I still believe that too much is being read into the hallowed k/t. It is governed by many factors, and is only a relevant comparison between guys who strive to achieve the highest k/t, and nothing else. I’m not interested in k/t, so mine is irrelevant - I have no interest in becoming enslaved to the scoreboard. It is also totally removed from the realities of WW2 (the event upon which this sim is modelled – seems some people need reminding) and one could argue that it’s the pursuit of a high k/t that has created the furball suicide dweebery and aerial Quake that is killing the MA, if Sabre’s songs are to be believed. Think of it – you go to a furball with alt in a one-ping wonderplane like the C-Hog, dive in, get as many kills as possible while you still have E, get shot, bail (you never intended to RTB anyway), and your new plane is only a mouseclick away. Just imagine if AH were to measure pilot performance in a different way – length of streak (and I’m not talking about dirty underpants). WB included that stat, and it was a measure of how many kills you had before getting killed yourself. I managed 28 once, but some guys had 50, 100, or more. That sure did away with a whole lot of suicide dweebery.
I get by as a fighter pilot. I’m not the best, not by any means. I’m good enough to get by against most of what the arena throws at me – my bad luck if I run into Urchin or Shane – lol. My fighter rank (assuming one ascribes any relevance to it) has been something around 150-300 for the last few tours. But even this needs to be qualified! There was a time when I scored attack sorties and fighter sorties separately. That’s because attack sorties carry great risk – a lumbering fully loaded P47 is a sitting duck – and the separation of the scores allows a separate analysis of one’s fighter scores and attack scores. But even this is flawed! And that’s because there are many times when what began as a jabo sortie becomes a fighter sortie later on. And very often there are a lot of kills to be had in one such sortie. So I have gone back to just scoring everything as a fighter sortie. It makes k/t look a lot better, but k/d might suffer if flying a lot of jabo sorties, and the cherrypickers are already airborne.
There’s something else. I’m not one for playing a subset of a game – any game – the way some guys here do. Some of you guys might be brilliant fighter jocks. I often see text buffer utterances like ”I would’ve killed you had your friend not shown up”, or ”let’s go to the DA and then we’ll see who’s best”. The thing about these situations is that the victor was in the right place at the right time – and THAT, I believe, is part of being a smart fighter pilot. Remember that in 80% of real WW2 kills, the attacker was not seen by his quarry. But some of you guys want ONLY to fight, and have no interest in the strategic aspects of the game. When you go looking for your fights, how do you do it? You look at the map, of course. But supposing some buffs/fluffs have flattened your radar factory? The map is not much use then. One evening, there were some determined buffs hammering Bish HQ. We had only just resupplied it from the last attack. I considered that it might be in the best interests of the Bish to get up in a Jug-25 and defend the HQ. Even though we were on one of the children’s maps, it was a long flight to get to the Bouncy Castle, and when I got to that area I was able to attack and destroy three buff formations. Because of being in a remote area, they weren’t expecting an attack and had no gunners. Two of the formations were LANCs – hehe, no ball turret on a LANC.
With my ammo (and fuel) largely depleted, I RTBed and landed 8 kills. One of the buffs must have ditched or escaped. It had been a long flight – that climb to 20K takes forever, so k/t went down the tubes, but at least it meant we had a working map, so that YOU guys could find your furballing fun. Symbiosis. Hey, somebody had to do it. I enjoyed that sortie, and a lot of Bish were happier as a result, though they never knew that it was old Uncle Beet1e that kept the lights from being turned off.
Of course, I could have gone for a insta-kill-5K-kwik-fix, but the interests of the Bish would have suffered great harm had we lost that radar factory. Then, the only option at my disposal would have been to whine to HTC, and maybe ask them if we are to be at the mercy of fluffs in AH2. Or whine to get the game changed – by increasing radar factory “hardness”, or by perking bombs weighing more than 100lb. Or whined that the effect of the buffs was disproportionate to the level of effort required. But these are all whines to procure a particular set of game parameters in order to boost a player’s chosen stat, and to show himself in the strongest possible light, without that player having to lift a finger to do it himself.
