Solahma, on 27 March 2018 - 02:41 PM, said:
Not true. The opponents you go up against can vary in HP, yet the value for killing any opponent is the same. Perhaps you only target assault mechs as a priority. You will deal a lot more damage for every kill that you get. Compared to only targeting lights and mediums that require a lot less damage to destroy. Yet the value for each kill is the same according to your K/D stat.
This is strawmanning my position, I'm not talking about the averages of individual pilots.
I'm talking about the global average damage to kill a mech for example, that average doesn't change very much depending on who targets which weight class in what order. It obviously affects your own average damage, which isn't what I'm talking about here.
Global damage average is basically capped by the total durability times average number of kills per match, the population is large enough that your individual choice to focus assaults won't make a noticable difference to these averages.
You can imagine model scenarios where everyone gets more accurate and the average damage goes down due to increased efficiency, or everyone twists better and the average goes up and so forth. Or your example where everyone suddenly decides to always go for a certain tonnage priority in targeting which would indeed increase the average damage to the extent it increased the percentage of lighter mechs amongst the survivors on the winning team (though there is already a big to small targeting bias in the game I think), it obviously makes no difference on the losing side in cases where the whole team dies.
In reality though, the averages are mostly defined by average durability x kills, as examplified by the much higher average damage scores on the clan side in Faction Play because there are more hitpoints to chew through.
Skill is a factor in the sense that accurate shots lowers the averages, though skilled tanking increases them, not sure if they cancel out or not. I'm inclined to beleive that there is both a higher skill ceiling and a faster progression rate for accuracy than there is for tanking, which would net a reduction in average damage (again per match, not individual) as you go up the skill brackets, but that's speculation.
You could test it by sampling enough low and high end matches and compare the average damage scores, my personal guess is that the average total damage dealt per match is higher in tier 5 than in tier 1 most of the time.
The bottom line is that there is no reason to believe that a more skilled player base would net higher average stats, it's just as likely (if not more likely) to decrease them a little.
Edited by Sjorpha, 28 March 2018 - 01:55 AM.