KDR, also known as kill death ratio, is a gaming term used to determine how many kills any given player has before he or she is killed, and respawned. Calculating the rate is easy; a player has to divide the kills by deaths. The term is more common among first-person shooter (FPS) games that require the player to eliminate members of the opposite team before the match ends.
The formula to calculate KDR is K/D. For example, if a player has 20 kills and ten deaths in a match, then they have a KDR of 2. It would mean that they have gotten an average of 2 kills for every death. So to put, a player has, on average, killed two players before dying once. These game mechanics have come in very handy over the years in determining the skill level of players.
Kill death ratio should not, however, be confused with a kill to death (K/D) spread. K/D spread is the team’s or player’s total kills minus the deaths. Kill death spread is a useful calculation method for single games, whereas the KDR is more suited to calculate the player’s career. The reason behind this is that the more kills a player gains, the less needed is the K/D spread. Put, if a player has 100,000 kills and 70,000 deaths, they have a spread of 30,000. But their KDR could be close to average. If a player keeps playing a particular game for a long time, then the K/D spread becomes less needed. The KDR, on the other hand, starts to become more fixed as the player keeps playing his or her first person shooter game. KDR then becomes more useful in the long-term.