Why K-D-A is a deceiving statistic and should be looked into
Hey everyone, LifeCyclesTWA here. Feels free to skip ahead to the TL;DR section, please leave a comment and I will do my best to get back to you. Read all of the post if possible please :] In my last thread, "Why I Will Never Gank for a Feeder" (link: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/0AEvyn5p-why-i-will-never-gank-for-a-feeder) one of the topics I wrote about the importance of bounties and the impact it has on the game. One of the points is how deceiving of a statistic KDA is due to how bounties work.
First off, what is the point of a kill? I would say you are trying to kill the opposing champion to deny them experience, gold, to achieve objectives, and to prevent them from denying your teammates the chance to earn exp/gold. All this while giving yourself an exp and gold advantage.
What happens when you die? It depends on the point of the game and who you are. EVERYTHING is situational. If you are mid and you die to their mid laner, you gave their mid free experience and gold, in addition to the ability to achieve objectives because their team outnumbers yours now. Basically, they get all the benefits listed above. There are good deaths though, like if the enemy team chases you across the map when they should be pushing, thus gave up an opportunity to push down your turret (possibly an inhib) just to kill you. There are many examples, again the phrase here "Everything is situational."
So what does KDA reflect? Nothing at all whatsoever except for kill participation, even then that can arguably be a worthless statistic. How can K+A be worthless? If you are on a team that is behind and is constantly forcing 4v5 teamfight that you clearly have no chance of winning (this happens a lot in low elo play) and you are aware they are jumping into a shitty situation and they do not heed your warnings/pings, you may have shitty kill-participation. If you are a split-pushing top laner and your team is playing over-aggressively and forcing 4v5s... you will have shitty kill participation.
KDA doesn't determine whether or not you are a "N00b f33der". You can go 10-10-0 right? That doesn't tell you anything. Did you die 10 straight times, and then pull some miraculous comeback and get 10 straight kills? Did you trade evenly with the opposing laner and you both left the laning phase fed as hell?
A kill in the first 4 minutes of a game isn't worth the same as a kill in the last 4 minutes of the game. You actually get less gold for kills made in the first 4 minutes. Why do we record kills when they mean absolutely nothing? Why not instead record gold earned/given up? Why not record how much champions are worth? This would provide a more accurate reflection of actual performance and would help players be more knowledgeable about the decisions they make.
TL;DR - Killing, dying, and assisting are very vague and untelling statistics that are very deceiving to the playerbase and should be replaced by more useful ones such the amount of gold said person has earned, how much they are worth, and how much they have given up.
