Or: A little statistical folly...
We all know that we do have to take all player stats in this game with some caution. For example Fighter Hit% is not only a result of skill and controller, but also depending on plane choice and playing style - buff busting increases your hit percentage.
That being said, I was curious about the overall distribution of hit percentages. By examining the rank numbers you could roughly estimate the average player having a hit % of about 3%-4%, but that wasn't accurate enough for me.
Method:
To get a sufficient number of random players, I went into a LW arena a few weeks ago and took a snapshot of the pilot roster. Then I waited until after the end of the tour before recording each pilot's final score. Players who did never fly a fighter sortie were eliminated. After all, this sample comprised 359 players seems to be about 5% of all players flying fighter sorties in that tour.
Result:
The median of all players Hit % was found to be 3.44%
Note the huge drop off at 6% - This seems to be indeed a big threshold concerning shooting skills. Once you get to 10% and above, there is not much variation anymore.
Based on that thresholds, I took the liberty of arbitrarily grouping the player into four categories:
