now the wording is geared for Counter Strike, so ignore the knife/rifle bullshit, and it's out of the box default points for kills. There is a minimum and maximum allowed skill change through frags, and these are set at the hlstats defaults of 2 and 25 pts respectively2. How is the "points" rating calculated?
A new player has 1000 points. Every time you make a kill, you gain a certain amount of points depending on a) the victim's points rating, and b) the weapon you used. If you kill someone with a higher points rating than you, then you gain more points than if you kill someone with a lower points rating than you. Therefore, killing newbies will not get you as far as killing the #1 player. And if you kill someone with your knife, you gain more points than if you kill them with a rifle, for example.
When you are killed, you lose a certain amount of points, which again depends on the points rating of your killer and the weapon they used (you don't lose as many points for being killed by the #1 player with a rifle than you do for being killed by a low ranked player with a knife). This makes moving up the rankings easier, but makes staying in the top spots harder.
Specifically, the equations are:
Killer Points = Killer Points + (Victim Points / Killer Points)
× Weapon Modifier × 5
Victim Points = Victim Points - (Victim Points / Killer Points)
× Weapon Modifier × 5
lets take an example -
Joe_n00b27 connects and is on 1000pts
Exfane is on shitloads (say 10000 for easy sums)
Through some odd twist of fate joe n00b kills exfane. he gains 50 points : (10000/1000)x5
Exfane loses 50pts. But the upper limit is is 25pts, so they gain and lose 25pts respectively
Normality is restored after the next spawn wave and exfane kills joe n00b. he gains .5 points : (1000/10000)x5
Joe n00b loses .5 pts. I would assume that the points are rounded off, so it would be rounded up to 1pt gained/lost, but the lower limit is is 2pts, so they gain and lose 2pts respectively
To add to the confusion, and so that existing players aren't punished that excessively for being killed by one time visitors, for the first 50 kills someone makes on the server the killer and victim points gains/losses are set to the minimum skill change, ie 2pts, on the 51st kill however the above points calculations would apply.
So you can see that as a server noobie, you can accumulate points very quickly, but as you climb the ranks, it gets harder to achieve or even maintain points.
If you want to play the numbers game, here's how: kill loads, dont get killed, cos it costs, but especially dont get killed by fresh faces!
hope that makes it all as clear as mud