So I started a thread on this forum asking anybody who has never dropped as a premade to post a screenshot of their stats. Lots of people responded by posting their stats, and in total, I had gathered 31 data points (sorry, if you typed your stats, they weren't included, l2 read instructions
![^_^](https://static.mwomercs.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/tongue.png)
Cool.
Hypothesis
I went into this with the hypothesis that the win/loss ratio of pugs would cluster at around 1:1 indicating that they are, on average, giving as good as they get.
Findings
![Posted Image](http://i.imgur.com/uMDsU5N.jpg)
In this chart we can clearly see the distribution of both kill/death ratio and win/loss ratio. As I predicted, the win/loss ratio appears distributed around the 1 line, indicating a near 1:1 win/loss ratio for pugs. The average win/loss ratio is 0.92:1 with a standard deviation of 0.31. This is very close to 1 and represents a strong rebuke to pugs who claim they are constantly being steamrolled due to the fact that they are pugging. Some pugs are losing more than they are winning, some are losing and winning about the same number of matches, and some pugs are winning more than losing. This data suggests that a total steamroll of all pugs always, is unlikely.
On the other hand, win loss ratios are comparatively high at 1.49:1 with a standard deviation of 1.11. My guess is that kill/death ratios are higher because this stat is more dependent on personal skill, and mech loadout. If you're a good player with a good mech, on a bad team, you might well take out 2 or more enemy mechs before losing.
With my hypothesis proven correct, I started to look at other things I could do with the data so I tried to correlate some of the stats.
![Posted Image](http://i.imgur.com/MaUdQdj.jpg)
What I found was that the only thing that really correlated strongly were kill/death ratio and win/loss ratio. However, I was disappointed to see no strong relationship between player performance and the amount of MC in their accounts.
![Posted Image](http://i.imgur.com/Za3dMNb.jpg)
So, I decided to split up the data into one group of participants who had MC in their accounts and one group that didn't have MC and compare their average performance. In this chart, we can see that people with MC in their accounts experienced a 51% improvement in kill/death ratio over non-paying pugs. However, in terms of win/loss ratio, the numbers did show a slight advantage for paying pugs, but after running a t test, the p value exceeded 0.05, so take that result with a grain of salt.
Conclusion
Based on the sample, the pug player experience is not uniformly bad; as a group, they are very close to a 1:1 win/loss ratio and a 1.49:1 kill/death ratio. While personal experience for pugs varies by individual, it is not accurate to state that all pugs are experiencing catastrophic losses. If you are constantly being steamrolled as a pug, you should be looking towards personal improvement, rather than looking towards the developers to elevate pugs as a group, because as a group, they're already very close to a 1:1 win/loss ratio.
Furthermore, if you are a pug and are looking to improve your win/loss ratio, there is a relationship between having MC in your account and your kill/death ratio, there is also a relationship between between kill/death ratio and win/loss ratio. And before anyone says it, yes, I know correlation is not causation. I make no claims of the existence of causal links here.
Raw data
If anyone more experienced with statistics than I am would like to poke around the raw data, here's the excel file.
https://www.dropbox....fw8e/TXdkfNMzOP
If the devs would like to weigh in with the actual pug performance stats, I would be really interested to see how well it lines up with my small sample.