To everyone else: this is an obvious troll attempt. Please DON'T BITE.
There is no trolling intended whatsoever. I became somewhat bored one week during this past tour and decided to count all of the merges where I shot at my opponent, when it was clear they were maneuvering for angles and had no intention of shooting back.
Out of 322 "hot" merges over the course of one week, I killed 172 on the first pass. Another 67 of those resulted in hits where the aircraft was either disabled or otherwise unable to employ effective ACM and they were shot down in short order.
In case you were wondering,
that's a 74.2% win rate... from firing at the merge. Not only is that a decent win rate, but also factor in the time savings.
If we generalize that the "average" fight lasts two minutes, then the jousting tactic saved 7.97 hours of time that would normally have been spent fighting. This frees up roughly another 8 hours to gain even more kills.
Once I had my statistics, I decided to post here and see if there was any interest.
That's all - nothing more, nothing less.