Has the poor performance of SOV indicated to the patch makers that they need a bit of help?
Well, most if not all games here were done with an earlier version of the GCS patch. For the main event the current v1.4 version is used which indeed brought a few buffs to the Maxim.
Samples are too small you're right. I guess the stats from normal ranked games rather than tournament play would be a better indicator but I'm not sure if those can be seen anywhere?
You can check out
coh2chart. But I'd also recommend reading
this article which tries to explain why coh2chart might not give you what you want if you are looking for "statistics on the true faction balance". The TL;DR version is: The problem is that the matchmaking algorithm tries to eliminate what you want to observe, so you basically mostly get an impression of how well that is working.
In reality we can't realistically quantify the faction balance. We are pretty much left with looking at different statistics without jumping to conclusions...
That is, if we are interested in this at all. That's probably kind of a controversial statement, but at the end of the day unless it is really bad, faction balance is irrelevant in most cases:
- When playing automatch games it won't matter as the matchmaking should take care of that (although you could argue that the matchmaker has it easier when the factions are balanced).
- For tournements it doesn't matter as long as you play at least BO3 rounds (actually, with proper rules you can even have BO1 rounds; ok, viewing might be more entertaining when factions are balanced...)
All statistics have strength and weaknesses. The good thing about this data set (unlike the current main round statistics) is that players are probably more on an equal skill level. The number of samples isn't great, yes. It's not totally horrible either, so at least for certain matchups and maps the numbers could actually indicate some trends (notice the vague wording
).
The issues, apart from the less than stellar sample size are the map choices which will certainly skew the numbers (while it is a bit too early for definite statements, it is noteworthy that the current main event stats include several top players that feel more comfortable playing SOV so that Soviets were picked more often, as was Kholodny Ferma). If you are interested in the effect of maps you can check out earlier breakdowns like
this one for ESL.
What I personally suspect to be a very relevant factor is also that the meta hasn't settled. This tournament happens shortly after the WBP so the meta changes coming out of that patch are not clear. On top of that, it's not even WBP but the GSC which likely most players haven't tested much if at all.
So, basically the game dynamics have been shaken up and have not settled yet. It might very well be that a faction might seem very weak now, but that eventually people will figure out ways to play in a different way so that it might end up being considered OP...