Everyone sees statistics the way they want to see them. In baseball statistics are God... in football, they're often dismissed as meaningless.

I know you're a football guy, so I'd recommend The Blind Side by Michael Lewis. I haven't finished it yet, but he makes the argument that football is in the middle of this sort of economic/stats revolution, which is part of why teams have started to pay their often anonymous left offensive tackle top-of-the-league kinds of dollars over the last decade or so. Lewis mostly talks about how teams learned to respect the LT position, but there's an undercurrent that football has always been dominated by "go with your gut" guys who are doomed to be usurped by the Bill Belichicks who are hoarding and microanalysing draft picks. If you've read Moneyball, it's essentially the same thesis.

I think CF has a similar problem in that the oft-cited statistics might not be the best ones. (I don't claim to know the best ones.) There's a culture, but some characters and players are definitely over- or under-appreciated. PK ratio, kills/hour, gank-o-meter, etc. are all good starts, but I wouldn't trust any of that over the opinion of a couple veterans who had fought the character in question a lot. Kills/hour is useless if you're comparing a guy who does nothing but fight with a guy who spends a lot of time exploring and RPing. Etc.

And don't get me started on why average yds/carry is much less useful to a coach than median yards/carry. :)

valguarnera@carrionfields.com