I like to work on keeping my rank/score reasonably high but not to the extent that it dictates what I want to do or how I have fun in the game.
I fly tons of different planes. ~ 40 different fighters so far this camp. My squaddies keep saying "imagine if you just stuck to your best planes" or "you always seem to find a way to handicap yourself". That might be true but flying lots of different stuff is part of what I find fun and I won't stop just to improve my fighter ranking.
I've had others say to me on 200 "you can't be very good with that K/D ratio". I ignore them. They don't know what, where or how I fly.
I do use my scores to to track my own progress. I also use them to judge myself against others, even though I know that scores/ranks don't tell the whole story.
After a fight, I like to look up the scores of the players I shot down and those who shot me down. I feel much better shooting down or getting shot down by someone with a better fighter score (K/D, K/S) than one without unless it's in a furball or I'm outnumberd, then it's just luck of the draw. This is another way to judge my own skills and I can put this into context based on plane match-ups and odds. For that reason alone I think they should remain posted.
Sometimes I find myself in a corner of the map finding easy kills. Last night for instance, a squaddie and I both killed a Spit pilot. He had 6 kills on 52 sorties, 0 landed. Now I'm not claimng to be an uber-ace or anything but, my squaddie is scored higher than me in a fighter, this guy was not going to be a challenge for either of us and flying against us was not going to help his development nor enjoyment of the game. As there were others in the area, we went somewhere else so that this pilot might find a closer match-up. We could have just stayed driving up our own scores.
On the other hand, the night before we were challenging some very highly rated players in a particular area. Scores were slightly against us as were odds but we had some great fights against some great players. I'm sure some of those on the other side were looking at the match-ups too as they stayed for several rounds.
So are these two instances biasing the fight based on rank/score? Yes. But I think in a good way. I wish more like-skilled players would seek one another out in the arenas and that some of the better pilots would volantarily leave some of the lesser pilots alone to find someone of their own skill level. Now thats looking at the MA's through rose colored glasses but it is possible to a degree.
Are there people who will do anything to raise their score/rank? I'm sure there are. If that's what they want to do then that's up to them. If they do so at their squaddies expense then their squaddies should either lobby to have them ejected from the squad or quit themselves. I was in a squad for two weeks once and left for many reasons, this being but one of them.
I think that public ranks/scores are a good thing. You just have to keep in mind that they don't tell the whole story.
