My understanding about kill points is you get points for every round you put into the enemy and it does not mater if you get the kill or not. I also think something like a 30mm round gives you more kill points than a .303 round – in other words, Kill Points is actually tracking the amount of damage you inflect on the enemy. Lower ENY planes can typically cause more damage by having bigger guns or more ammo, and they have the survivability to burn through all their ammo before getting killed themselves.
The kill point category is there (IMO) to balance out the “luck factor.” As an example, Pilot A gets lucky on his first sortie and gets in on a base-take vulch-fest and gets 8 kills before the base is captured and then quickly lands the kills. He now has a good Kills/Death, Kills/Sortie, Kills/Hour, and Hit Percentage and decides to not fly in the Fighter Category again that tour. Pilot A will not have many kill points which opens the door for Pilot B to rank higher if he can match or come close to Pilot A’s scores but over more sorties which earns him more kill points.
People like me that only have time for maybe 20 hours a month can not compete in the Kill Points category with players that put in 200 hours per month no matter what ENY plane we fly. I don’t think putting at risk three categories – Kills/Death, Kills/Sortie, and Kills/Hour (higher ENY planes are usually slower ant take longer to get to and from the fight) – to improve the one Kill Points category is incentive enough to get better sticks into the higher ENY planes.
If Pilot A and Pilot B both had the exact same score but Pilot A did it in a Tempest and Pilot B did it in a P-40, I would like to see a scoring system that would favor Pilot B. I don’t know what it would really take but it would be nice if Fighter Ranking was solely base on a single category that toke into account the planes relative ENY values, the relative rankings of the pilots at the time of the kill, and the perk multiplier to award points. (Well maybe not perk multiplier but the relative number of players of the two countries involved in the fight at the time of the kill.) If you shoot down a lower ENY plane flown by a higher ranked pilot while having a high perk multiplier, you would get a lot of points and the higher ranked pilot you killed would lose a lot of points. Since a player is getting and losing points, the number of hours flown in a tour (or the number of fights) should not be a big factor. But the scoring system would have to be setup in such a way as to prevent someone from quickly rising to #1 and then refuses to fight anymore. There has to be a way to knock out a player from the #1 spot. So we go full circle and end up back at using kill points to give the higher ranks incentive to stay in the fight.
So what do you know, the current system is perfect – or is it?
