Why do people care so much about this. It's a number with 3 significant figures that is influenced more by how much you screw around than how good you are.
Your Bnet account has your KDR posted, and just because your KDR is low, doesn't mean your not good. I have a KDR of .86 or around that, and I usually end up on top, It's very low because I usually play unbalanced gametypes like Infection, or because of that 1 week I spent camping in my basement, playing Grifball to my hearts content, fearing it would be gone in a few days. Anyways, a good KDR is generally a noob's excuse for trying to be better. Frankly, I wouldn't worry about it.
Your K/D is also under 1 in the most other playlists so you may end on top, but you also die a whole lot. Staying alive is just as important as getting kills. Just sayin'.
Just a small thing i'd want to point out: Most of my teammates, even though they have a high rank, their KD is around 0.70-0.80.
Not true. Staying alive is important in most gametypes for various reasons. You can't attack or defend an objective, or help a teammate do the same, if you're dead. You and your teammates can't score in Grifball if you die, and you're more likely to be scored upon if you die. In fact, there's very few Halo gametypes where it doesn't benefit you to have longer lives and fewer deaths. It just happens that slayer is the most directly influenced by your k/d gap. However, even in slayer that can be misleading - a guy who goes 10-0 but does so by camping in a corner far from the rest of his team might not even be a net benefit to his team; he might give them a better chance of winning by going 10-8 and dishing out some assists, support fire, and weapon/map control help. And I've had many games where I had some crazy line like 26-20 in slayer - yes I died a lot and my ratio wasn't all that great, but I also was clearly all over the place, a constant disruption to whatever the enemy team was trying to do. It's hard for the other team to win games like that even though they may be fairly close for most of the game. On the whole, my feeling is that k/d means something and it's better to have a good one than a poor one, but it's not the best possible measure of how effective a player is, either. A number that properly incorporated k/d, assists per life, and win/loss ratio into a single thing (like Football Outsider's DVOA) would be the best way to determine a player's overall ability.
Halowaypoint.com has something like that, but it's pretty flawed. I scored a 100 out of 100 according to it. On a side note: I find it amusing to see that the people who have a low k/d are often the people who say they don't care about it.
Statistically speaking, with two evenly-matched teams in Team Slayer, each player will have 12 kills and 12 deaths. Anything above a 1.0 is "above average", again, statistically speaking. I think the fact that most players have a K/D above 1.0 and consistently expect to have K/Ds above 1.0 is a testament to matchmaking's inability to pit evenly skilled teams against each other. In a perfect matchmaking system, everyone would have a K/D of 1.0. Going a bit off topic, I'm slightly irritated by the people who are saying "My K/D is x without using power weapons/vehicles/etc.". Halo is about the control of power weapons. If K/D is your focus, why would you intentionally put yourself and your team at a disadvantage by not using power weapons or vehicles? That's like a football team not sending in their star players because they want a "pure" Win/Loss record...what? I think it's a pretty petty reason to put your team at such a disadvantage.
I wouldn't go as far as to say controlling power weapons is what Halo is about, but it is important. A team that ignores those weapons is twice as likely to get annihilated, but still. There've been games where the enemy team have taken all the power weapons, and we still cleaned up pretty good. Anyway, as for staying alive only being important in Slayer, I disagree. You can't do anything for your team when you're dead, and being dead in an objective game means thats one less person to defend for anything up to 15 seconds depending on the gametype. If you have a K/D below 1 in a game, unless you're playing pure support, then you're doing bad. It means you aren't contributing, or you're affecting the game negatively for your team. If you play support, and get a high number of assists, or actually do something that benefits your team, but means you get less kills, fine. You're only bad if you're doing nothing for the team. Either way, K/D isn't a measure of skill. K+A/D is probably the best measure of skill you can get now, but even at that, it's not a very accurate one.
*facepalm* Most people when they say that they mean that they don't hog them and pick up a Sniper, snipe until you used up all it's ammo and then camp at the Sniper spawn and wait till it respawns and do that the whole game. If i see a good Vehicle or a Power Weapon i pick it up but i won't camp Weapon spawns to get it as soon as it spawns.
I dont think the overall K/D gives lot information about the player itself (well of course when you see someone with less kills than deaths -> bad... xD) I had 1.20 when I lost the fun in leveling up in reach, so I went into my favorite-list... swat lol since then I cared about my K/D firstly I wanted to get to 1.50 but now the 2.00 is waiting Bungie.net : Reach : Service Record I have 1.69 right now, but my KD rises nearly 80% of the games, because I'm way better then my K/D sais... 30 kills 4 deaths? not the "be(a)st" as example... but such K/D's are not a rare thing to me :] So what I want to say... you can look for a match in snipers and probably meet someone having: 4953 Kills 4291 Deaths ....just not good in the allround-halo-game but maybe a SICK sniperdude... Good old advice during the acutal match... DON'T care about someone having a better K/D and don't ever laugh too hard @ a noob sometimes there are matches where you got bad luck, you're not playing very well because of being frustrated because of the bad luck... AND the noobs throw lucky-grenades like hell omfg... So just play with the best skill which is possible or while not giving your best, just relax and don't care about winning/losing
K/D doesn't matter very much at all. -In objective games K/D has no more importance then any other stat. You play a game to win, If someone played chess regularly you wouldn't rate someones skill at chess on how many pieces they took compared to how many pieces they lost (K/D) You rate someones skill in the game on there W/L ratio. (Ignoring the goal to rank a random stat=not a good player) -In team slayer your personal K/D is irrelevant. Guess I will use a chess example again, At the end of the game it didn't matter which piece got what kill as long as there combined efforts gave them victory, Same goes for Reach. K/D matters but not just yours, If you get a high K/D and the rest of your team got a bad K/D your team did bad and since your part of that team you did bad to. Assisting your team is just as important as getting kills yourself. (if your thinking thats there problem i did my part they should of done theirs go play FFA The reason it's called TEAM slayer is because your meant to work as a team not compete against your team to get the best K/D) -In FFA slayer you can get a negative K/D and still win. A high K/D is a good sign of a good player in FFA but someone who has a lower K/D with a higher W/L is still a better FFA Slayer player then a person who has a higher K/D and a lower W/L -In 1v1 slayer games is the only place K/D really matters. But there is no 1v1s in matchmaking and Reach is a team game. The main people who care about K/D are the kids who send messages after you beat them like "Noobface 1v1 me u sukz my K/D is 1.83 and was 1.88 last week" the annoying part is when these people convince other people that K/D is important.
If you grab sniper, quickly use the ammo and then sit there waiting until it respawns then you're missing out on a lot of action in that time, and thus are likely to be missing out on lots of kills too. If you can get enough kills with one sniper in a minute or so to offset the next minute or so of waiting for the new one, being out of the action, then frankly you're a pretty good sniper anyway and so you're not 'padding' your K/D at all. If you're talking about simply being aware of power weapon times and making moves towards sniper spawn when you know it's about to come up, then again criticising that is stupid. Once you learn the times and are aware of the game timer (far from difficult), then how is there anything worthy of criticism, or even which would cause lopsided stats, about simply going towards a weapon you know is about to spawn/has just spawned? This is exactly the same as what Titan was saying, in that if you're aware of something which will give you an advantage, something which was placed in the game to give you an advantage and (in the case of Sniper and GL particularly) even requires a lot of skill to use, then by not taking advantage of it except when you happen to walk by it, you're being stupid. There's nothing stat whoreish about knowing weapon times and making the most of that. And if you actually take the time to sit and wait for a weapon to spawn for more than about 10 seconds, and still end up with most kills on your team despite keeping yourself out of the action, then yes you may be a bit of a ****, but you're also pretty good to pull that off.
No it's not a problem to look after Power Weapons but if you're all the game camping near it then i think it's pretty cheap. If a Power Weapons was your tool of destruction i don't care, as long as you weren't using that weapon all the game.
If you get the sniper and it respawns as soon as you run out of ammo then camp the sniper theirs no reason not to, Having a sniper 24/7 during a game is a good advantage for your team. Using the ammo up quick sitting waiting for it to come back is bad though you will probably still get 20/0 K/D but your leaving your team one man down for the entire time you don't have a sniper and your hiding. And I'm going to quote myself so I don't just repeat it in different words.
I agree to an extent, though it's highly circumstantial. Frankly there are plenty of times when the team mates are going negative and you're going positive because they just can't or won't be helped. Plenty of the time this kind of stat imbalance isn't from the skilful person adopting a lonewolf attitude, or at least disregarding the teamwork mentality, it's because the awful people are doing it, making their stats even worse. To be fair, this is often because they don't really understand what a strong, if basic team mentality involves.I find that the majority of people in MM have the attitude of: walk around with no real direction other than towards where action seems to be, shoot at things you see, if they run then chase them till you can shoot at them some more. Priorities, awareness of team mate locations, waypoints etc. (to see who's under attack) are rare in the general MM populace, so I do think it's unfair how this kind of attitude is most commonly associated with good people who 'lone wolf,' when in fact it's rare that they'll get anything back from constantly trying to bodyguard team mates who seem intent on just holding forward and fire. A perfect example. There are plenty of times where I'm not baiting my team mates, am engaging in pushes and often trying to get between them and my enemies to try and ensure they live as well as us getting the kill. However, more often than not in these circumstances, I simply can't kill as fast as my team seem capable of dying. I definitely agree that assists and a proper approach to teamwork are generally underrated in terms of attributes of a good player, but I do see this point being made with regards to good people much more often than people who's stats are bad either way, who are essentially doing exactly the same thing in playing as they feel rather than trying to engage with the team.
Well, if you're hiding with the Sniper i don't think there'll be good hiding spots where you got a good overview of your teammates so most enemies you kill are people that are just cross-map walking and try to get into action when they see it and these aren't much of a threat. If you kill an enemy sniper, you could see it as preventing the enemy for getting some kills. If you kill a Human in Infection you helped your teammates more than by killing 3 zombies as a Human. So one kill on a high-value target would count as more points cause you prevent him to cause more deaths to your team, so your team also gets more kills and you eventually will get his power Weapon(or one of your teammates grabs it). I don't get why most people in my team are simply afraid of enemies with power weapons. I try to kill them no matter what and if i lose the battle but the enemy has low shields and, my teammates, instead of finishing him, run away. You know, retreating isn't always ''advancing to a later victory'', if the enemy is weak and you're with 1 or 2 teammates close to him go get him cause it's better than having to face him later with full shields and when your teammates aren't there.