Honestly, I think you could remove stats/rank/name-in-lights all together and nothing would change. Not everyone is motivated by what others think, you know. I've stated before that even without the ego-stroking you get from landing kills, you'd still see me trying to land because that's just the kind of dweeb I am.
That's incredibly true.
There is a myth that there's only two camps, those who play for score and those that don't. But, as I wrote in another post on personality's effect on your game, there is an almost infinite number of reasons and motivations for flying in certain ways. Interestingly, a lot of the reasons and motivations are subconscious, even the person doing it doesn't know exactly why they are doing it.
For example, I am a perfectionist, my joy comes from "perfect" hops, where I make no mistakes, bring down as many enemy as possible and live. If I can't live, I at least want to learn something from the experience. A completely failed hop for me is one where I die, don't learn anything and fail to down the maximum possible number of enemy. You may have a totally different concept of a good and bad hop, in fact there's probably 5,000 different ideas of good/bad. Neither is more right or wrong than another.
There is no doubt some do in fact define good/bad hops in terms what effect it has on their score/rank. But, it's not as common as people believe and it's almost never the single motivation or reason for flying a certain way, especially for protracted periods of time. I flew for rank a few tours just to see if I could do it. It wasn't very fun and was not sufficiently rewarding in and of itself to merit performing the really boring chores required. It becomes like that for almost everyone over time. In the end people end up just flying in harmony with their personality, you can no more change that than you could change any other innate individual quality like intelligence or temperament.
