Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: Anaxogoras on February 27, 2009, 01:45:37 PM
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A squad mate of mine who used to fly AW saw me land 9 kills in a P-38L the other night. None were vulches, but I'm sure the majority were picks :t, and maybe I had to work for a couple of them. He mentioned that it was very rare for someone to get 9 kills in a sortie in AW, and that he sees it a lot in AH. I had to admit that the same seems true for WB. I can't remember getting 9 kills in a single sortie then unless I was vulching. 5 or 6 would have seemed like a very big pull.
I also remember that K/D ratios among the top pilots were much lower. I can remember the score pages that ranked everyone, and the top 20 or so for K/D were around 4:1 or 3:1 (vics, garn, drex, etc.). You had to have at least 20 sorties to be in the score pages. In AH right now my K/D is 6.59 and I am 54th in that category, and my flying is nothing special. Back then, I tried very hard to have a K/D ratio at 3:1, and most of the time couldn't get above ~2:1.
To me the difference has to be the $. I used to get billed ~$100/month, and sometimes more. Anyone who didn't learn quickly enough to achieve some kind of success would have dropped out quickly for the privilege of paying by the hour to have their butt kicked all over the arena. Previous flight sim experience would be a requirement to have any hope of the money being worthwhile.
So, is it true? Are K/D ratios much higher in AH for a merely decent stick than they were in AW or WB? Should we go back to an hourly rate? :devil
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simple, there are more players. more bad players to kill.
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simple, there are more players. more bad players to kill.
Other things being equal, there would be more good pilots, too.
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Why dont you visit the wishlist forum and ask for an hourly rate arena and see how well it goes over? :rolleyes:
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Other things being equal, there would be more good pilots, too.
there are more good pilots but you're way more likely to run into the influx of easy targets. there are more hordes going. battles shift and all of a sudden youre with the flock and getting kills.
There are more easy targets to shoot it's quite simple.
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Other things being equal, there would be more good pilots, too.
But all other things are not being equal.
Higher turnaround of players, more players playing for short time vs a few very experienced stick playing this for many years. The top sticks don't run into each other that often anymore.
Much fewer players = more 1 vs 1. Much more players = much bigger battles, much increased importance of overall SA. Specific style of palying "Picking / E fighting /playing safe" etc is getting more efficient.
Also, the number of players knowing about WWII air combat and air combat tactics before joining an online game was much higher 10-20 years ago. For many of us "old" people it was an hobby/field of interest long before any computers were capable of running a flight sim ;)
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First, I'd say your presumption is correct that it is easier to score more kills in Aces High than Airwarrior. Here are the three biggest reasons in my opinion.
1) Damage model: Concentrated bursts into a specific region of a plane will cripple it. A good shot can easy kill an enemy using very little ammo. In Air Warrior it was all or nothing IIRC. You had to pump ammo into them until they exploded, otherwise their plane would fly as 100%. Took a lot more ammo to kill a guy on average.
2) More ammo in aces high. More cannon, more 50 cals IIRC. If you are a good shot you can rip wings off with less than 5% of your ammo.
3) Less parity in skill. So many bad pilots flying around making for easy kills. Not to say there weren't bad pilots in air warrior but if I had to throw out arbitrary percentages, I would say 75% of the pilots sucked in AW and 95% suck in Aces High. :t
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All or nothing damage model? That must've been interesting. :lol
I should point out that there were exceptions. I remember that deft once had a 100+ kill streak in a P-40E... Man he used to tick me off! He would kill my 109 even if I started with a mountain of altitude above him. :P
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That's all written with as much accuracy as my hazing air warrior memory will allow.
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First, I'd say your presumption is correct that it is easier to score more kills in Aces High than Airwarrior. Here are the three biggest reasons in my opinion.
1) Damage model: Concentrated bursts into a specific region of a plane will cripple it. A good shot can easy kill an enemy using very little ammo. In Air Warrior it was all or nothing IIRC. You had to pump ammo into them until they exploded, otherwise their plane would fly as 100%. Took a lot more ammo to kill a guy on average.
2) More ammo in aces high. More cannon, more 50 cals IIRC. If you are a good shot you can rip wings off with less than 5% of your ammo.
3) Less parity in skill. So many bad pilots flying around making for easy kills. Not to say there weren't bad pilots in air warrior but if I had to throw out arbitrary percentages, I would say 75% of the pilots sucked in AW and 95% suck in Aces High. :t
Totally agree. The same principles apply to Warbirds as well.
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I just remembered another reason for why K/D ratios were much lower, and this one has to do the with the scoring system: In warbirds there was no attack category. If you wanted to go suicide-porking it counted toward your fighter stats.
2) More ammo in aces high. More cannon, more 50 cals IIRC. If you are a good shot you can rip wings off with less than 5% of your ammo.
In Warbirds the 6x.50 cal armament was anemic, at least in the earlier versions of the game. You had to put about 2 seconds of sustained fire on a target to bring it down.
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I just remembered another reason for why K/D ratios were much lower, and this one has to do the with the scoring system: In warbirds there was no attack category. If you wanted to go suicide-porking, or actually fight, it counted toward your fighter stats.
bingo and fixed a little.
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Ohhhh, snap! :rofl
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All or nothing damage model? That must've been interesting. :lol
I should point out that there were exceptions. I remember that deft once had a 100+ kill streak in a P-40E... Man he used to tick me off! He would kill my 109 even if I started with a mountain of altitude above him. :P
It wasn't all or nothing in AW and if your friend had tough times landing multiple kill sorties in AW it was because of how he flew not that AW was harder to score kills in. IIRC, my ratio in AW was about the same as it was in here, around 5-6 kills per flight.
The damage model wasn't visibly represented in AW as it is in AH. The only visual signs you did damage were the smoke trails but that doesn't mean things like flap, landing gear, ailerons, elevators, hydraulic systems couldn't be damaged. You just didn't see the visual representation of the damage.
It was also far easier to score a kill in AW because of the hit bubble. You didn't have to hit the plane with your rounds, just anywhere in the hit bubble. Some planes had a larger hit bubble than other planes, like the P-38J, which had the largest hit bubble of any of the fighters in AW. The hit bubble on the Lightning was the same size of a bomber like the B-17. Now, imagine having a hit bubble that large and flying in a furball over VOD.
So was it easier or harder to score kills in AW than it was in AH? Easier.
ack-ack
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It could not have anything to do with the rearm pads?
HiTech
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It could not have anything to do with the rearm pads?
HiTech
Do you have stats on how many players actually rearm? I don't do it very often.
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It could not have anything to do with the rearm pads?
HiTech
Can you see from your logs how much rearm pads are used in AH? I dont see them in use very much. (except scenarios) Most people dont live long enough to get back home. :)
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It could not have anything to do with the rearm pads?
HiTech
this is the biggest difference that I have found
its like comparing it to a WB streak where all you had to do was land to continue your streak badair regularly had a streak of 90 to 100 every month
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Rearm pads only affect K/S, not K/D. Right?
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Until coming here I never even thought about k/d at all. I used to auger to change planes or fields or whatever and never even thought about it. I find that since I've come back here after a multi year layoff, I've been worrying about my k/d some all of a sudden. I feel like that sucks a little bit of the fun out of it for me, but only a little bit really. If I really worried about it a lot, I'd have to change the way I fly, and that would really suck the fun away IMO.
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I don't mean to differ with HT but I don't understand what the hot pads have to do with K/D
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It could not have anything to do with the rearm pads?
HiTech
I would say the percieved disparity between AW and AH k/s is due to your excellent ballistics/hit detection/damage model/ability to fire primary and secondary banks individually, along side of AWs relative rudimentry hit detection, and random damage model, and all guns firing at once.
My best P-38 sortie without re-arming in AH was 18 kills without vulches. My best P-38 flight in AW was 11 kills, which included vulches. Without rearms- 14 in a spit9, back to back 13 and 14 in a dora, 9 in a yak...all well above what I'd expect to get in AW.
My k/d is probably about the same, though I don't really pay much attention to it unless it strays very far away from my average performance.
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Totally agree. The same principles apply to Warbirds as well.
Umm... then you either have a very fuzzy memory or never flew WB.
I flew WB from BETA .07 thru 2.01, almost 5 years. HiTech worked very hard on the Dmg Model, and had great success with it, along with including variables such as velocity, trajectory and dmg potential of rounds, all based upon verified data collected mostly by the community itself by doing research. Their boards ( at AGW ) would be 90% conversations of how to improve the game, research on acft, guns, ammo and tactics. Everyone knew everyone, would share information, shoot it off to Texas, discuss ad naseum at conventions, and it would be put into the game.
The main reason for all of this, was the average age of a WB player was well into the 30-55 age range, based mostly off the fact it cost hourly rates all the way up to $2.00, and only history loving aviation enthusiast with jobs could afford it. There where no squeakers........... and yes, with only 200 in an arena, most of them great sticks, most being able to tell who they where fighting based upon the tactics being displayed... the experience was far more real life like, and thus the K/D ratios where much lower. Except the streak thing.....
The game you all enjoy today owes a large part to War Birds and HiTechs experiences and lessons there, and the community played a major role in all of it.
So yeah, part of me DOES want an hourly rate arena... but kids these days are more spoiled than ever with their cell phones and charge cards... so the squeakers would still show their faces.
Base Captures are much better here, graphics are better here, there is alot better here in AH. But I doubt HT would argue the fact that a desire to make money (mans gotta make a living) forced him to rethink the game and how it was to be structured to draw a larger audience (younger gamers with short attention spans and make the game cheaper), but it was at the cost of the quality of community and quality of experience in game.
:rock
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Rearm pads only affect K/S, not K/D. Right?
HiTech was responding to the initial observation that AH2 pilots are landing more kills than AW pilots. That goes to K/S. Rearming allows one to increase the total number of kills until shot down, bored, or acquiring enough to get lots of WTGs upon landing them. ;)
My regards,
Widewing
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HiTech was responding to the initial observation that AH2 pilots are landing more kills than AW pilots. That goes to K/S. Rearming allows one to increase the total number of kills until shot down, bored, or acquiring enough to get lots of WTGs upon landing them. ;)
My regards,
Widewing
Oh, yeah, that's obvious now that you point it out (smacks forhead). I guess I missed it because I haven't rearmed to bump up K/S since last summer, unless the fighter hangars are down. 9 kills in a 38L without rearming is not extraordinary.
I started the thread with K/S because it's necessarily connected to K/D: the latter is always equal to or greater than the former.
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I flew WB from BETA .07 thru 2.01, almost 5 years. HiTech worked very hard on the Dmg Model, and had great success with it, along with including variables such as velocity, trajectory and dmg potential of rounds, all based upon verified data collected mostly by the community itself by doing research. Their boards ( at AGW ) would be 90% conversations of how to improve the game, research on acft, guns, ammo and tactics. Everyone knew everyone, would share information, shoot it off to Texas, discuss ad naseum at conventions, and it would be put into the game.
The main reason for all of this, was the average age of a WB player was well into the 30-55 age range, based mostly off the fact it cost hourly rates all the way up to $2.00, and only history loving aviation enthusiast with jobs could afford it. There where no squeakers........... and yes, with only 200 in an arena, most of them great sticks, most being able to tell who they where fighting based upon the tactics being displayed... the experience was far more real life like, and thus the K/D ratios where much lower. Except the streak thing.....
Uter and complete BS.
Just to give you an example of how biased this opinion is K/D average of either game has to be the same, simply because for every death there is a kill.
The age range in AH is the same as it was in WB.
The total number of people playing AH is almost the same as what WB's was when I left.
Ows something to WB? I think not, AH is an evolution of WB because I was the creator and designer of both. But WB more realistic? Not in any portion of any model including damage modeling.
But I doubt HT would argue the fact that a desire to make money (mans gotta make a living) forced him to rethink the game and how it was to be structured to draw a larger audience (younger gamers with short attention spans and make the game cheaper), but it was at the cost of the quality of community and quality of experience in game.
Once again, nothing is different now then when I was running WB's.The same goals apply now as then. I am always amazed how people can say the quality is less, when all the people play here and not in WB. What do you really believe a people prefer to play a game that has less quality and is more expensive? Because we are more expensive than WB.
HiTech
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For many of us "old" people it was an hobby/field of interest long before any computers were capable of running a flight sim
So it's true! You used to fly a pterodactyl. :P
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Just to give you an example of how biased this opinion is K/D average of either game has to be the same, simply because for every death there is a kill.
I think dawger and everyone else are referring to the greater deviation in K/D in AH versus Warbirds, not the average, which by necessity has to be 1. A 3:1 K/D ratio in AH is no big whoop; in Warbirds it frequently denoted a very good stick. That means that the worst players in Warbirds likely had a better K/D ratio than the worst players in AH.
Still, I think that the addition of an attack category does more to sway the K/D ratios than anything else.
Owes something to WB? I think not, AH is an evolution of WB because I was the creator and designer of both. But WB more realistic? Not in any portion of any model including damage modeling.
Dawger did not claim that Warbirds the game was more realistic than AH. His claim was that the tougher opposition, and hence lower K/D ratios, made it more realistic. I don't know what's realistic about that, but that's what he was saying. I think he would have been better off saying that tougher opposition was more fun. :)
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Just to give you an example of how biased this opinion is K/D average of either game has to be the same, simply because for every death there is a kill.
Yes K/D average of the populous has to be the same (1:1) but this K/D talk is coming from the better pilots. So it's like comparing the K/D of the 95th percentile of skilled pilots. (or 90th percentile, whatever, pick an upper class)
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Yes K/D average of the populous has to be the same (1:1) but this K/D talk is coming from the better pilots. So it's like comparing the K/D of the 95th percentile of skilled pilots. (or 90th percentile, whatever, pick an upper class)
Right. 3:1 would've put you in the 95th percentile 10 years ago; 3:1 today would be more like (guesstimating) 75th percentile.
Edit: doing a few rough calculations, assuming there's about 5000 active fighter pilots:
6.59 K/D is ~99th percentile
2.73 K/D is ~93rd percentile
1.23 K/D is ~80th percentile
0.69 K/D is ~61st percentile
So that means dying a little less than twice as often as you kill is far better than average.
I don't think a high K/D means "good." How can it with so many players being nothing more than "dead money" in the pot? There's also a number of pilots who can kick the crap out of me but who do not achieve a K/D of 1 because they constantly put themselves, intentionally, into impossible situations.
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I'm getting the urge to gather a lot of data and putting it into simple graphs again...
must...resist...urge...
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I'm getting the urge to gather a lot of data and putting it into simple graphs again...
must...resist...urge...
<----Give in to the dark side.
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Yes K/D average of the populous has to be the same (1:1)
Actually they are probably very close but not the same and it would not be 1:1.
There are handful of times each day where someone dies but no-one gets credit for the kill.
Example: 1 guy shoots your plane and give you a PW so you head for home. While you are rtb a friendly kills the guy who shot you. You then fail to make it home and there is no-one close enough to you for them to get the proxy when you die.
Example: you get disco'd with no-one around and you had not been pinged.
Example: you hit a mountain on climbout with no one around.
So the K/D of the overall arena is less than 1:1.
:salute
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Do it Lusche! I'd love to see some data to back up my assertion that the "average" pilot in this game has gotten worse and worse, getting exponentially worse in the past 3 years or so.
The overall K/D of the arena has to be 1, but I imagine that the standard deviation has gotten larger and larger. I might try to think about how to present that data, but I imagine you'd do a better job than I ever would.
Good point Steve. So yea, the "true" K/D is less than 1. Not sure how much less, nor how one might go about finding that information.
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The overall K/D of the arena has to be 1,
See my previous post.
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Do it Lusche! I'd love to see some data to back up my assertion that the "average" pilot in this game has gotten worse and worse, getting exponentially worse in the past 3 years or so.
The problem is, with the brute-force method I'm using I could do such a thing only for a current tour and for tour 89, not even two years ago.
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I don't think a high K/D means "good." How can it with so many players being nothing more than "dead money" in the pot? There's also a number of pilots who can kick the crap out of me but who do not achieve a K/D of 1 because they constantly put themselves, intentionally, into impossible situations.
There is a correlation between skill and K/D, but not a great one. But yeah, this has nothing to do with skill, only K/D and the percentiles only refer to K/D, not Skill Percentile.
Actually they are probably very close but not the same and it would not be 1:1.
There are handful of times each day where someone dies but no-one gets credit for the kill.
Example: 1 guy shoots your plane and give you a PW so you head for home. While you are rtb a friendly kills the guy who shot you. You then fail to make it home and there is no-one close enough to you for them to get the proxy when you die.
Example: you get disco'd with no-one around and you had not been pinged.
Example: you hit a mountain on climbout with no one around.
So the K/D of the overall arena is less than 1:1.
:salute
Yeah you're right. It's actually closer to 1 in Aces High since there were no proxies in Air Warrior. If you are on a guy's 6 and he crashes and you hadn't shot him yet you get no kill...another reason K/D is higher here. (just thought of that)
But for all intensive purposes you can assume 1:1, it's probably like 1:1.05 or something. The majority of deaths, somebody gets credit for it. I doubt noobs are off crashing into mountains thousands of deaths in the middle of nowhere skewing this ratio.
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Comparing with WB3 , kills are much easier here - specially at range , version 2.5 was about the same as in here imo.
I find long range kills much easier than WB.
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K/D is subjective. As was stated...Several guys in this thread can kill anyone in the arena 1v1...or even 2 and 3 v 1. Yet thier K/D is very low.
I am very average at BEST...probably more of the low end...and my K/D is 22 in fighter....why? Cause I fly a specific way when I want to just see how far I can take it. (personal score) Most of the time Im dieing in attack mode and have no intention of attacking crap other than another plane. :lol
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K/D is subjective. As was stated...Several guys in this thread can kill anyone in the arena 1v1...or even 2 and 3 v 1. Yet thier K/D is very low.
Indeed: Individual K/D is very subjective and only a very rough hint on a players skill - and this only if you take a look at all the other factors (for example the planes he's flying)
However, it would be nice to see the overall distribution of K/D ratio. Even more interesting to see if that had changed over the years.
If there were any changes, they would have reasons, and we could wonderfully argue about them for a long time ;)
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Uter and complete BS.
Just to give you an example of how biased this opinion is K/D average of either game has to be the same, simply because for every death there is a kill. :salute
The age range in AH is the same as it was in WB. :salute
The total number of people playing AH is almost the same as what WB's was when I left. (Ok, was basing that on a 10 year old memory, and the dedicated size of the arena's at that time)
Ows something to WB? I think not, AH is an evolution of WB because I was the creator and designer of both. But WB more realistic? Not in any portion of any model including damage modeling. (Was just saying what you learned in WB as a game designer and programer, what we all learned in WB's as pilots makes for a better GAME in AH.. didn't realize you felt differently)
Once again, nothing is different now then when I was running WB's.The same goals apply now as then. I am always amazed how people can say the quality is less, when all the people play here and not in WB. What do you really believe a people prefer to play a game that has less quality and is more expensive? Because we are more expensive than WB. Umm... When I played WB's It cost me $100 a month until 2.0 time frame I think, and I stated in my original post that AH is a better game start to finish, my point was the quality of the gamer and the community due to its relatively small size up to 2.0 and what I perceived to be much older gamers in WarBirds made the game in that aspect better... Sorry If I ruffled any feathers. Was not my intentions. I have given your games well over 7 years of patronage, and alot of those on Hourly Rates. Saying AH's has more players in an arena and what I perceived to be more of a twitch gamer aspect than WWII aviation enthusiast feel to it. I still feel that Aces High does not hold the same quality of gamer that the original War Birds did. Now I left after 2.01 because the quality of the game (due to the quality of player) was going down once the pricing model changed and the arenas got bigger. I came back years later to Aces High because YOUR name was on it and on the book sitting on my desk... Warbirds, the Story so Far. :salute
HiTech
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...He mentioned that it was very rare for someone to get 9 kills in a sortie in AW, and that he sees it a lot in AH....
I, for one, can remember plenty of folks that could kill that many in a sortie in AW. The first to come to mind are the guy that wrote this and the guy that gathers the model data for this one. :)
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As a bonafied survivalist I can tell you that while relatively high K/D's may seem to be more prevalent in terms of plurality in AH, they were far, far easier to attain in AW. My best camp in AW was 584 kills to 3 deaths; 2 augers and 1 to a "party wagon" buff gun crew, and I had many camps along those lines. My best in AH, just off the top of my head, was less than 30 to 1 K/D, my average tour much lower than that. It really has nothing to do with the relative quality of the pilots per se. It's the HO's and collisions more than anything else that are responsible for it. Simply put, there's more mitigating factors somewhat beyond your control that can ruin your flight in AH.
The perception that K/D is focused upon more in AH is an illusion created by the arbitrary separation of "Fighter" and "Attack" sorties. It's only evident when looking at someones scoresheet and noticing the statistical disparity between the two categories then taking the amalgam. If you combined all attack and fighter sorties for a given pilot I think you would find the average K/D worse in AH than in AW. In AW K/D was really the only metric able to be calculated by the available in-game statistics, in AH it is but one of several and the least competitive in terms of the ranking mechanism.
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As a bonafied survivalist I can tell you that while high K/D's may seem to be more common in terms of plurality in AH, they were far, far easier to attain in AW. My best camp in AW was 584 kills to 3 deaths; 2 augers and 1 to a "party wagon" buff gun crew, and I had many camps along those lines. My best in AH, just off the top of my head, was less than 30 to 1 K/D, my average tour much lower than that. It really has nothing to do with the relative quality of the pilots per se. It's the HO's and collisions more than anything else that are responsible for it. Simply put, there's more mitigating factors somewhat beyond your control that can ruin your flight in AH.
The perception that K/D is focused upon more in AH is an illusion created by the arbitrary separation of "Fighter" and "Attack" sorties. It's only evident when looking at someones scoresheet and noticing the statistical disparity between the two categories then taking the amalgam. If you combined all attack and fighter sorties for a given pilot I think you would find the average K/D worse in AH than in AW. In AW K/D was really the only metric able to be calculated by the available in-game statistics, in AH it is but one of several and the least competitive in terms of the ranking mechanism.
I think the original argument is that it's easier to get more kills in a sortie. This should probably be called K/S: then vs now. I think it's easier here than AW.
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I think the original argument is that it's easier to get more kills in a sortie. This should probably be called K/S: then vs now. I think it's easier here than AW.
Perhaps, but there was no way to measure K/S in AW so that ascertion is pretty subjective. I don't think that was the case for me personally. But, I was a Fw190-A8 pilot primarily in AW the last 10 years and I fly a relatively short-clipped/legged plane in AH. In AH K/S is far more a function of the plane you fly than anything else as there is a big difference in ballistics, ammoload and endurance between individual aircraft. In AW the difference in those categories was relatively minimal by comparison.
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Perhaps, but there was no way to measure K/S in AW so that ascertion is pretty subjective. I don't think that was the case for me personally. But, I was a Fw190-A8 pilot primarily in AW the last 10 years and I fly a relatively short-clipped/legged plane in AH. In AH K/S is far more a function of the plane you fly than anything else as there is a big difference in ballistics, ammoload and endurance between individual aircraft. In AW the difference in those categories was relatively minimal by comparison.
Yes it is subjective. I think that's why the OP was asking for other pilots' observations about it since there is no data.
Proxy kills are another big reason you can get more kills per flight. You typically can get 1 proxy kill/mission where you never fired at the guy. In AW you would receive nothing for this.
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Please also remember that I never flew Air Warrior. My perspective is only as someone who used to fly Warbirds: we had collisions, which people whined about constantly ;), auto-gunners on buffs (like 999000), and the fighter armaments were about as varied as they are in AH.
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Please also remember that I never flew Air Warrior. My perspective is only as someone who used to fly Warbirds: we had collisions, which people whined about constantly ;), auto-gunners on buffs (like 999000), and the fighter armaments were about as varied as they are in AH.
Ahhh vulching fields in B17's... one of the not so great aspects of WB, but fun as %^$
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Right. 3:1 would've put you in the 95th percentile 10 years ago; 3:1 today would be more like (guesstimating) 75th percentile.
Maybe its just that you and many other players from 10 years ago simply have 10 more years of experience under your belts.