[Guide] Bad Advices: How to attack someone's stats

*** Disclaimer ***

This is an attempt at humor and education.

I don't actually suggest to attack anybody's stats.

Introduction

As most of you know, PlanetSide 2 tracks lots of different player statistics. For legit purposes, they are useful to track your own progress.

But we're gonna talk about using stats to win an internet argument.

Bring up stats as an ad hominem argument in any discussion to discredit the opponent, and in this way destroy his arguments.

It's also a good way to humiliate the opponent and make him feel insecure and emotional, so it's gonna be much harder for him to come up with good arguments. Best case scenario - you troll him into raging.

And even if the opponent remains calm and detached and says "I don't care about my personal stats, they have nothing to do with this discussion, let's focus on my arguments", your statement about his bad stats will remain correct and his arguments will lose value in the eyes of other people.


Not everybody realizes this, but there are many ways to enjoy PlanetSide 2, and different stats are often mutually exclusive, so everybody will have certain stats higher at the expense of other stats.

For example, an aggressive player that throws himself at every enemy he sees will have high KPH and low K/D, while a cowardly spawn room warrior will have low KPH, and high K/D.

So no matter who you're arguing with, chances are - at least one of your stats will be higher than one of the opponent's stats.

So you press hard. Make the whole argument about that stat, and discredit every other stat the opponent has higher than you.

As far as he is concerned, there is only one way to play PlanetSide 2 - yours. Any attempts to defend stats are excuses for being bad.

If the opponent brings up alternative characters, with fresher stats - accuse him of making alts for stats, and for statpadding. Especially if that alt has only short amount of time played, like less than 24 hours - clearly he just created that alt for one-two lucky sessions, and he deleted many alts before he actually got that lucky streak.

If that alt is created before Jan 28, 2016 and is around BR15-BR20 - make sure to accuse the enemy of farming newbies on Koltyr.

Stats

Where to check stats: I find http://ps2.fisu.pw/player to be the most accessible and clear resource.

• Kill / Death Ratio (KD or KDR) - the most popular stat to attack.
  • If the enemy has lower K/D than you, he's a noob that can't fight for his life. It's basically an automatic win for you. Act like you don't even have to explain or prove anything.
  • If the enemy has higher K/D, he's a spawn room warrior or a coward that fights on the outskirts of battle, kill****ing somewhere and being completely useless to his faction. You can also accuse him of abusing med kits, MAX suits, Heavy Assault and vehicle farming.

• Kills per Hour (KPH) or Kill per Minute (KPM).
  • If the opponent has higher KPM than you, ignore it and push on other stats. But if that higher KPM comes at a cost of lowering other stats, make sure to point that out and call the enemy overly aggressive, brainded jumper that lacks situational awareness and tactical thinking.
  • If the opponent has lower KPM than you, call him inefficient, and once again bring up cowardice and overly careful playstyle, and being useless to his faction and generally being unable to kill enemies.

Some stats are more obscure than others.

K/D is an easy stat to understand, so most players have an impression of what K/D is good, and what isn't. Rough outlines: 1 K/D is average, 2 K/D is above average, 5 K/D is very good, anything higher is god.
But KPH - few people have an idea of what's good KPH, so no matter what KPH the opponent has, you can always pose it as not being high enough, like "lol only 120 KPH what a noob".

• Score per Hour (SPH) or Score per Minute (SPM). A very versatile stat to attack, because it speaks less about raw number of kills, but more about quality of the time spent.
  • So the lower the opponent's score is, the more he is useless and ineficient.
  • Basically the same as KPM, but can be also used against playstyles that don't involve getting lots of kills, for support classes like engineer and medic, or vehicle vs. vehicle playstyles.
  • If the enemy has high K/D and KPH, but low SPH, it means he's farming newbies and spawncamping. Point that out.

• Playtime.
  • If the opponent has much less playtime than you, he's a green noob, still wet behind the ears. He can't possibly have enough experience to have a meaningful opinion.
  • If he has massively more playtime than you, it's better to not bring attention to it.
  • Though you can call the enemy a no-lifer, or use the long playtime against him, like "you play this for so long and you're still this bad".
  • If the argument is about a certain class, make sure to check opponent's playtime with that class, and use it against him.
    

• Accuracy. Accuracy is something that can always be improved on, so no matter what accuracy the opponent has, call him a s***ter that can't aim.
  • Not everybody knows this, but PS2 tracks all hits: whenever hit markers appears - it counts. So you can always accuse the enemy of padding his accuracy by shooting vehicles, terminals and MANA turrets.
    
• Shots Landed Per Kill (LPK) or Hits Per Kill (HPK). Shows how many hits somebody needs to get a kill.
  • If the opponent has high LPK, you can always accuse him of padding accuracy stats or shooting legs and torso instead of the head. Make sure to act like always going for headshots is the best way of engaging in all situations.

• Head shot ratio (HSR). PlanetSide 2 actually doesn't track the number of headshots, only kills finished with a headshot.
  • Due to CoF mechanics, trying to get a headshot finisher is often less efficient than starting with headshots, but finishing with a body shot, but almost nobody knows or understands that, so it's a great stat to attack - same as accuracy, it can always be better.
  • Also, make sure to compare opponent's accuracy grade and HSR grade. If accuracy grade is higher, accuse him of being a body shooting spraying s***ter that can't aim for the head.
  • If HSR grade is higher, accuse him of statpadding in favor of headshots by aiming above the head, so he misses more and does less damage, but gets more headshot kills. You can also bring up CoF mechanics.

Final tip: you won't always participate in a full-blown argument. If you just want to make a passing scathing comment, you can simply mention one of the opponent's stats in a diminutive form. Example: "lol 2 K/D noob is being cute".

On a serious note

I hope I did a good job of explaining why stats are useless for comparing different players:

• Most of the stats are mutually exclusive, and different stats will often come at the expense of other stats.
• All stats can be intentionally padded, and some of them can be actually lower than average when played optimally.

Stats are great to track your own progress, because you yourself know your playstyle, and what changes have you made to it, you know if you pad or not.

You can never tell these things about a different player, and you shouldn't trust their words about it.

Ultimately, PS2 is just a game, and any playstyle is legit, as long as everyone is having fun. Attacking somebody's stats is just as low as any other ad hominem argument.

It's normal to take stats into account, but they can't be used to directly compare two players objectively, unless there's a clear and huge gap in overall performance.

Thank you, Iridar. Hopefully the MLG tryhards who enjoy this type of argument read this.

Cool site. I don't know whether to feel pride or shame for this: http://ps2.fisu.pw/killboard/?name=hegeteus&count=1000

One interesting anomaly I found in Accuracy is that Medic/Engie tools register as misses. I was wondering why my new TR character was getting sub 10% accuracy as an Engineer. I checked the number of shots and it was something insane. I added up all shots fired from carbine and shotgun and it didn't come close... and my 25% accuracy with carbine (AMC) and 40% with shotgun (Barrage) wasn't averaging to be 8% lol. But then I saw 20k+ shots with the engie tools (each rank counts as a different 'weapon'.

Pfft, Iridar your assists are shockingly low compared to all of your other stats. You're obviously not qualified to be assisting people by making guides what is this nonsense.

Yeah, that's true. I didn't mention it, because FISU properly checks per-weapon accuracy. Class accuracy more relates to planetside2.com/players, which is more obscure and less informative.

There are a couple of other issues I didn't mention, like revive removing death from stats - I'm not sure how that works exactly. Like - removes from sessional stats, but not from permanent stats?.. A bit unclear.

And another issue with SPM and boosts / membership. They used to affect SPM, but later that was changed, and I also haven't figured out exactly how.

obiously mag-shatter need nerf, ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Some scrubs put links to their characters' stats in their forum signatures. These noobs make it super-easy to denigrate them on any stat you like!

Oh my GOD! Iridar! We all know that stats are the ONLY metric that matters. If you don't have OMGWTFBBQ!!!!1 stats of Godlike PWNAGE, then obviously you have NO PLACE in this community.................

Said elitist MLG turdblossoms everywhere.

Nicely written post!

Why play a game for stats when you can play it for, say, fun?

The only stat I look at when seeing how much I respect other players is their percentage as the different classes.

Nope, too late. Skipped everything. I'm attacking your stats now.

Sorry bad english

His stats aren't good enough for us to get the joke.

Hey Iridar. I'm wondering whether you made this post specifically because I told you to 'look at my stats' with respect to the A2A missiles a couple of days ago?

Because if that's the case, I feel there has been a miscommunication. I did not mean for you to think that I was discrediting your opinion because 'your stats were worse than mine' or anything like that. What I wanted was for you to see the humongous performance difference an experienced pilot can achieve with A2A missiles.

hehe yeah, people used those stats against a few times in a row a year or two in the past. "OMG a teeny tiny accuracy". I pointed out that the lowest accuracy on any of my weapons was about 10% higher than the stat displayed, but I still had to point out every single attacker's own lowered stats before they quit.

No, don't worry about

I had these thoughts about how different stats can be padded or de-padded for some time now, and I just decided to put them into one place. Also a few guys on reddit keep attacking my stats, so I'd be lying if I said that didn't affect me a bit.

Cool advice (for 12 year olds apparently)

my character is named Sponges, i usually lose all arguments based on name alone.

It seems Planetside 2 has his fair share of 12 year olds.

OP:
Don't forget when someone loses a fight, runs away (or hides behind their burning vehicle) and redeploys to pad the K/D stat

Don't forget that some sites have specific filters, IE Stats.Dasanfall doesn't count any of their "Unsanctioned" weapons towards your Kills, but still counts your deaths as well.