1.0 (or slightly less) is the expected number of kills generated by a death. It has nothing to do with player performance. The term "average K/D" is ambiguous since there are different kinds of averages (in common parlance, average typically refers to an arithmetic mean). If you take the total number of kills and divide it by the total number of deaths that is, technically an average. But it is useless as a metric of player performance, because it does not in any way include the per-player distribution (i.e. player performance). It is a measure of the expected number of kills generated by each death. It is like trying to represent duck hunter performance by calculating the average number of dead ducks per dead duck and then saying anyone who kills more than 1 duck is above average. They are 2 different metrics (ducks/hunter vs ducks/duck). In a similar example, consider a group of people with cars. If you take the total miles driven by all of them, and divide by the total amount of gas used by all of them, you get an average MPG. If you calculate the individual MPG of each car and then the mean of those values, you get another (different) average MPG. Which one would you use to determine if one person's car was above average at fuel conservation? Not the first number, which ignores the cars entirely to determine the mileage produced by an average gallon of gas consumed. The latter number is a per-vehicle representation of fuel consumption. All kills divided by all deaths is a metric of how many kills a single death is expected to result in, but has nothing to do with player performance. The mean player K/D, on the other hand, is a metric of typical performance of an individual player. So having a 1.0 K/D does not make you average unless you are a death, rather than a player.