Just thinking out loud in text here
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Yeah, the kills*k/d approach can get a little interesting. I guess adding kills+deaths together bothers me inherently as proxy for usage. Noodling on this way back when the more I looked at this the more I didn't like the various ways of trying to tally up usage from the stats we have access to.
I think it boils down to what one defines as "usage". Is it # of sorties? Is it # of encounters/events? Etc. I've approached this in the past from a sorties perspective and have come away unsatisfied with the approaches I've tried.
If it's # of events then I can see where a kill and a death are equally weighted. But here are some caveats with counting kills + deaths as encounters as a proxy for evaluating usage rate.
total_events_per_model = kill_events + death_events + events_with_no_kills_or_death
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So we have data for the 1st two terms. But the last term is troublesome. For instance what about events where one or both parties escape? Worse yet, what about events where it's more than a 1v1? How do we count these events because if its more than a 1v1 then even if a kill / death is registered what about the planes in the furball that neither get the kill or becomes a death. They have all registered that the other planes were in the engagement therefore "in usage" yet this isn't recorded as an event in a stat anywhere.
Now of course I just want to make sure folks understand that I'm not criticizing your stats at all Lusche. I'm just intrigued by some of the riddles it leads to.
Tango, XO
412th FS Braunco Mustangs