All those "discussions" about quality both of the game as well of the players made me look up the distribution of K/D in fighter mode in LW arenas.
Granted, K/d doesn't tell much about the actual fighter quality of a player, but when looking as the arena as a whole, it's a interesting statistical parameter. And while you can't say from K/D if a player with 8.0 is "better" than another with 3.0, it seems to be a common consensus that a player that can't get a K/D of 1 isn't really "good" and that one constantly below 0.5 does more or less "suck"
But how many "suck" that way? How many do reach the 1.0 breakeven point at all?
I sampled two tours, the last full tour (111) as well as one from the "glorious past" 7 years ago, tour 24.
Tour 111.
I found that
- only ~37% of all players managed to get a K/D better than 0.5
- only ~22% of all players reached 1.0 or better
- only 9% ended up with a K/D of 2.0 or better
- the 50% threshold was at about 0.3
Tour 24
If the general skill level at that time had really been much better back then (with more WWII aviation enthusiasts and much less "XBox/Quake gamers" as it's been frequently called), I would had expected a different, somewhat more balanced distribution. Of course, there would still had been a small number of players at the top getting high K/D's, but I would had expected a little bit more even numbers at the lower and medium ranks.
I found that
- about 37% of all players had a K/D better 0.5
- about 19% got 1.0 or better
- about 6% reached K/D 2.0 or better
- the 50% threshold was at about 0.27
We can see, the 50% threshold is slightly higher today and the minority of players getting K/D 2.0 or better (and thus spanking the huge majority of our virtual pilots) isn't as small as it used to be (increased by a whopping 50%). Of course, the significance of these numbers is highly debatable
Feel free to draw your own or none conclusions at all
