@Hackman84, would you say that ETQW has a learning curve? Would you agree that it takes practice to get good at ETQW? If you do agree, then that means play time is directly and significantly related to skill.
The flawed logic you may be using is: Although it may be true that two players with the same XP/rank may still have different skill levels, it would be false to conclude there is no correlation between skill and practice time. It just means that XP/rank is not an absolute indicator of skill level, and/or that the correlation is not perfect. You may also be confusing play-style with skill. Consider the possibility that a skilled player may still choose to play in a manner that prefers personal gain over team gain.
In the current permanent stats design, many feel that improvements are reflected “too slowly”. I happen to agree with you, in that you have identified one area of permanent stat design in which ETQW falls short. The nature of accumulated stats is that any one score dilutes the pool of collected scores, or put another way, the greater the selection set, the less impact has any one sample. One way around this would be to have a running total of most recent scores in addition to all scores. Currently, the game has such a running total: Unfortunately its limited to one campaign and unfortunately one campaign inadequately represents achievement. What is needed are several totals, perhaps selected by the player, such as; overall total, total of last XXX games, e.g. last 300 games total, last 30 games total, and last campaign total.
I gave you an actual example of how stats can influence new players. This was in response to your contention that stats don’t influence new players. Of course my comments reflect my personal preferences, but that is what the person wanted to hear – were my personal preferences.
Although I strongly prefer PS3, I do play both PC and PS3. There are good players and yahoos in both camps and among other things there are community differences. However, I can say that even though the controls may differ, the game play does not significantly differ. Lots of folks have strong opinions, but that doesn’t mean the games are significantly different.
Since one person’s opinion is as valid as another’s, then although many disagree, as long as one person (in this case the first ranked player) holds stats to be worthwhile that would mean that stats are not “useless”, for whatever valid/invalid reason each person has.
