A discussion I always have with my friends when playing shooter/fighter style games is how to decide who essentially played a better game. There are typically two things a player looks at the end of a game to judge his score:
- Kill Count – Very obvious here, higher number of kills is better
- Kill/Death Ratio – Total number of kills divided by the number of deaths a player experienced.
A quote I have heard said before by many hardcore gamers goes something like this: “Getting kills is easy, not dying is hard.” Think about it– most people can run around a map and shoot at anything moves, and you are certainly bound to get a decent amount of kills… but is there true skill involved in that? I tend to make fun of my friends who “spray fire,” or essentially hold down the shoot trigger while flailing in the direction an enemy is at until he dies. I also don’t think there is much skill in this tactic.
A truly skilled player will pick off the enemy with strategy, with intentions on dieing the least amount of times. Short burst fires are key in this tactic, with every shot meant to count towards a kill. A player must be agile, sneaky, aggressive all at the same time. If a player plays like this, I feel that he is more successful.
But hold on… what if there are two players, one went 30-25 (30 kills, 25 deaths), and another went 5-2. According to my opinion above, the 5-2 player is technically “more skilled.” This is why the discussion is never ending. One can argue either direction. Why did the 5-2 player only kill 5 people? Did he just join? Without the 30-25 player, the team would need 30 more kills to win. Could the team collectively kill 30 enemies while dieing less than 25 times? These situations will never be solved and friends and game players will forever debate who had a “better” game.
It’s the same weird argument that I’ve had with many people about accomplishing tasks.
Do you consider a culmination of small tasks just as valuable as a large task?
Obviously, this argument has different answers situationaly, but it is hilarious to have it regardless.
Taking into account that assisting other players and not necessarily getting kills is also a possibility is something that’s often overlooked.
Being a LoL player that strictly weakens everyone so that the rest of the team picks them off, I don’t even mind having 0 kills as long as the team finishes with a good win.
Even in Halo I tend to be very generous and weaken enemies and have my teammates pick them off.
Frankly, the more I talk about it, the more I realize it’s a matter of perspective as to what is considered a “GG”.
I somewhat agree and disagree. The 30-25 is a pretty bad K/D if you are playing something such as TDM, but what if you were playing objective type games. What would be the deciding factor, if saying GOW or COD would be what was their overall point total. Usually capturing objectives is more points than a kill would be so there is more to shooters than Kill count and K/D. But with the agreement the 5-2 player does possess a better K/D, which would make him/her, I wouldn’t say more skilled, but more aware of surroundings. You could camp and only see 5 people total and get that K/D easily. If the K/D was say 20-3 or something rather, then I would say the player is more skilled.
In my opinion, counting kills is better than a “good” kill/death ratio. I do think not dying is sometimes difficult, but at the same time, I also think you can’t get kills without dying either. There are a lot of games that have kill/death ratios (most notably Call of Duty), and many people who have consistent K/D ratios like 5-2 don’t actually go out and fight/participate in the game much, but they are technically one of the best players in the game. However, players who may participate a lot have those 27-22 ratios.
I can’t say with certainty which method is better, but perhaps a good compromise would be to include both rankings? This way you would be able to see a list of players who are sorted by K/D ratios and another list of players that are sorted by most kills. This may not appease most of the gaming community who may want one version of the high score list over another, but I think it would be interesting to see both at once not only after every match, but also a career ranking as well.
I’m going to have to disagree. Depending on the game, having a really good kill death ratio in games does not always mean that it makes you the most “skilled” player. You claimed that not dying is hard? Not true. Consider games like Call of Duty and Battlefield, there’s always those players people refer to as “campers”. The campers are the people who find loopholes or tricks to stay alive. They could sit in a corner and not move and just wait for people to walk in instead of actively playing the game like it was supposed to be played. And you’ll notice this in most shooter games you tend to shoot and aim for the people who are moving and sometimes the people who don’t just kind of blend in the background. Also in Battlefield you could literally just hide in the mountains or on top of buildings picking people off with a sniper rifle, giving you a good K/D ratio since the only other people that can really kill you is the other snipers. So in this case are you going to argue that the campers are the better players?
I would say just the kill counts themselves are a pretty good way to judge on who was the better player. Just like your example, if a guy goes 30-25, sure his K/D wasn’t that great but (assuming his team won, or if he won in Free for All) his high number of kills is what got him the win. Just like if you were playing basketball, at the end of a game should you really care about the high number of shots that you missed? No, as long you made a lot of shots and your team won, then that miss number really doesn’t matter and you could still be seen as the best player because you made all those shots (and not the guy who went 5-2 or only made 5 shots).