People Who Make Up Stats to Prove Points

[Greenday]

One of the main online games I play is a football simulator. You own players, as they play, they get experience and level up. It's been full of balancing issues. Blocking issues, blitzing issues, players too powerful, players too weak. It's tough as when you hurt one thing, you make another more powerful so your nerf that one and something else gets better.

Current issue is kickers kicking kickoffs too far. Some people that kickers are kicking the ball 80+ yards too often (aka PAST the endzone). I have an extremely high level kicker and that never seems to be the case. Someone then had the balls to say that 80-90% of the time, high level kickers can hit 80+. That was it. I went to the highest competition leagues, with the highest level players. I looked at one conference, which is 16 teams. With all 16 kickers, the average amount of touchbacks alone (70+ yards and it's not returned) was a whopping 40%. Take out one freak kicker and it dropped to 38%.

So where does this douche get off saying 80-90% of the time, kickers can hit 80+ yard kickoffs which would be an automatic touchback, but the average of the best league is only 40%? I hate dumbasses trying to make up BS stats.

[jackfaire]

Yeah 9 times out of 10 people doing that are full of it

[elsporko]

75% of all statistics are made up. Everybody knows that.

[Arcade Man D]

75% of all statistics are made up. Everybody knows that.

And 83.592% of all given values have more precision than they should from values used to arrive at them.

[Greenday]

Well, my post stopped the discussion dead in its tracks for a solid 12 hours. Then the guy posted ONE game where someone kick 70% of kickoffs for 80+ yards. Awesome, you can find a statistical anomaly. Still haven't proven anything.

[Wingates_Hellsing]

Statistics seems to be one of the sciences that many people either believe is a lot simpler than it is, or pretend so because it proves their point. They find some stat that supposedly proves their point and quote it everywhere without considering how it was reached, what other factors there were, etc.

*Paragraph about gun-control related stats deleted because no one wants to hear it*

It's almost as bad as people who don't understand the concept of the scientific process, rigor or the definition of 'theory' within a scientific context (it does NOT mean guess for the millionth time!)