Total newborn alpha here. Hoping someone can help me figure out those zkillboard stats. I’ve look online, but not to satisfaction.
What is the measure of success?
What is considered good?
What do the stats mean, in terms of ISK or LP that a pilot has gained (or lost out of pocket?)
For example, from someone’s stats I saw the other day:
If I take this at face value, the efficiency being less than 50%… my first reaction is “damn that’s an ass whooping”. But being new (I have no stats), I have no foreknowledge of what is considered “good”.
There are two ways to be “killboard green”: killing more ships than you lose, or destroying more estimated ISK value than you lose. You also have to consider the Gangs/Solo bar, because many people fly mainly in fleets and therefore may be less dangerous individually.
Generally speaking, we might define victory in a fight that wasn’t objective-based as coming out of the fight “ISK-positive”. In other words, you destroyed more value in ISK than you lost. This is by no means a useful statistic for defining a player as “successful”, but it is at least a more interesting statistic than K:D (because a player could farm rookie ships on an alt to artificially pump up their K:D ratio).
Also important to look at is amount of kills. A high sec care bear who once whored on a concord kill will have 1 kill, 0 losses, and so all stats will be at 100%. But he’s nobody to worry about. A PvPer on the other hand will have kills and losses nearly daily, and his totals will be in the hundreds or thousands (depending on age.)
Aside from group size, also consider the role he plays. A tackler will have more losses than a dps.
The stats listed are the amounts of ISK (and ships) the pilot has, or has had, destroyed. It is not the amount earned or looted.
What is good is sort of defined by who is looking but there are several important things to keep in mind. One, not all kills show up on zKill, only those shared by one of the parties so it may not be a complete history. Second, kills are shared amongst everyone who did damage, while losses are not. This means if 300 people explode a Titan, they all get credit for a 100B ISK, so even if they all lost their ships, everyone comes out massively ISK positive. So basically anyone who flies in large fleets appears efficient. Plus, they can be faked easily with alts or other special event kills.
All of these means killboards are mostly useless as a measurement of performance. Someone with an experienced eye can learn a lot about how you play the game by looking, but the summary numbers on their own aren’t much use beyond a measurement of activity.
I have yet to win a PVP fight, but I dont care about stats, that doesn’t matter to me. It is about isk. If I lose less than it cost to kill me, I win. No really I have been attacked by a Stratios while in a T1 Probe, he lost 3 T2 drones to my probe which at the time was at most 10mil. Overall I counted that as a win. Because it cost him more than he got from me.
Kill mark whores are the only people who care about kills.
The points are an arbitrary system that tries to describe how hard the fights were and is based on the relative power level of each of your ships and side of the fight.
Your killmails do not automatically appear on public sites like zKill. You need to give them permission using your logon credentials to pull them. The can though also be provided if the other guy, the other guy’s corp/alliance, or your corp/alliance does so. Therefore most kills do eventually end up there given a permanent record of when/how often you play (at least when you kill/lose ships) and what type of gameplay you partake in.
When you take kill-mail whoring into account (that’s where you shoot someone once just so you get on the kill mail, and therefore tracked on killboards) stats are imo largely irrelevant and meaningless
If you’re going to pvp
then pvp
the only important part