Nickmercs is incredibly good as a new player

FPS game is FPS game in its basics - point and shoot.

Especially if people are coming from other Battle Royal games there is a significant carry-over effect same as in any other related field in life.

As for the K/D ratio (as well as any other stat in my opinion), it really does not represent the true skill. You can be a great support player taking all the damage, picking up players who push on your team and you will get horrible stats, yet your role in the team is still important and you still benefit the goal of winning. People here just focus too much on damage, k/d, badges and of course, kills.

My K/D ratio has been around 0.6 for 2+ seasons now yet I am on Diamond level and feel ok there with people who have k/d over 2 and they do say the same that I play well. Adding to that it really matters which k/d ratio are you looking at - ranked or public or overall. Usually ranked one is way lower especially the higher you go up the ranks as it is not uncommon for me to win a game with say 2 kills or even less.

Also, I played just yesterday with ex COD player who was on the controller - the dude has aiming skills from COD, aim assist from Apex. Without tactical guidance, he got to plat (currently diamond level given it is the beginning of the new season) lobbies easily but then hit a wall when playing vs diamond+ players give he has no positioning skills and apex-specific skills e.g. when to use and how to use abilities.

The dude really sucked but after some guidance, good coms during the game we did manage to pull very good results utilizing his strong sides of shooting and pushing and e.g. my knowledge of positioning rotation and knowledge of legends.

To be fair I did also report some level <100 people who were on Diamond + level as smurfs, but I see now that I might have been wrong on some of the cases and people just transfer from other games and catch up with Apex quite fast proving also the fact that players sub diamond (which is like 70?% of the whole community) are really sub-par skill-wise if we can call it so.