Two things here.
50% of 475 is ~237. I've never witnessed that number myself whereas 150+ was actually a challenge set by Respawn for each map.
Another thing is that I'm referring to AP ratio (not a thing, but bare with me). In R2, a Titan death is 2% of the score, with a Pilot death being about 1%. We can't see how many times people die in R2, but even when you see scores of absolute blowouts you can see that the losing team still killed usually 10 or more Titans. Getting such high AP ratios in R2 would require you to take out a lot of Titans and not lose your own. With Core Abilities, no rechargeable shields and certain classes strategies being based on mitigating loss of health for damage, it's just not really possible.
I don't believe the "skill level" of R2 players is better with the higher polls, I just think that Titan combat has shifted to being team-tactical. The solo player who carries his team against an average group is gone. I suspect that my Attrition Win% must be close to 60% at best in R2.
Bounty Hunt has the opposite attribute. Right now, people don't understand the game type and it's so easy to Nuclear kill at least one Bounty Titan each round, especially Wave 2's since the lower skill player leaves all the minions making it super easy to get a Titan in the first minutes of the game. I like Bounty Hunt in R2, not just because pub-stomping is easy, but because I like the idea, but knowing that it was possible to improve in a solo-queue was a good thing.
In a game with aggressive SBMM and less skill gap with regular play *cough* Overwatch *cough*, I wouldn't feel like I'm improving.
I'm not the best at R2 but I'm also not sure what I could improve. Aim is good enough to beat anything I get the jump on, I can Phase Shift out of danger for the most part, and I've got air-strafing down (more so than I did in the original by far). I feel like I should be able to survive better as a Titan, but I've come to accept that a lot of the learning is more about understanding the encounter design, as opposed to using the abilities/aiming better.
It's strange because I'm so much better at R1 in terms of playing pub games, but at the same time, I feel like there's so much more room for improvement.
I think from now on, I'm going to avoid Bounty Hunt a bit. I feel like I've pretty much got it sorted on the default meta and atm it's for the community to catch up. It's a shame because I know that for me to improve in Attrition, I need to focus on getting better at Pilot vs. Pilot combat ;(
You must forgive my use of the term better. I didn't mean to say which one I preferred or suggest which is a "better" situation. I wanted to comment merely that scores were higher for the pub-stompers.
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I realise you may not have played R1, but really, combat is MUCH longer. Regardless, it's very misleading to suggest that general TTK is the same just because the raw numbers are there. When people report that you had more survivability in R1, it's due to a variety of factors.
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I don't understand why you don't feel like you're doing well in R2. Your gifs always look pretty good, and what I've played of the XBOX ONE version didn't seem different to the PS4 version. I'm sure it is in competitive play, but not in pubs unless your especially unlucky.
As for all of what your saying about time to kill, I get it, it's a little more survivable, but it's not that different. If your shot at by someone on a roof top with a clear sight on you, you were still likely dead. Look at videos like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebb60Vlqozk
People like you say that the TTK makes a huge difference, but it never stopped things like that happening. I'm not saying it isn't a difference, but to act like it's night and day isn't realistic. 70ms increase in time to kill is a difference, but it isn't as if it went from Halo 3 to Call of Duty. And there were other features that were straight up more powerful against pilots, like the Titan's themselves.
As for the skill level, no I wasn't suggesting it was higher in Titanfall 2, almost the opposite. The learning curve is a little lower, it's harder to do incredibly well because everything has been brought down to make everyone more killable.
Pilots are slightly more killable by small arms fire, making even the best players vulnerable if they make the wrong moves, while Titan's take permanent damage. Titanfall 2 makes everyone pay for their mistakes, Titanfall 1 forgave them, provided you were a little more accurate than your opponent, or a a little faster to react, you had more of an opportunity to straight up turn around and kill them.
It's similar to how fighting games work, a bad player will never beat someone much better than them, the learning curve is too steep, relatively small amounts of additional skill amount to incredible increases in performance. Titanfall 2 lessens that learning curve, making the game more accessible and bringing players closer together. That does mean that some TF1 veterans might struggle in TF2, because if you were just 'good enough' to surpass the learning curve, you got a relatively easy ride to achieving very good performance via the Titan mechanics.
A 1.5 KDR player becomes a 5.0 KDR player because they've done just enough to surpass the learning curve which facilitates the toolset that makes them almost unstoppable. While in most games just being a 1.5 player means just that, you're a little better than someone else, when you have higher time to kills, regenerating Titan shields, faster paced gameplay with a greater emphasis on mechanical skill, you create an environment where being just a bit better than everyone else is enough to win every encounter you come across. Titanfall 2 still has some elements of that, it's been toned down, the learning curve which was more like a wall in TF1, is a steady hill climb now.
That guy that posted way back with the 10.0 KDR in TF1 was a good example of this. He had more than 70% of his kills in the Titans, even on TF2 he had more than 50%. The benefits of surpassing the learning curve are still there for those that want to take them, but they are less significant. The reason you are struggling more in TF2 is because of the structure of this learning curve. While on TF1 you were just good enough to be at the top of the curve (or wall) with the majority of players sitting at the bottom, in TF2 there are more players surrounding you.
This is what I mean, iterated with a diagram (sorry for the crude drawing, I was bored though).
So the reason you're doing better at TF1 is because you've done enough to get over that hurdle, not necessarily better than the best players, but better than the majority because you're over that hurdle, and because that hurdle places you so significantly above the majority below it.
TF2 has taken deliberate action in its design to tackle that, shrinking the steepness of its climb in skill. This has various effects that underpin your performance and also generally speaking, I feel they're better for the game.
If you pick a random player out here, unlike in TF1, the odds are that they'll not be as far from you in terms of skill. Even if they're lower, the difference is such that they're going to have at least a chance of killing you, even if you will win the majority of encounters against them in a match.
This isn't a bad thing though. Yes it makes the game more accessible, but that isn't as awful as some people would make out, there's still a continual climb in player progression, but that's the thing, it's going to feel like a continual climb. People are going to feel as if they're getting better and better as they play, they're less likely to hit a wall, and they're more likely to feel that their moment to moment gameplay provides them with more influence on the match. Because in theory, they can kill the best player, the right bullet the right moment, they can turn things around.
The game still has a significant enough climb to make time investment feel rewarding and at a strategic and at a team level the learning curve is much more significant than my diagram iterates, but that doesn't matter in these public games. With this shift in focus more people are able to stay in their zone of proximal development, more people are afforded a sense of flow where they're able to experience a game that keeps them comfortably inbetween a level of challenge where the game is neither so easy (above the steep learning curve) that they become bored due to the lack of challenge, or so difficult (below the steep learning curve) that they feel anxious and frustrated.
The other option is to use some form of aggressive skill based matchmaking to pull similarly skilled players together and effectively separate the divide that way, but that doens't tend to work in games with that type of learning curve. Based on tests I've seen reported, Call of Duty doesn't accurately apply skill based matchmaking to players above a 1.9 kill to death ratio, because that places them in the top 1%, where it just doesn't have the player base to get them into same-skilled matches in a timely manner (despite the game being incredibly popular).
I think Respawn made the right decisions with TF2, perhaps a little too far in that direction (I hate turrets and I think the time to kill adjustments go too far when amped damage and weapons that can one-burst you are considered) but I'm also confident that they'll be making progressive improvements to the games balance to create the ideal balance between the two styles. I don't expect them to universally change the TTK back to TF1's standards, but tweaking some of the nonsense (Hemlock, Devotion, Amped Weapons, G2) would make me very happy.
