Originally posted by beet1e
I had been trying to interpret the MA scores yet another way. And that is to locate a player whose fighter rank was better than mine and who did not fly the Easymode/Big Three subset of P51/LA7/Spit ix, because I never do. And what did I find? I couldn't find a single pilot who ranked higher than me who didn't fly one, two, or all three of those planes. The process was tedious, with each player's score having to be checked individually. So after a few random checks, I started to look at every tenth player, ie. rankings #10, #20, #30 etc. all the way up to #100. (I was #103 at that time) Couldn't find a single one.
ROFL! Who would have thought that such an innocuous, casual observation could have generated such a threadfest as this!
Shane, you'd better read what I said again above.
At the time I made that check, I was ranked at #103, and for the purposes of checking those ranked higher than me, I used the top 100. Sorry I can't remember who #101 and #102 were.
And forget about akak and his #124; we'll continue to stick to the top 100.
Nothing in that self quoted paragraph was wrong. I made it clear that I had not had time to check EVERY stat. I searched for those who had never flown the big three, and I couldn't find any because it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Now,
if I had known that this topic was going to turn into the Spanish Inquisition, I would have done what I did today...
... which was to get to the heart of the matter, and check every single score for the top 100
fighter ranks in the last tour. And these are my findings. And Shane might like some of this.
There were only 9 guys in that top 100 who never flew P51/LA7/Spit ix. Mobil (ranked 56) was a borderline case. He flew a P51B in which he died but got no kills.
Of those 9 guys, who as far as I could tell NEVER flew P51/LA7/Spit ix, there was often (but not always) some other easymode/dweeb/überity factor at play, as has been discussed above by Steve, Urchin etc. Here is the list:
- tarmac (20) - we already know about.
- DmdCoach (28) - lots of kills in TYPH, as discussed above - in fact of 790 kills, 593 were in the TYPH.
- Agalland (31) excellent F4U1D score.
- pjk9 (35) - 250 of 338 kills in a 190D9, but
! I've met pjk, and he's cool. 
- popy (48) - vast majority of fighter kills achieved in a N1K.
- tori3 (50) zeke5 ace - WTG!
- Yaws (58) - 109 ace - WTG!
- lazerus (59) 190A8 expert
- GTR - ki61
A full 91% of those guys in the top 100 had, at some point, flown the big 3. I said that this was the case, with very few exceptions. How many exceptions? It doesn't even stretch to a double digit value, which in
my book is very few. I said what I said, I was careful in what I said, and I was right.
These are the FACTS.Now some of you are asking
to what extent did these 91 guys make use of the Big Three? And the answer is that some guys made a small amount of usage of those planes.
But that does not invalidate what I said, which was NOT an argument, but a casual observation. But by the same token, many of those guys made
massive use of the Big Three. I noticed this especially near the end of my list - ranks 80-100 - page after page of guys who'd got hundreds of kills in the Big Three, but just token amounts in the other planes. Some guys flew two out of three, and some guys (like Shane) fly all three. Hehe, was looking forward to checking Shane's stats, but even the Big Three überkrutch couldn't take him to the top 100 last tour. Better luck next time, matey.
