[Guide] In Defense of Statistics

Kill/Death, Facilities Captured / Defended, Kills per Hour, Score per Minute, Accuracy, and Play Time. I have seen all of these items maligned and defended. They're all useless. They're all the ultimate measure of skill.

The fact is that we have statistics tracking. It is not going to go away. A great number of people like looking at stats, and the argument that if you don't care about them, just don't look at them is completely valid. That said, stats need to be examined in the context of their relationships with each other and with game play mechanics.

I worked in the game industry for 5 years, and now work in corporate software QA; figuring out how things SHOULD work has been a part of my job for a long time. On top of that, I've been involved in one of the top PS1 outfits for years having to judge applicants based on a pretty rigid set of criteria for recruitment. I WISH I had all of the stats we have available now back then. It would have saved us a lot of time.

With that, I am going to go through each of them and explain their pros, cons, and beneficial relationships.

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Kill/Death Ratio:
This is the stat that some people prop up their characters on, and others think should be removed from the game. With a few notable exceptions, you can usually figure out what someone's opinion on this is based on what their K/D is. This simple fact makes it pretty clear that a majority of people think it is important, if only because they think other people will judge them based on it.

Here's the thing. This is a shooter. It may be a combined arms, massive, objective-based, platoon-oriented shooter... but it's still a shooter. People want to be able to trust that the person they're playing with can hold their own in a firefight so that they're not suddenly flanked from a direction they thought would be reasonably covered. A higher K/D ratio objectively means you're better at the shooty aspects of this game, which means you're better at the majority focus of this game. You cannot waltz up to an objective. Most of the time, you have to shoot your way there.

What constitutes a high K/D ratio is specific to each player, though. Back at release, a K/D of 10 was average for a pilot with rocket pods. Currently, a K/D of 1 is decent for someone who is a dedicated medic. When looking at K/D, you have to examine their Score per Minute and Classes Played to get the context. A low K/D can be forgiven if they have a higher SPM and spend a lot of time as a medic. This just means they are focusing on other things. If they have 80% of their time played as a heavy or light assault, and a K/D of less than 1.5, there's little excuse.

It is true that the changes to medic revives have changed the nature of this stat, but the changed nature is universal. It is a normalized change.

Please note that I am fully aware that people can cheese K/D, like the guy with a 500 ratio. These are fringe cases outside of the norm.

Score per Minute:
The flip side of the 'This is a shooter' argument is 'This is an objective based game'. It is also this. Kills, vehicle kills, playing medic with a large group, and following the alerts all contribute pretty significantly to SPM. A high SPM is unarguably the sign of a useful player, even if you don't agree with that use. Someone with a high K/D will most likely have a high SPM. Someone who revives everyone they see, especially if playing with a large group, wil have a high SPM. Someone who captures base after base may have a high SPM.

SPM is one of the very few stats that is indicative of someone's usefulness without needing much else context. There are a few specific playstyles that ARE useful, but don't get high SPM. However, I'm a firm proponent of the term 'Useful Player' including 'Being able to adapt and change', meaning someone isn't a full time grunt, vehicle player or some niche style.

There is, however, something pretty big to consider when looking at SPM. Boosters. Unfortunately, SPM is not normalized. Someone can have anywhere from 0% to around 150% XP boost, which all contribute to SPM. Someone with a SPM of 300 may be extremely useful, or they may be a mediocre player with a 150% boost. Someone with a SPM of 160 may be an above average player with no boosts at all. The only contextless SPM numbers are once you hit under 75.

To determine if someone actually is useful after looking at SPM, you can view all of the other stats to see what is propping it up, or keeping it down.

Kills per Hour/Minute:
This isn't a stat that gets tracked normally, but is fairly easy to figure out by looking at Kills and Time Played. It is marginally useful to determine how good a player is at sticking with or creating action. Some people like to argue that spending ten minutes climbing a mountain to kill a sniper is a good reason for this number being low. It isn't. Just grab your own rifle or get in an air vehicle.

Like K/D, this needs to be compared to SPM and Class Played to make an accurate judgement.

As a note here, I'm talking about KpH/M across the whole character, not the individual Kills per Minute tracked by weapon.

Accuracy:
Accuracy is one of my favorite stats to look at because, with a few exceptions, it is pretty standard across most playstyles. A majority of average players seem to fall in the 20%-25% range. You may see some significantly higher numbers, but these are usually dedicated snipers or people who spend a LOT of time firing lock on missiles. You can easily view the individual accuracy stats for each weapon to determine this. Depending on the weapon, an accuracy below 20% means that someone needs to work on their aiming a bit.

As a note, vehicle accuracy is a separate stat.

Time Played:
Time Played is a tricky stat that plays into a lot of different elements. I regularly see people say 'Well I've played this game for 29 days to I know better than you!'. This is silly. People have played Counterstrike for 10 years and still can't make it half way up the leaderboards.

Time Played can drastically affect things like K/D, SPM and KpH/M. Someone with a middling K/D, but with 20-30 days played, might have gotten notably better at the game since they started playing, and the poor K/D for the first 10 days is holding down their true, current K/D. You can put this into context by looking at their killboard. SPM and KpH/M can be affected in similar ways.

Facilities Captured / Defended:
This stat is one of the least useful ones to look at. It is true that this is an objective based game. However, many players have extremely high numbers in these categories simply due to sticking with the largest groups of people without really contributing much in the grand scheme of things. Likewise, a player who leaves a base for the next objective without waiting for the counter to finish will rarely get the tally for their contributions, if any. The best use for this stat is to determine if someone is more offense or defense minded, but otherwise it doesn't point to many things of concern.

Class Played:
Not really a stat, but looking at Classes Played helps put many of the other stats into context. Medics have lower K/Ds. Heavies and LA's have higher K/Ds. Infiltrator's K/Ds vary wildly based on how it is played. Just look at it and make accurate judgements.

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The controversy over statistics comes down to the fact that people do not like to be judged based on what they consider to be poor representations of themselves. Poor or inflated, stats simply ARE representations of how you play. Taken all together, they provide a picture of your overall usefulness, the playstyles you prefer, if you play better in a large or small group, if you prefer support or can accuracy hit targets, and if you are able to make good decisions on the fly. To argue against this is to argue against the whole of statistics in general. Statistics can be flubbed through some specific gaming of rules or exploitation, but these are rarer cases and are not hard to spot if you take all of a player's stats into account.

TL;DR - Statistics are extremely useful taken as a whole and arguing against any of them individually probably points to self-esteem issues.

You don't even have six days played time so I didn't read it.

Also I wish they would add something like a true SPM, so you could see your actual score unaffected by boosts. That could negatively impact boost sales and subs though, so doubtful

So, which would you say is the best? And please, summize how good I am in a sentence. I'll wait.

All those are basically deathmatch stats.
There's no stat for being able to lead a squad or a platoon, helping your teammates, properly listening to orders and so on... and there's no stat for being a nice buddy.

Stats are basically useless, you can't know how "good" someone is before you actually play with them.

The point is you can get a pretty good idea by looking at the stats. One stat alone doesn't say much, but a combination paints a pretty good picture of someone's ability.
Also my friends per minute is off the charts.

No you can't, stats only describe the deathmatch side of the game, not the human factors. It's like deciding how "good" someone is just by looking at their salary.

Deciding if you enjoy playing with people is a completely different dynamic totally separate from stats, you're right. Your suggestion that this invalidates stats is completely off base.

Your salary comparison is also pretty bad. 'Salary' would be BR. Looking at all of these other stats would be more akin to looking at how much work someone completes, what their reviews look like, how big of a raise they get, and the quality of their work.

Yes.
You.
Can.

The stats are an objective measure of a player's ability. A flat KDR of 1 doesn't say anything alone, but if their most played class is medic and they have a high SPM, they are clearly a competent player. However, if they mainly play heavy and run that KDR with a low SPM, it's safe to assume they're not a force to be reckoned with. FPS stats matter because this is an FPS. Your ability to stand on A point or arm a generator means nothing if you can't perform when the bullets start flying.

Your ability to 'follow orders' also don't matter if you can't actually complete those orders because they require you to fight through people.

The K/D ratio is something to live with. It was always and will be a measure of how well the person can survive in a fight. A dead person doesn't decide a battle. I would rather go in capturing a base with somebody with 4+ K/D than somebody with 1 K/D because i know we will meet resistance and have to keep ourselves alive

I think score per hour and KDR can be used as a rough estimate of player ability.

If one player has 30% higher SPH then he is clearly more able compared to other player. However if the SPH difference is below 10% or so you cannot reliable determine the better player because the difference is likely to be caused by some random factors and not player skill.

We need as many stats as possible. They should add in more. The more the merrier.

Agreed. How can we possibly take his post seriously when he is such a low BR?
I recently learned that time played, not logic & reason, will determine if ones comments are valid.

Can I please stop making alt accounts for you?...it's getting tedious.

The biggest problem with this, as I mentioned in the post, are the boosts. If SPM were a flat rate of experience gained before boosts, I'd totally agree with you. The way it works now, though, it isn't all that much more useful than the other stats unless you know what boost percentage someone is getting and has gotten throughout their characters' life.

Higby has said a few times they want to get SPM sorted out, I think there was even something on the roadmap for that. Not sure if they backed out of that one though, haven't heard anything lately.

Exactly, and I'm all for making support stats more prominent, just give us the info.

/offtopic switch on

I stopped caring about this thread the moment i read this line:
"I've been involved in one of the top PS1 outfits for years having to judge applicants based on a pretty rigid set of criteria for recruitment"

Now i don't know if i should laugh or cry when i see that people take so seriously a GAME..Perhaps both....
I remember a time when i was elevated to "commodore" status in a huge Star Trek StarFleet Academy clan, in the beginning it was cool having 200-300 people beneath me and issue dumb orders all the time but that was when i was like 15 years old so yea i was "dillusional" !

Now after roughly 17 years i can't believe that things are getting worse in the world. I don't know if that's a "need" some people have because in their daily lives they have bosses who they hate or something and thus they live a "virtual" life through such games to feel special (hell from what i hear in the states they even have live Role Playing gatherings) but come on people GAMES ARE GAMES snap out of it.

/offtopic switch off

KDR : Bloated by vehicle use and abuse of logout mechanisms

SPM : Bloated by passive bonuses. Also can be decreased by afk time (because some of us have kids and stuff between assaults)

Kills per Hour : Bloated by vehicle use, decreased by afk time, doesn't take in to account support engineers, medics (in general),
AA MAX units (as aircraft often fly off or destroyed by a lock on missile)

Accuracy : Even this can be thrown off for suppresive fire (Lasher use, MCG use, bombardment of spawns and buildings)

Time Played : Thrown off by afk time. Not all of us can utilitize our online play to 100% efficiency (damn rugrats)

Facilities captured/defended : It's not as useless as you think. It at least shows some participation in activies rather than just lone wolfing with an ESF skill podding people with little activity, for instance.

Class played : Just shows what an individual likes the most. It's not an indicator of player skill nor can one derive a meaningful KDR per class (that I'm aware of).

For the record, you'd judge me for KDR but not knowing I'm the first guy in the room with a conc grenade, flash grenade, or EMP grenade wouldn't be reflected. My action (and death) makes for the rest of my squad's success with slowed, blinded, or shieldless foes to face pending what role I am in.

Did you even bother reading the post at all? Your arguments against each of these is only an argument if you're looking at it in isolation, which is exactly what I'm talking about NOT doing.

Also, unless Concs and Flash grenades don't work the same was as EMPs, you're SPM would still be decent because you'd be getting kill assists for each of those grenade hits.