Can you get plenty of PKs? Sure. I get tons of them, especially when I'm playing one of the powercombos I'm comfortable with. You'll find me hella annoying as a level-sitting evil ranger with 40 damroll at level 20 and 60 damroll at 35. I'll wait till random people are hurt from fighting mobs, and then ambush them and one-round them and rack up ten kills or so for every death I get. I've done it with several rangers, none of whom really tried to reach hero. Hell, I'll bet you could match some of their PK ratios against the most quality characters in the game.

Does this mean I'm "competing?"

No, it means I have a special instinctive talent for multikilling newbies and enough patience and experience to scour every damn ranking area in the game and then some.

For me, competing means going toe to toe with some of the toughest and most experience players in the game. I tried to compete a lot with my hero characters, and most of them died horrible, horrible deaths as I slowly accumulated more knowledge and more experience. Now, I'm still not competitive at the highest level of PK in the game, at the league where players like Twist and Mek throw down in, but I am much more close to it now that I have quest knowledge, prep knowledge, and area knowledge (like these silly boats) which I did not have before. Every little bit counts - stuff like this is important.

I recall dying once because a guy slept me on the sea, summoned me onto the boat, blinded me, cursed me, and then fucked me up while I panicked like crazy, spamming commands like a headless chicken, completely confused because I thought I was still on the ocean, and didn't realize I was in a closed room. This would not have happened if I knew what I knew now, and had the layouts of the boats more or less memorized, including what doors are closed and where to get off.

There are other times when something like wave dancer could have made a difference between a win and a loss, a victory and a defeat. You're just lying to yourself if you think you don't need every scrap of knowledge to match up against the heaviest hitters in CF.