I lasted two minuets.

[Hoplite]

Since I do try to land my kills I suppose I do care about K/d in a detached sort of way.  Overall rankings..."stars"...etc....could care less.

I will admit I occastionally look at my hit percentages hoping in vain that they will improve.   

I have no issue with people who play for score as long as that doesn't completely drive their actions and fighting style in game.  There is a difference with possessing amazing skills which result in a high rank and being a bunghole who never fights for fear of damaging score or ranking.  These later types tend to do things like spend the majority of their time vulching to pad stats hoping to fool others into thinking they are the second coming of Galland.  That's dishonest.

[Skyyr]

And you'll notice my sig reflects these facts

I'd like to see a weighted scoring system, where quantity directly weighs/affects the quality across the board. What I see here in AH is people flying 5-10 fighter missions, group-vulching a capped base, and getting 10:1 (randomly picked number for emphasis) kill ratios... but then they land them, and then proceed to fly Ground Attack missions for the remainder of the tour, keeping their fighter stats frozen in the top ranks, where they then struggle to maintain 2:1 ratios.

Quality is always more important, but there's a point where you must have a quantity of quality to accurately reflect that quality.

Someone who has a 10:1 kill ratio, with 10 kills... that's not indicative of anything more than luck. Someone with 50 kills and 5 deaths... they're probably decent, but anyone can accomplish that. 250+ kills? There's a clear pattern that they're regularly killing 10 opponents for each of their deaths. I'm picking arbitrary numbers, but you get the point.

We had the same problem in Fighter Ace, so the fix was to provide sorting tiers. Kills over 1,000, kills over 10,000, etc. This helped weed out all of the posers who flew for easy kills vs. those who could actually hold their own on a regular basis.

The only "weighted" portion of the score right now is raw kills/score... and that's easy to get around. Simply compensate in another stat.

[BluBerry]

This helped weed out all of the posers who flew for easy kills vs. those who could actually hold their own on a regular basis.

careful, round here they are on the side of the posers.

they call it "your 14.95" or something like that.

[Lusche]

I'd like to see a weighted scoring system, where quantity directly weighs/affects the quality across the board. What I see here in AH is people flying 5-10 fighter missions, group-vulching a capped base, and getting 10:1 (randomly picked number for emphasis) kill ratios... but then they land them, and then proceed to fly Ground Attack missions for the remainder of the tour, keeping their fighter stats frozen in the top ranks, where they then struggle to maintain 2:1 ratios.

You can't generalise that. This is by no means typical, nor necessary.
I once had a similar impression until I actually started to evaluate the top ranked fighter pilots in various tours. Against my expectations, only a few players did exhibit such a behaviour, and they were't dominating the top ranks either.

Fighter vs attack mode time for the top 25 ranked fighter pilots of last tour:



On average, they spent about 2/3rd of their combined fighter/attack sortie time in fighter mode.

Someone who has a 10:1 kill ratio, with 10 kills... that's not indicative of anything more than luck.

Someone with only 10 kills won't be very high ranked in fighter mode. He simply has to few kill points, thus his killpoint subrank drags is total rank down.

[Skyyr]

You can't generalise that. This is by no means typical, nor necessary.
I once had a similar impression until I actually started to evaluate the top ranked fighter pilots in various tours. Against my expectations, only a few players did exhibit such a behaviour, and they were't dominating the top ranks either.

Fighter vs attack mode time for the top 25 ranked fighter pilots of last tour:

(Image removed from quote.)

On average, they spent about 2/3rd of their combined fighter/attack sortie time in fighter mode.

I agree with your data, but I think it overlooks the nature of flight-style.

I'd like to see a direct comparison of the same 25 pilots, with the Fighter flight stats compared against their Ground Attack stats. My hypothesis is that you'll see a distinct change in stats. Not for every single one of them, but for a good number of them. Of course, I could be wrong, but I've specifically experienced pilots who go into Attack sorties whenever their honey-hole vulching ground dries up. They switch to attack mode until they find a new suitable spot... and then repeat.

I can PM you with the names of several players who I've found doing that this very tour. I'm speaking from experience, although that experience may be limited to a small sample size and not reflected overall.

Someone with only 10 kills won't be very high ranked in fighter mode. He simply has to few kill points, thus his killpoint subrank drags is total rank down.

Maybe 10 kills is too low, but pilots have taken the #1 spot with 50 kills or less, which is virtually the same problem.

[Lusche]

I can PM you with the names of several players who I've found doing that this very tour.

No need to, I know quite a few of them. And in some way I'm amongst them. For the most part I reserve "fighter mode" for long buff hunting missions (apart from those planes where I am not able to chose anything else at all), while attack mode is mainly chosen by me whenever I think there might be a good chance of hunting GV's, troops or killing objects.


The thing is, any form of "weighting" beyond the one we already have (by the measure of kill points rank) will not make any player trying to 'optimize' his score/rank at all cost change his ways. He will simply adjust. And as I tried to show above the "3-5 fighter sorties then switch to attack for the rest of the tour" is not happening that way - at least in LW arena. EW and MW are an entirely different matter due to the very low volume of sorties flown totally and individually.

[Skyyr]

The thing is, any form of "weighting" beyond the one we already have (by the measure of kill points rank) will not make any player trying to 'optimize' his score/rank at all cost change his ways.

I guess I somewhat disagree here. By causing kills to affect the weight of all of the other stats (arbitrary example: like a diminishing-returns multiplier), pilots would be penalized for avoiding fights (while still being penalized for losing a plane / dying). Pilot A, who flies at 25k for twelve hours of the tour and gets 75 kills and 10 deaths would have a lower weight compared to pilot B, who had 1000 kills and 100 deaths.

With the current system, pilot A would win the ranking, all things being equal. With a weighted system, you could take into account that pilot A only has 7.5% of the kills pilot B has, and weight them appropriately.

With the current system, if pilot B was #1 for kills and pilot A was #2 for kills, all of pilot B's additional kills over 76 are useless.  In fact, his extended sortie times can inherently hurt his ranking. While this is obviously an exaggeration of what happens, the fact that it can happen this way, to me, illustrates a flaw in the scoring system.

I just don't see how the glory of the fighter pilot, which celebrates raw numbers of kills, not getting shot down, and taking on superior numbers is anywhere near reflected in the current system of "Kill quickly, fly safe, fly less, and use less ammo."

Just my .02

[Lusche]

I guess I somewhat disagree here. By causing kills to affect the weight of all of the other stats (arbitrary example: like a diminishing-returns multiplier), pilots would be penalized for avoiding fights (while still being penalized for losing a plane / dying). Pilot A, who flies at 25k for twelve hours of the tour and gets 75 kills and 10 deaths would have a lower weight compared to pilot B, who had 1000 kills and 100 deaths.

That already happens

[FLOOB]

Since I do try to land my kills I suppose I do care about K/d in a detached sort of way.  Overall rankings..."stars"...etc....could care less.

I will admit I occastionally look at my hit percentages hoping in vain that they will improve.   

I have no issue with people who play for score as long as that doesn't completely drive their actions and fighting style in game.  There is a difference with possessing amazing skills which result in a high rank and being a bunghole who never fights for fear of damaging score or ranking.  These later types tend to do things like spend the majority of their time vulching to pad stats hoping to fool others into thinking they are the second coming of Galland.  That's dishonest.

so you admit that you could care less

[Tupac]

I have a friend that was wanting me to try warthunder, that game sux compared to AH they are all like arcade games. 

If I don't have much time to play I'll hop on War Thunder. It's not as good as Aces high, but a lot easier to do a quick 10 min battle and head out the door.....

[FLOOB]

It's not all that simple. 

Quite a number of players, even long time ones, went from AH to WT, for various reasons.

Names?

[Hoplite]

so you admit that you could care less

For myself...yep.  Also don't care if others are different and DO care about their stats and rank.

[SirNuke]

The Kill point's total IS weighted in score and players that have a lot of kill points WILL have an advantage over pilots who fly selective fighters sorties. In short: kill a lot of bombers, and even if you die or miss at times your score will be predictably (is that a word) good.

[SirNuke]

And I also would like to add that being aggressive is also rewarded in the score with the kills/hour stat

[BnZs]

I think that's because the stat and scoring here promote that sort of flight style.

With the exception of raw fighter score, every other ranked stat promotes vulching, teaming, and running from even fights. I'm not saying in any way that it prevents people from being successful, but it does promote a cowardly style of play your average pilot.

This is partially true, and partially not. Your kills/time and kills/sortie can definitely be hurt by these practices. For instance, if there are way more green guys than red your chances of getting the kill on that red guy go down. Climbing high or running away also eat up time.

IMO, the two best scenarios for scores both involve CVs: A busy but not overwhelming defense against CV planes in high-performance high-firepower aircraft like Spit16s or LAs offers lots of opportunities to kill laden jabos, Zekes, and other generally easy targets. Neither excessively high alts or excessive timidness is a part of this, you must engage and shoot well.

 The other scenario is capping your own CV in a C-Hog. Many low and less defended bombers will come in from their base. Last time I did this I got 7 kills, got bored, and landed.