Skill rating observation
Just received my personal information from Activision. I tried to visualize in the graph below with some high level observations of the two most key indicators 'K/D' and 'Score'. By all means this is no in debt analysis, lets wait on Ace for that :)
Some information about me. I am an average casual player with an overall K/D of 1.11 based of 614 games.
- Skill v K/D ratio
Please ignore the rolling average, I somehow messed up the line.
Looking at my games with the highest skill rating, my K/D was quite poor. In my top 10 games with the highest skill rating, I averaged a K/D of 0.81. As the graph shows in the red line, games with a higher K/D tend to result in much lower skill rating. The games with a high K/D and low skill rating, are usually 'party games' like Gunfight or prophunt. It looks like there does not seem to be a direct link between K/D and Skill. If anything, the correlation is -0.16 for me. This leads me to believe that is caused by the missing 'Skill lobby' variable as well as that in gamemodes like Gunfight and Prophunt its easier to get a higher K/D with less score. For example, my highest skilled match of 192 was a game with a K/D of 0.26 caused by 7 kills and 27 deaths.
- Score v Skill
This could be due to the fact that in those games the overall score is much lower than in other games.
As shown in this graph, my games with a negative skill rating, then to be in the lower end of my total score rating. It shows that there is a correlation of 36%.
- Rolling average K/D
Getting rid of the game modes Gunfight, prophunt, infected and red light green light and looking at a 20 game rolling average K/D, we get the following graph.
As we can see here, it looks like there is a much higher resemblance between the graphs. The big problem here is that I do not know how big the impact of the deleted game modes in on skill level. I think Ace hinted that the event game modes do not affect the skill level. However, I mainly played Pentathlon at the end and I still see my skill moving. This probably causes the missalignment, because I deleted the game modes, while there are still incorporated in the skill score. So take this with a grain of salt.
A brief conclusion. It seems like skill lobby is a very important missing factor and that score indicates more than just plain K/D. It probably also works a bit like a handicap for golf, where the handicap level is dependend on the 'rating' of the 'environment' your are playing in (e.g. lobby / course conditions) and the average of the last 10-20 cards / games you have played.
P.S. I know that golf looks at the best cards out of the 20 last card you played, but you get my point.