156 replies to this topic

[Mercurial]

I have to ask that if stats are it takes to turn a player into a raging jerkbag or a rage-quitting soreloser, how easy it going to be to get them to that state anyway?

I like stats, damn it: It's a good way to actually *see* how I'm progressing in my game, and how I compare to other players, especially around my experience/style of gameplay.

[Frostiken]

Mercurial, on 14 June 2012 - 04:25 PM, said:

I like stats, damn it: It's a good way to actually *see* how I'm progressing in my game, and how I compare to other players, especially around my experience/style of gameplay.

This is exactly what I mean. It's not a matter of people being jackasses, it's people like you.

You want stats to "compare yourself to other players". Why? Do you feel inferior in games without stats-tracking? What do you think you realize you aren't stacking up against others? What do you consider important in your stats?

Before you know, it, people exactly like you who really want to improve their completely meaningless, pointless dick-sizes at each other are ignoring defense and going for kills, refusing to support teammates because you can chase down a light mech instead and get another kill, and in general, completely alter your playstyle in a way that maximizes your points, but not necessarily your effectiveness.

In Tribes: Ascend, some of the most useful roles will net you awful death rates and terrible scoreboard rankings. Being a midfield champion might be fun and get you lots of points, but usually you're not being as useful as you want to believe.

If you are using your stats to "see your progress" and "compare yourself to other players", this means you and everyone else who has said anything even remotely like this means that they use stats to judge their worth in games. Anyone with an ounce of brains can objectively infer from this that this means you would measure personal improvements by maximizing out your stats, and thus it becomes a competition of "who has the largest e-peen". Whether you know it or not, this means that you're now consciously or subconsciously putting your stats before anything else. Next thing you know, you're trying to stack teams with players you know are good and ragequit games that aren't going to help your stats.

Edited by Frostiken, 14 June 2012 - 04:32 PM.

[Mercurial]

Frostiken, on 14 June 2012 - 04:29 PM, said:

This is exactly what I mean. It's not a matter of people being jackasses, it's people like you.

You want stats to "compare yourself to other players". Why? Do you feel inferior in games without stats-tracking? What do you think you realize you aren't stacking up against others? What do you consider important in your stats?

Before you know, it, people exactly like you who really want to improve their completely meaningless, pointless dick-sizes at each other are ignoring defense and going for kills, refusing to support teammates because you can chase down a light mech instead and get another kill, and in general, completely alter your playstyle in a way that maximizes your points, but not necessarily your effectiveness.

In Tribes: Ascend, some of the most useful roles will net you awful death rates and terrible scoreboard rankings. Being a midfield champion might be fun and get you lots of points, but usually you're not being as useful as you want to believe.

If you are using your stats to "see your progress" and "compare yourself to other players", this means you and everyone else who has said anything even remotely like this means that they use stats to judge their worth in games. Anyone with an ounce of brains can objectively infer from this that this means you would measure personal improvements by maximizing out your stats, and thus it becomes a competition of "who has the largest e-peen". Whether you know it or not, this means that you're now consciously or subconsciously putting your stats before anything else. Next thing you know, you're trying to stack teams with players you know are good and ragequit games that aren't going to help your stats.

Wow, way to set up a straw man argument.

It has nothing to do with dick-waving. It's not just about kill-death ratio. A good stat breakdown allows me to see where I might improve as a player. If my K/D ratio is higher but I have less targets scouted and sighted, I have to ask the question if that makes me a better player or if other light pilots are focusing on being better scouts--and decide how I feel about my playstyle. If I'm scouting more targets but my damage is low and my K/D ratio is suffering against other Scout pilots, I should consider if that means playing more aggressive--or hell, if I'm suited to Scout at all. Same with judging my performance vs. Medium/Heavy Assault. That's all interesting to me and from my perspective you claiming that such a thing makes me some lower form of player--how dare I be interested in how I'm performing in a competitive multiplayer environment--is incredibly rude, probably more rude then the behavior you're describing! You don't even know me as a player, don't make a bunch of assumptions about me because I like stat-tracking. That's what the people you're describing supposedly do.

You'll notice in that tirade that at no point did I infer that I was judging other players--I was judging myself. That's because I'm a freaking healthy human being who enjoys their hobby and likes to see how they progress. If a guy is somehow objectively doing worse then me (whatever that means), I'm not going to give the guy a hard time or anything like that--I'm probably going to shrug. Now if I start to see I'm doing a little better then average--great, this is probably the weight class for me! Or great, I seem to be picking up this game! If I'm struggling, well it's time to look at what I can do better. And yes, a post-match breakdown also helps me figure out if a team loss was beacuse I was underperforming or if we were all struggling or if one guy was killed within a minute of a match.

You know nothing about me. I don't team stack, because I'm frankly not the kind of guy who rolls in big groups or stays that organized--if I find friends I'll play with them yes, but I'm more interested in people I enjoy playing with (ironically, sore losers are one of my biggest pet peeves). I don't ragequit. EVER, because losses are important to me because they teach me more about the game. I use stats in stat-tracking games to, as I said, see where I'm improving, where my weaknesses are, and yes--to see how I stand out (which frankly is often not very much!) against other players.

But what you're doing right now? Jerk behavior. And you didn't even need stat-tracking for it.

Edited by Mercurial, 14 June 2012 - 05:34 PM.

[Melcyna]

Frostiken, on 14 June 2012 - 04:29 PM, said:

This is exactly what I mean. It's not a matter of people being jackasses, it's people like you.

You want stats to "compare yourself to other players". Why? Do you feel inferior in games without stats-tracking? What do you think you realize you aren't stacking up against others? What do you consider important in your stats?

Before you know, it, people exactly like you who really want to improve their completely meaningless, pointless dick-sizes at each other are ignoring defense and going for kills, refusing to support teammates because you can chase down a light mech instead and get another kill, and in general, completely alter your playstyle in a way that maximizes your points, but not necessarily your effectiveness.

In Tribes: Ascend, some of the most useful roles will net you awful death rates and terrible scoreboard rankings. Being a midfield champion might be fun and get you lots of points, but usually you're not being as useful as you want to believe.

If you are using your stats to "see your progress" and "compare yourself to other players", this means you and everyone else who has said anything even remotely like this means that they use stats to judge their worth in games. Anyone with an ounce of brains can objectively infer from this that this means you would measure personal improvements by maximizing out your stats, and thus it becomes a competition of "who has the largest e-peen". Whether you know it or not, this means that you're now consciously or subconsciously putting your stats before anything else. Next thing you know, you're trying to stack teams with players you know are good and ragequit games that aren't going to help your stats.

Translation:

"You may or may not turn into a stat ***** but i say you definitely will become one because i am an expert...
And I don't like the way you play the game, you should play the game the way i like it with no stat..."

congratulations, you have effectively become the person you hated the most... ie: the kind of players who would be stat focused and berate others with it because they don't fulfill some sort of expectations.

the only difference is that one has his head filled with stat, the other one (ie: you) hates it with all their guts and blame every disaster on it..

You know what, both of the sides are just as bad, and the ones in the middle are frankly tired of being yanked one way or another by the 2 idiotic sides.

[Frostiken]

Bullshit.

If stats don't affect how people play, next you're going to tell me that achievements don't subtly encourage people to go after them. Wait, it turns out that achievements, utterly pointless-beyond-belief little 'yay for you' gold stars you can tack onto a page where nobody will ever care about them, are more popular than Jesus.

Do you even have a rudimentary understanding of the basics of psychology, particularly concerning why people do things and feelings of reward / gratification? You know what happens if you put electrodes in the pleasure centers of a mouse's brain, and make it so when he pushes a button it gets stimulated? The mice starve to death every time.

Inability to enjoy something without a third party telling you you deserve to feel good is a mental illness. Stats-addiction has so thoroughly mentally warped some of you that you are utterly unable to even decide if you're good at the game or not without pie charts and line graphs to tell you that you are.

Should I even approach the other side of the issue, and how obsessively comparing yourself to others generally manifests itself as an inferiority complex? You know all that crap you hear in the news about how girls are getting depressed and eating disorders are on the rise, because of airbrushed hyper-thin models making them think they're too fat, unattractive, and ugly?

I think you can see the parallel.

Edited by Frostiken, 14 June 2012 - 07:35 PM.

[Jayboltz]

Look at people that play WoW and spend hours doing POINTLESS things like fishing so that they can have a little placard that says they've done so. Its really really sad that people can be driven to do such pointless things. But I don't consider achievements to be in the same boat as stat tracking.

Stat tracking is basically a continuous measuring of how well you're doing. Achievements just state that you've completed some mundane task.

I think stats have a place in competetive gameplay, but in just normal play I think they're a nuisance.

Achievements are just a false sense of accomplishment.

[Frostiken]

Jayboltz, on 14 June 2012 - 07:37 PM, said:

Stat tracking is basically a continuous measuring of how well you're doing. Achievements just state that you've completed some mundane task.

Achievements are just a false sense of accomplishment.

Stats might make it worse because once you have an achievement, you're done with it. Stats have no baseline and require constant maintenance. It's more like an achievement you have to earn every day.

I have a 400 SPM in BF3. For any inferior person, they'd look at this and go '400 SPM, that's pretty good' and feel good about themselves.

They then have three choices - play for score even more to try to get it higher, continue what they're doing and maintain it, or change playstyle and their SPM slips.

What do you think they're going to do?



I get killed by people in Battlefield that have like 20,000 kills with the M320 grenade launcher. They do this by playing Metro over and over, for several hours a day. Run up the stairs, fire grenade launcher, get kills, die, get revived, repeat. Over and over.

Do you think these people are doing this, for hundreds of hours, because what they're doing is really fun, or are they doing it because they're getting mental gratification out of having a ridiculous number of M320 kills they can show off?

http://battlelog.bat...tats/335120328/

Here's the guy at the top of the global leaderboards for the Assault kit. 29k kills with the grenade launcher, 3x more than with any other weapon. His play history is metro, metro, and more metro. His SPM is 1500, KDR is over 3.5, and he has nearly 1,000 hours played. That is absolutely no less than 4 hours, every single day since the game launched, playing Metro, with his grenade launcher in hand.

I dare you to tell me that that's healthy behavior, and isn't motivated by stats whatsoever.

Edited by Frostiken, 14 June 2012 - 07:52 PM.

[Rejarial Galatan]

Sierra19, on 14 June 2012 - 04:20 PM, said:

I have no problem with stat tracking. It is one easy, quick, and good way that devs can check balancing within the game. If a mech in a particular weight class is outperforming it's peers, then things can be adjusted accordingly. If there is no stat tracking, people will come up with a way to do it anyway, through a program or spreadsheet they devise. It's a good tool to help yourself also. Whether you choose to become a slave to your stats is up to you.

so um... let the devs have stat tracking for developmental purposes, and not let us know a bloody thing. lets face it. this will turn into a fight of who has the best kill/death rates or who is a better scout or some other yadda yadda. Look. Once the stat thing gets started, there is no way for it to end peacefully for any of us. For example, on Battlefield 3. Let us look at a Sniper for example. You would say a kill of 1000+ meters is good. Would you also say having killed 3736 players (for a casual player who plays off and on mind you for an hour here or 3 there) is good? What about having been killed 5693 times as being bad? What about having killed 1126 vehicles and having 199 vehicular destroy assists as good or bad? What about a head shot at 1291.15 meters? If you have not guessed, these are my own PERSONAL stats from battlefield 3 on 360. Would you say I am a good or bad player based solely on what I have listed?
Okay here, let us say, you say I am a bad player in general. Would it matter to you of a good portion of those deaths are from me screwing around and padding a buddies score? Change your view? What about the fact that 500 or so are self inflicted deaths from miss judging a jump or parachute open time? OR some of the others are from being beyond bored and dropping buildings on myself with C4 just to LOWER my stats to avoid the hard core players?
Okay, what now, if I told you I have 4 service stars in the MBT or 5 stars in the M240B or 2 each in the M249 and L96? These are all just numbers and are utterly meaningless. Why? Simple, they do not tell you how I actually fight or if I am lethal or lucky. The point of the matter is, there are going to be players who have 'god like' stats and will lord it over others and make those they deem worthless or below them miserable.
I say let the Developers track stats so they can better our experience, but, please, do not let us see our stats open to the public. IF they want to give us a way to see our stats privately, I am all for that, but, not for making them a public spectacle.

[Jayboltz]

Frostiken, on 14 June 2012 - 07:44 PM, said:

Stats might make it worse because once you have an achievement, you're done with it. Stats have no baseline and require constant maintenance. It's more like an achievement you have to earn every day.

I have a 400 SPM in BF3. For any inferior person, they'd look at this and go '400 SPM, that's pretty good' and feel good about themselves.

They then have three choices - play for score even more to try to get it higher, continue what they're doing and maintain it, or change playstyle and their SPM slips.

What do you think they're going to do?



I get killed by people in Battlefield that have like 20,000 kills with the M320 grenade launcher. They do this by playing Metro over and over, for several hours a day. Run up the stairs, fire grenade launcher, get kills, die, get revived, repeat. Over and over.

Do you think these people are doing this, for hundreds of hours, because what they're doing is really fun, or are they doing it because they're getting mental gratification out of having a ridiculous number of M320 kills they can show off?

http://battlelog.bat...tats/335120328/

Here's the guy at the top of the global leaderboards for the Assault kit. 29k kills with the grenade launcher, 3x more than with any other weapon. His play history is metro, metro, and more metro. His SPM is 1500, KDR is over 3.5, and he has nearly 1,000 hours played.


I dare you to tell me that that's healthy behavior, and isn't motivated by stats whatsoever.

Well I couldn't defend someone who does that regardless of any of those facts. When I played battlefield 3, I stayed far, far away from those zerg maps. Even the big maps felt waaay to small. Then again people play solitaire on a computer for hours, and that I also seriously cant understand...

[Rejarial Galatan]

@Frostiken: that sort of player scares the hell out of me, also a Colonel SS 100? NO LIFE. I am a Colonel SS 2. Yea, I dumped some hours into it, but not to this level of obscenity. Ok, so I may have 500+ kills with the 240B but, that is more open up and dont stop till it goes click click click lol.

[BlindProphet]

Frostiken, on 14 June 2012 - 04:29 PM, said:

This is exactly what I mean. It's not a matter of people being jackasses, it's people like you.

You want stats to "compare yourself to other players". Why? Do you feel inferior in games without stats-tracking? What do you think you realize you aren't stacking up against others? What do you consider important in your stats?

I <3 stats. I don't feel inferior without stat tracking. I like comparing my stats to those of others. Why because it shows me what I am skilled at, and where I have room for improvement from a non biased view point. Statistics don't lie. On top of that, I enjoy doing statistical analysis and theory crafting. I've done it for years in other games.

What stats do I find important? Well that depends on what stats are available, and for what role, ect. The more stats available the better.

My personality type is INTJ if you're curious. I'm also a computer programmer. Statistics, theory, ect regarding all this? It comes entirely naturally to me.

Quote

Before you know, it, people exactly like you who really want to improve their completely meaningless, pointless dick-sizes at each other are ignoring defense and going for kills, refusing to support teammates because you can chase down a light mech instead and get another kill, and in general, completely alter your playstyle in a way that maximizes your points, but not necessarily your effectiveness.

I'm just going to point out...in a game thats likely going to reward you some of your xp based on damage done, mechs killed, etc. that this is going to happen regardless of stats. I know back in the days of non stat tracked games, even on modes where the team completeing an objective was important, people still went after kills at the expense of the team. That behavior is not caused by statistics.

You go on in another post about mice and pleasure centers and how they'll starve to death pressing that button. Guess what? Scorring a kill? Thats the same kinda feedback as those probes in the mouses brain. Just like an achievement. To some, scoring team points gives the same effect. And so on and so forth.

Quote

In Tribes: Ascend, some of the most useful roles will net you awful death rates and terrible scoreboard rankings. Being a midfield champion might be fun and get you lots of points, but usually you're not being as useful as you want to believe.

If you are using your stats to "see your progress" and "compare yourself to other players", this means you and everyone else who has said anything even remotely like this means that they use stats to judge their worth in games. Anyone with an ounce of brains can objectively infer from this that this means you would measure personal improvements by maximizing out your stats, and thus it becomes a competition of "who has the largest e-peen". Whether you know it or not, this means that you're now consciously or subconsciously putting your stats before anything else. Next thing you know, you're trying to stack teams with players you know are good and ragequit games that aren't going to help your stats.

Actually no, you're not objectively inferring that. You have a bias against people who like stats, and comparing them. This is evidenced in the early part of your post as well as the later part here.

Beyond that yes if I see a area in which I am technically deficient I will likely try to improve that area if i find that area to need improvement. If my damage per game is low and I've played nothing but scout mechs? Yeah I'm probably not going to go out of my way to improve that as thats obviously not a focus of my role. Contradictory to what you claim i would do. Will I try to go out and kill things in my scout mech? Hell yeah. Am I going to do it to the detriment of my team on occasion? Sure thing! I mean its going to happen, I'm not going to deny it. There are going to be games where I screw around. There are going to be games where I don't see my team doing anything with the information I'm giving them and decide to take matters into my own hands, etc etc etc.

I'll leave you with some fun facts...If you're a good player you are going to end up with good stats. If you're a bad player you're going to end up with bad stats. If you're an average player you're going to end up with average stats. If you don't know where your faults are, you're not going to improve them.

[Frostiken]

If you need stats to tell you where your faults are, you're probably not a very good player.

[BlindProphet]

Frostiken, on 14 June 2012 - 07:44 PM, said:

I dare you to tell me that that's healthy behavior, and isn't motivated by stats whatsoever.

I dare you to prove to me he would not do the same thing if there were no stats.

Also he could enjoy killing noobs with grenade launchers. i know its crazy talk, but some people like certain maps, and certain guns, and play them almost exclusively. maybe he's doing it for stats. maybe not...but you can't prove he's motivated entirely by stats and does not enjoy what he's doing.

Also using extreme cases to prove your point? Yeah bad form. Outliers exist. One should not base an argument around them. Lets use the way you're arguing in another example:

We should ban peanuts from being sold to private citizens. They're obviously not healthy because that individual over there, and others can have extreme deadly reactions to them. Because of this no one should have peanuts.

This is essentially your argument...

[Rejarial Galatan]

blindprophet, on 14 June 2012 - 07:59 PM, said:

I <3 stats. I don't feel inferior without stat tracking. I like comparing my stats to those of others. Why because it shows me what I am skilled at, and where I have room for improvement from a non biased view point. Statistics don't lie. On top of that, I enjoy doing statistical analysis and theory crafting. I've done it for years in other games.
<snip>

the BIU portion of your statement was done by myself. Let me make this absolutely clear: Statistics can and DO lie. Want proof? My longest head shot in BF3 is yes, 1291 meters. Yes that did take tremendous skill with the M98B with a 12x scope. But what that statistic does NOT say is: My buddy was on the other side standing absolutely still, in an XBL party with me and walking my shot into his bloody head! Did it take skill to actually HIT him at that range? YES. Why? I could not see him at ALL. He had to fire at me just so I could see muzzle flash to even GUESS where he was. Do not rely on statistics to be 100% accurate or you are in for an absolutely rude awakening when you see Player A with 100% boosted statistics that LOOK awesome and think they will be of any use and disregard the guy whose statistics are in the toilette because he chooses to screw around <much like myself> but can actually fight at a much higher level than the statistics would suggest.
My statistics on BF3 are actually very misleading. I have almost 2000 more deaths than I do kills, but this is because I tend to F-Around and appreciate the obscene detail in that game more than I fight. I am willing to bet that a good majority of you <the players of BF3 on any platform> do not know that when a tree is felled in BF3 its stump has rings, or that the cars on say Seine Crossing have tires that can actually be flattened with the repair torch <only tried this at US Spawn <conquest mode>>! Did you know also that the trees sway some on some maps? I know this because I fart around. BUT, when forced to choose between screwing around or getting killed I tend to come out swinging and I can kill with the best of em.

[BlindProphet]

Frostiken, on 14 June 2012 - 08:01 PM, said:

If you need stats to tell you where your faults are, you're probably not a very good player.

Yup question our abilities to pilot mechs! That'll win your argument!

Seriously though, depending on how deep the stats are you can gain a wealth of knowledge about what you are good and bad at that you may not even realize.

For example. I play world of tanks. I did not for a single second enjoy playing my IS tank. I hated it. I did not enjoy it. I thought I did horrible in it. When I much later looked back at my stats regarding the thing I did above average in a tank I thought was a horrible piece of trash.

Lets also say for example the stats display where you most often you get hit. After hundreds and thousands of battle you may not even notice that you tend to leave your right side more exposed than your left. Your stats however won't forget this.

You can also infer all sorts of other wonderful information about your playstyle that you may even not realize.

[Rejarial Galatan]

blindprophet, on 14 June 2012 - 08:17 PM, said:

Yup question our abilities to pilot mechs! That'll win your argument!

Seriously though, depending on how deep the stats are you can gain a wealth of knowledge about what you are good and bad at that you may not even realize.

For example. I play world of tanks. I did not for a single second enjoy playing my IS tank. I hated it. I did not enjoy it. I thought I did horrible in it. When I much later looked back at my stats regarding the thing I did above average in a tank I thought was a horrible piece of trash.

Lets also say for example the stats display where you most often you get hit. After hundreds and thousands of battle you may not even notice that you tend to leave your right side more exposed than your left. Your stats however won't forget this.

You can also infer all sorts of other wonderful information about your playstyle that you may even not realize.

What you suggest, is private stats for your own use. What the issue I think is, is making our stats available for every person to see, and form cliques based on how well some one does. If you want private stats to assess your play style, and find where you could polish, that is fine, and hell, I even support that sort of thing, but, please, and I think a lot of people agree: Public stats can ruin a game.

[BlindProphet]

Rejarial Galatan, on 14 June 2012 - 08:10 PM, said:

the BIU portion of your statement was done by myself. Let me make this absolutely clear: Statistics can and DO lie. Want proof? My longest head shot in BF3 is yes, 1291 meters. Yes that did take tremendous skill with the M98B with a 12x scope. But what that statistic does NOT say is: My buddy was on the other side standing absolutely still, in an XBL party with me and walking my shot into his bloody head! Did it take skill to actually HIT him at that range? YES. Why? I could not see him at ALL. He had to fire at me just so I could see muzzle flash to even GUESS where he was. Do not rely on statistics to be 100% accurate or you are in for an absolutely rude awakening when you see Player A with 100% boosted statistics that LOOK awesome and think they will be of any use and disregard the guy whose statistics are in the toilette because he chooses to screw around <much like myself> but can actually fight at a much higher level than the statistics would suggest.
My statistics on BF3 are actually very misleading. I have almost 2000 more deaths than I do kills, but this is because I tend to F-Around and appreciate the obscene detail in that game more than I fight. I am willing to bet that a good majority of you <the players of BF3 on any platform> do not know that when a tree is felled in BF3 its stump has rings, or that the cars on say Seine Crossing have tires that can actually be flattened with the repair torch <only tried this at US Spawn <conquest mode>>! Did you know also that the trees sway some on some maps? I know this because I fart around. BUT, when forced to choose between screwing around or getting killed I tend to come out swinging and I can kill with the best of em.

I want to point out that something here. Your statistics do not lie. Your longest kill was 1291 meters. What someone might infer from that could be wrong, or incorrect, but the statistic that you killed a player at 1291 meters is 100% truth.

The data might not tell the whole story, that is correct. Singular points of data rarely do shed the whole light on something. Hence my constantly saying the more data we have available the better. Also hence my stating multiple times earlier in the thread that statistics don't tell the whole story, but do lead you to questions that should be asked. "So man you have 2000 more deaths than kills...why is that?" To which your answer would be "I screw around alot and have fun" where my answer might be "I play medic alot and tend to focus on providing healing and reviving teammates almost to the exclusion of firing at the enemy a lot of the time because no one else will".

Data itself does not lie(unless fabricated, or bugged). What we infer from said data however might be incorrect. But I hardly see 'people think stupid things' is a reason to deny us visibility into statistics...

[OnLashoc]

The Nanny State has arrived to MWO! YEAAAAAAAWWWR!!!


Seriously, I loved the old Zone Stats. It told ya how much damage you did and received, kills, deaths, suicides etc. Lots and lots of useful info. You can always choose NOT to look at if you don't like it.

Edited by OnLashoc, 14 June 2012 - 08:30 PM.

[BlindProphet]

Rejarial Galatan, on 14 June 2012 - 08:24 PM, said:

What you suggest, is private stats for your own use. What the issue I think is, is making our stats available for every person to see, and form cliques based on how well some one does. If you want private stats to assess your play style, and find where you could polish, that is fine, and hell, I even support that sort of thing, but, please, and I think a lot of people agree: Public stats can ruin a game.

No what I suggest is a extremely large volume of statistical information be made available publicly for each player. I've suggested that from the first time I posted in this thread. The more stats PUBLICLY available the better.

Guess what? Those cliques of players? Yeah they're going to form regardless of if there's stats or not.

Also a lot of people have agreed on a lot of things. The world is flat. The sun revolves around the earth. And so on and so forth. Just because a lot of people agree does not make them correct.

[Rejarial Galatan]

Where the statistics start to lie is when boosting to the Nth degree is involved. Lets say for example, a group of friends pays 500 some microsoft points to rent a server on BF3. Lets say this group of friends is 24 players, and 12 of them are using a secondary account to boost the stats of the first 12. Take this 'sacrificial' account crew and lets have them run up to the first crew who are there to make stats. They each get a turn killing the 12 a few times and then the match ends. They do this time and time and time again <anyone else see that dictator dude from Iron Eagle in their heads when they read: time and time and time again or is that just me? > and now have amazing statistics that read by someone who doesnt know that they spent a week boosting like this would think they are good players, not until the fat hits the fire atleast. Dont always believe the stats is all I am saying.