat. I don't wanna remove this stat even because it's important for some classes. But it should be private while something similar my suggested ADR should be implemented to give a measure of teamwork.
Every stat can be padded, but we need a stat which can give us a better point of view on the players.

it means absolutely positively nothing being the game is 100% goal orientated. BF3 and other "ticket" based games reward a team for each kill and punish a team for a death due to losing tickets. Once out of tickets, your team loses..

PS2 is 100% about location capture and nothing else maters as far as who is winning a given map. Yes player A might soak up 20+ deaths while holding a given point to player B who dies once but in end if player B never moves forward player A and his 0/20 KDR still "wins"..
same deal for killing a sundy.. same for trading your life for a tank.. Same for fighting the tough fight to get into a base vs the easy one sniping/shelling the spawn.. etc etc etc etc etc

Sure every now and then someone is a billy-bad-*** who moves forward, takes a ton of risk and takes a given point and holds it.. All while not being killed much at all. The problem is that it is very, very rare. Most pad up a good KDR by taking less risks and doing so negatively impact ALL of his teammates KDR by having more fire focused on them... It's why so many feel KDR being removed would foster better team play..

plus the game stats take place in such total vacuum, devoid of any sort of "how" it throws the really good players who push the action and still have a good KDR in the same pile as worthless snipers and spawn campers in tanks. So at it's very core the stat means nothing in game, on any level.

that being said I LOVE that KDR it's in game being while I don't care about KDR on any level I know many do. So killing them is extra sweet in the nerd rage department.

Right, but a part of succeeding in your goal is killing the enemy soldiers, as well as not dying yourself. It's actually a pretty large objective that seems to be completely overlooked on the forums. Clearing out concentrations of enemy soldiers is often more important and more difficult than blowing a generator, or flipping a point. KDR isn't such a big deal that it should be dictating how you play, but it still gives you a general idea of how you're performing in combat. So long as you're doing everything else you ought to be doing, KDR just tells you how well you're doing it. Sure, you may have participated in capturing a point, but if you didn't kill any of the enemies blocking you, unless you're really on point as a support, you didn't influence the engagement as much as someone with lots of kills did. Killing an enemy removes him from the engagement. Dying removes you from the engagement. Those things in mind, how can KDR be a useless stat?

A death is only tracked if you aren't revived by a medic. If you're dying 20+ times trying to hold a point and you somehow didn't manage to kill anybody, it was probably someone else who did all the work. If you're holding a point, killing the enemy is the most important thing. A medic can't effectively heal his allies while he's under fire. KDR isn't the only measure of how much you affected any given engagement, but it's still decently important.

It's not too rare, really. If you have a bad KDR, it usually means you were either doing something that made you unable to defend yourself, or that you just weren't paying enough attention to your surroundings. Dying is inevitable, but most players are not all that good. If you have good reaction times and play close attention to cover, you should be able to kill several guys before they get you, even as a medic or engi. As for removing KDR, I don't think it would make much of an impact. Not very many people are good enough at the game to really be watching their KDR intensively. If so many people care, they're doing an awful job at it.

As a metric to measure between players, sure. There are plenty of ways to get a high KDR that doesn't help your team, but these people would probably be doing what they're doing anyways. People who snipe tend to want to snipe in every FPS they play. Take away KDR and they're still terrible and useless. As for spawn campers, well, gotta do something while you're waiting for that base to cap. If you don't kill them at spawn you have to kill them somewhere where they could potentially do more damage. Spawn camping makes tactical sense.

Whatever floats your boat man.

You have good points. Teamplay is very important and critical to getting anything done as a faction. But YOU, the individual player, are more important than your team. If you kill five guys and secure the point and res ten of your teammates at the same time, good for you! Everyone benefits. But you should never sacrifice your fun so that others can enjoy themselves. Remember that this game is an FPS at its core, first and foremost, and THEN it is an MMO/RTS with base captures and overall logistics. The fact that this game is FPS and individual-player-oriented justifies that KDR should stay.

KDR, Is a stupid stat because it means you spend most of your time beating the crap out of players with less skill then you.

The life time KDR tracking has severally hurt how we play FPS. Instead of targeting good games against highly skilled players we focus on beating on player much worse then ourself so we can beat our chest and say look at my KDR.

It's sad that in the FPS genre we don't seek out good fights just easy kills now days.

Honestly I'm more impressed with the amount of Auraxiums someone has especially with underpowered or high skill cap weapons, thats the real metagame right now. Started working on my Baddie rifle and EM1 purple medals, man it feels good going on a nice killstreaks or winning 1v1 against high rank players that should have murked me with their superior weapons. K/d is like judging a book by their cover, you need to dig a lil deeper to find a real players worth then just a simple avg, especially in this game.

Just make KDR a private statistic that other people can't see unless they were looking at your account. People that want it still have a cosy feeling of superiority while everyone else can just ignore it completely without fear of being ridiculed for it being low.

I would think that all players seek out good fights rather than "easy kills", in fact, good fights are 90% of the time a good place to get a load of kills. That is why the good players are "good". Because they seek out the best fights possible and make the most of them. If that is the case, then they earned their high KDR and deserve to more or less boast it.

Easy fix:

Monthly K/D ratios. Most MMO games these days (Tera, War Thunder) use ratios from a fixed period (usually a month). Statistics from the beginning of time are useless.

KDR is meaningless in this game. Death is meaningless, you respawn in 8secs..
Want a high KDR?? Camp a spawn room and shoot through the shield.
Wow look how l33t your stats are...

Or farm in a tank.. or in a lib.. or be a lolpodder.. or pick your farm vehicle of choice..

No they don't, Most people back out when the going gets tough. It a common trend in most FPS games now days. Good players should be fighting other good players, It's a little more difficult in games like this.

But if you are REALLY REALLY good so should your enemy.



Like if you look at starcraft or LoL or WOW people want to see you rating. You can only get that bybeating players who are at that level this is a good measure skill compared to a completely subjective KDR score.


The other problem with KDR in this game is most of the ways to get a high KDR take almost no skill.. Example maxes and harrassers and tanks. Will boost your KDR way up over what it would be if you are using basic infantry

Well, Latency, your first part just makes my point more. If you are naturally just good at aiming and all the stuff needed to be "skilled" then you deserve to have it shown. To the victor go the spoils.

Pikachu suggested earlier in this thread that there should be separate KD ratios for aircraft, mechanized, and infantry stats. That is an excellent idea and would fix a lot of issues, so make sure to thumbs that up.

No the point is going over your head.

If you want to really focus on getting a high KDR, You want to fight the worst players you can find as much as possible and avoid good players as much as possible. Which is why it's sort of stupid to look at it. This is the best and most effective way to get a higher KDR.

So instead of people want to have battles with great players fighting great players, You want great players fighting the worst you can possible find.

KDR does not mean a single thing, I can provide plenty of examples of players who make the statistic completely meaningless.

https://players.planetside2.com/#!/5428010618038226353/stats
https://players.planetside2.com/#!/5428087455774756401/stats

And of course, Connery's most famous MAX player:

https://players.planetside2.com/#!/5428011263287707345

There are a lot of ways for mediocre or straight up bad players to have higher KDRs than actually good ones. These aforementioned three are just a small sub-section of one type of cheese enthusiast: the MAX ***** who constantly worries about whether or not they have enough infantry resources to pull a MAX.

SOE provides these kinds of players the tools they need to succeed where in any other FPS they would be terrible. Everyone should be able to play the way they want to, don't get me wrong. But I will never, ever respect these kinds of players who play in the most selfish way possible which only serves to reinforce the idea of open-world TDM. I see countless NC players get farmed by players like this in droves, and it honestly makes me question the "fun" that this game provides. Is the fun of a few cheesy players really worth the frustration and utter helplessness of dozens of players who have to face them? I do my best to counter this mentality as much as I can, but the current generation of FPS players won't have it. They need kills like it's some virtual heroin, and they don't care how they get them.

This game could be so much more than that, and it's a shame to see that a small portion of the community will do whatever it takes to boost their KDR through whatever cheesy means SOE keeps providing to them.

people might be less obsessed with kdr if capping points gave more xp than an assist...

This is a game where 600 people can be fighting on the same continent all at once. If you try to find a fight where there are "bad players" so you can boost your KDR, you won't find any. There will always be excellent players mixed in with them. I avoid squads of certain talented outfits because I know I can kill one but his buddy will kill me and then revive him. I fight 1v1 with people who have KDR's of >5 sometimes because I like the challenge. If I happen to decide that instead of running head on into the enemy I want to take a LA and C4 bomb their clumped-up position of them from above, so be it. THAT is how KDR's happen. It's called being tactical and cautious, which is what KDR promotes, and what makes the game a much better experience.

And with a click of a button you can re deploy to the other side of the world. It doesn't take long to figure out you are fighting a 70+ level platoon. You seem to even admit to doing this. So they guy you stuck it out and fought that hard platoon is punished with a lower KDR because you bailed to protect yours.

It's why it is a stupid stat. Every time you take on a challege you are directly dropping you score over someone who bailed the second the saw that challenge and fought from inside the spawn shield instead.

KDR rewards taking the easy way out and punishes you for taking on a challege.