Kill the K/D Statistic. It's killing Planetside. Seriously. It's time to Reevaluate The Effect.

I sucide myself like Crazy in this game just to get my XP.

No, you could just be some boob that sits in an aircraft all day long and bombs spawn points.

Not even sure why it's a question.

NO

K/D is a silly-ish stat. I can do 99% of the damage to a player and not get the killing blow. By the way, all you k/d hussies, how do the engineers and medics figure into that for you?

Nah. My k/d is under .60, and that's actually inflated by a couple hundred mine kills, and sniping infantry with an AT turret near our warpgate when we get gated, which is distressingly often. (Trying to hit infantry with an AT turret is fun, though.) I'm godawful at CQC but my accuracy is improving, slowly, to the point where I can occasionally kill somebody if I catch them unawares. But only occasionally. Playing NC doesn't help in this regard with our high-bloom, high-recoil guns.

But, I know how to work as part of a team even if I do suck. I lay mines, I repair, I swap classes if needed, I spot things, I call out contacts on Teamspeak, I keep an eye on the map. I'll be the idiot that runs out of the biolab phone booth and gets vaporized just to get a look at what's in the next room, and hope that my example will get the people behind me to actually push toward a point. I'll go try and get a generator stabilized knowing that I won't get any backup and that there's probably a Vanu lurking in the darkness who will shoot me in the back halfway through.

So does my bad k/d show me as a bad player? Well, it shows me as a bad run-and-gun infantryman. But there's lots of other aspects to the game, and in those, I'd like to think I'm at least average. >.> What can I say, I have delusions of mediocrity.

I think you'll find that Engineers in general have the largest K/D out of all the classes. Due to the fact that if you use any vehicle and you pretty much have to be an engineer.

Pretty sure the people who were discussing this got our points across yesterday and quit posting in this thread...

Bottom line, its a good base to judge skill off of.

Good players win fights in which they are at a disadvantage. K/D doesn't reflect this at all.

All a kill/death ration will tell you is literally how many kills they have per death, it says nothing about the circumstances under which that ratio occurred. They could be a dedicated medic, or a Galaxy pilot. An infiltrator that does pre attack hacking and disruption, or scouts out enemy sunderer positions for friendly air/armor

Typically I would say that a k/d ration will tell you who is worth watching, but frankly the disjoint between good k/d and good play here is massive, even relative to other team shooters. More often than not a high k/d is gonna lead to you observing some guy sit in a lib firing on a spawn room for 3 hours and yelling at their platoon not to cap.

Obvious answer is yes but you have to look at how many of their kills are coming in vehicles.

Aslo are they rolling with the zerg? Pretty hard to die when you outnumber opponent 20 to 1.

Playing offense or defense? Offense usually die more and defense get to dig in and pad stats a bit.

To many variables for a yes no answer but in general im sure you would rather have 20 guys behind you that have a 5:1 ktd ratio than 20 guys that have a 1:5.

nope,just means someone will get a ego.

A good engineer will still have a lot of deaths because MAX repairing gets you killed a ton, but medics can perform their support duties from cover just fine. Medics should die a lot less than other infantry classes (other than snipers) and this should factor in to them getting a decent kdr purely by virtue of surviving for a long time and getting opportunistic kills that present themselves.

An average medic session for me is something like 80 kills-40 deaths in 2 hours. Hardly a stellar kill rate, but a good KDR for a support class.

I ignore all this score board BS. I just watch my cert points.

Only reading the OP, ya, it means you're good at SOME style of play. Wether it's balls deep infantry or shy guy in the corner lib bombing.

IF you are an on foot player with heavy assault wiping combat medics & infiltrators at their range generally it is a good indicator that you know how to position and shoot and you are more useful in a firefight than the hundreds of potatoes on the battlefield.

Vehicle hoes bragging about KDR, sorry lol just no.

a high KDR only means good player in a deathmatch style game. Otherwise its all about objectives.

If the player isn't farming with Libs (or other vehicles) it simply tells you he is good at one part of the game (winning firefights) which makes him a better player who is equally good at everything else but with a lower KDR.
Score per hour is a better indicator imho. Because it incorporates anything from getting kills (pushing the enemy back) to reviving, repairing and capping bases. Lots of points usually means that you are very useful to your empire.

...and that's the problem with K/D. Without observing that "whining player's" play style, they've been relegated to someone not worth listening to. Their primary role in his platoon could be to risk their butt to keep a squad of AA MAX's healed and ammo'ed up or support an AI MAX in a CQC attack/defense. My typical role in the platoon is MAX - AA, AV and AI as the situation dictates and we have engineers who selflessly take the role of supporting my ability to kill at the expense of this magic K/D. I can easily rack up 20 kill streaks at a time while they're a target, holding a repair gun, getting slaughtered often.

K/D is neither a measure of skill or someone's credibility. The game would be better off without it. If it is a measure of someone's credibility, my K/D is ~9.3 last time I looked therefore you must listen to me!!

Yes and no at the same time.
Some are good but not all.
And some just don't die meaninglessly, you know they know what to do or what not to.

Supporting in this game is very easy and lacks the same mechanical skill requirement that many other roles do. At very best, a support player would still have a low amount of credibility, because playing support shows us nothing about how good they actually are.

Ah who I am kidding with "many other roles," basically everything except infantry vs infantry and rotary dogfighting takes absolutely 0 skill. But the people who do these things and maintain good scores are certainly more credible than some chump whos 0.5:1 who plays engineer only to hide his ineptitude.

Its a stat to measure your own performance relative to the job your doing.

Its currently not good enough as a universal number to compare players. It needs more detail(rifle kills etc etc) to make it useful or the death stat removed to make it redundant and promote teamplay.
Without this you cant differentiate if someone is a really crap Lib gunner or a Engi killing machine without making assumptions.

Both will work but its currently no way to judge another's ability or a way to show off your own.

Id personally like it removed but people loved it in ps1 and i bet many do here so i doubt thats an option.

Pick someone at random with a high K/D, how can you tell the manner in which they obtained that K/D? Most of the time you can't. Mine would be easy since my stats would likely show that my most played class on one of my characters is MAX. You'd then possibly make an incorrect assumption that I achieved my K/D while sitting in a Bio Lab with Dual Hacksaws. Unless you observed how I play, there would be no way for you to determine whether I was skilled or not.

Personally, I respect a team-member who unselfishly dishes out healing and ammo in the middle of rocket spam or an infantry push resulting in certain death for AA or AI MAXs over someone who sits in a lib gunners seat farming a busy sunderer and refuses to target the sunderer. One is rewarded with a higher K/D without necessarily helping their team and the other is penalised in the act of helping their team.