> So for the OP, the game might be easy. No issues. Perhaps the game just happens to suit his playing style better than previous Halos. Perhaps he woke up in November with mad skills. Perhaps he finally upgraded his internet connection or grew thumbs. The reason doesn’t matter. His easy necessitates someone else’s difficult.
First of all, K/D is not a good measure of skill. It doesn’t measure absolute values. It measures the average deviation from 1.0 K/D. And if you think about what that means, if we say that kills=skill (which is not the case, mind you), is that it basically measures the average skill difference of the player and their opponents. As if the matchmaking system was perfect and always matched likely skilled players, all K/D ratios would be approximately 1. So, for that reason, and many others, K/D is an invalid measure of skill.
That said, despite the fact that when someone’s K/D goes up, someone’s must go down, it doesn’t specify whose K/D must go down. And therefore doesn’t strictly mean that the game becoming easier for someone means it becomes more difficult for someone else.
For the sake of this argument, let’s assume K/D as our measure of skill, regardless of its actual capabilities. Obviously, if one’s K/D goes up by 0.2, it doesn’t mean someone’s drops by 0.2, no. It’s all obviously part of a larger, global shift in the player base. But whose K/D drops and whose goes up is the interesting part.
Again, let’s we simplify it to players with K/D above 1.0 being “good” and players below that being “bad”. An increase in skill gap would obviously mean a drop for the bad player and an increase for the good players. That makes sense because obviously this way both groups will move away from 1.0; that “state of zero skill”. On the other hand, if we flip the changes the other way around, so that K/D drops for good players and increases for bad players, it means both are pulled closer to that state of zero skill.
> Perhaps H4 is “easy” compared to past Halos, but posting “my K/D is like ginormously HUUUUUUUUGE in H4 man!” is not evidence that it has no skill gap. Since H4 is a zero-sum game, you just posted fantastic anecdotal evidence that H4 actually has a large skill gap.*
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> Simply because the mechanics in H4 may be easier than in past Halos (and they very well may be) does not necessitate a smaller skill gap.
Now, theoretical examples aside, what really happened to OP was probably a combination of them gaining more skill and a worse ranking system (which tends to amplify the effect of skill increase if you are in the top 50% of the player base). Ultimately, looking at an individual player’s evolution throughout the series hardly offers any insight to how the skill gap has evolved. It only tells how that player has evolved.
And yes, the ease of mechanics does affect skill gap. If you think something as simple as kill times. If we have a minimum kill time of value A and an average kill time of value B, the difference between points A and B corresponds to the ease of achieving that minimum kill time. Obviously, the bigger that difference is, the more practice it takes to get closer to the minimum kill time. And the amount of time required to practice something is the exact definition of skill gap (well, not the exact, but a simplified one). So, ease of mechanics directly corresponds to skill gap.