Profile of achpawel

Bundle nades are also udes against smaller squads too.
Commandos have carbon copy of bundle nades and are perfectly fine balance-wise and bundle nades are STRONGER then shock nades.

Bundle nades are usually used against very large squads because of the design difference. Don't manipulate.

This is 1st non stupid thing you have said since you joined .org, but we have to disregard remainer of that paragraph to keep it that way.

You don't compare these costs between factions.
You set them up internally, to work WITHIN faction they are placed and within context and specialization of the unit.

Please don't lecture me. It is not related to the topic.

If that's the logic you want to use, PG bundle nades are also used against 4 men squads and are way too good.

There are very few such squads, and most of them get more men as the game progresses. You are manipulating. Allied nades are used mostly against 4 men squads and that is why they usually will inflict more manpower bleed. Axis will have to use "bigger" and more expensive nades to have similar results. Those bigger nades will have longer explosion times, which often requires more skill to use.

Shocks fight against 5 and 6 men squads just as often as PGs do, since osttruppen and AGs are 1v1 meta and PFs are team game meta.

It is not true. PGs fight larger squads more often. Shocks don't really need grenades to kill osttruppen. PFs are only a threat to them after an expensive munition upgrade. Still shocks can use smoke, use shotblockers, etc, to close the distance and annihilate them. The whole point is to make a tiny adjustment to a grenade pricing to reflect its better than standard nade performance. I don't really understand why you are so frustrated about it. Such change will probably make the gameplay experience better. It won't affect balance that much as the price should probably be sth between the bundle a a standard nade.

This is not an argument that holds any value, because its no longer vanila sov vs ost exclusively.

This comment is again not related in any way to adequate pricing of things to avoid in game frustrations.

I know how to read a graph, mate. But I am still talking about the graph that plots game rank vs win rate. This one contains by far the most information.

I understand

No it does not. These cherry picked players are the same that you find in the top 5% of the graphs and therefore the region that I am talking about.

True. The difference is that their games are cast, uploaded to YT and can be analysed! My whole point is that this is probably the only way to improve an already pretty well balanced game.

Tournaments are additionally held on only a couple of maps which further scews the outcome in case one of them is slightly unbalanced. Additionally, the "form" of the player is way more important since they are a snapshot of only 1-2 days. If you're playing Asia/Oceania but the tournament runs until late evening in European time, the cherry picked players from Asia will have a disadvantage because they will play their games in the middle of the night. Did not sleep well that day, had a cold, a stressful day at work, argument with your family? Well suddenly the player's favourite two factions will get an additional loss. The game size is small. The only thing that tournaments have going for them is that the skill gap is - assumingly - smaller, but that's all.

I agree with everything above. That is why I wrote in the previous post that this is the best we have. Probably far from ideal but if AE cantinues his tourney quest (fingers crossed) there will be so much more material soon.

Most, if not all, other factors still apply (they still run via Relic's servers, there can still be a bugsplat.

True - but I really think that the number of problems and random loses is greatly reduced. I don;t really think anybody playing in the tourney will have a baby on their lap, will have to open the door to a mailman or answer an urgent phonecall.

And quite famously, in game bugs as it happened in Luvnest vs Asiamint. All these weight actually MORE than in the 15k game sample), but with a smaller sample size and that actual RNG has more weight.

Yes, but because such games are cast you can always just delete their result (a bugged game) from the stats.

You said you know your statistics, so give an actual reason as to why all this does not apply instead of sentiments and statements.

I feel I answered above.

The "silly matchmaking" is a fair point, but as I said: At the edged of the graph this happens to all players, therefore all factions have higher winrates at the top 10% of players. There is no good reason to assume that this happens more often to one specific faction than another.

Yes and no. When you have a bigger sample the result will be better/more realistic. You have many games as Soviets and many fewer as UKF or USF. Also there might be players who play only Soviets and manage to enter the top zone only with one faction. They are usually worse players than those who play all factions (tourney guys, for example). Anyway, this is the variables thing. It is really impossible to predict what strange constellations of factors might influence that. It may or may not be faction strength related. Looking at those graphs my bet is that there are simply more Sov players and the peak is less sharp because of that (quite typical in stats).

If you know statistics you should also know that - for the most part - the tournament matches are a subsample of the data that SiphonX visualized, but slightly scewed due to the tournament environment.

But it is a cherrypicked subsample that will grow in time. And this is the sample that can be reviewed under microsope . You will know if a match was won or lost because of specific strat, early game failure, simply a bug or some non balance related mistake or rng or some period of player godmode. It is impossible to determine balance problem or faction strengths only basing it on such graphs (sadly).

Alright, then give a reasoning as to why all this is wrong. Just saying "it's wrong" does not make it wrong. You also focus on the end of the graph - but don't say anything to my points regarding the top players.

Yep. I guess top really is a bit more solid. Still, just like I wrote earlier, not solid enough imo to draw conclusions. Assuming that all those top players keep switching factions and have all their stats there....nah. Probably one army players blur the picture there - that is my guess. They probably play Soviets as their main faction and enter the zone with them only. Their other played factions are further behind on the ladder (especially their axis), maybe even 100-200 positions lower or even not existent at all - this way they don't lower other armies performance in the top of the graph. This way their other armies stats don't lower other armies performance, but their Soviet performance lowers the graph. This together with more Soviet players makes the peak lower. But that is my guess as I can't verify it.

Those random elements have been addressed already as above. I agree that the bigger sample size is better, that's why SiphonX's data is better. You specifically claim that the more games were played, the closer the win rate is to 50%. Let's have a look: For OST this is true, SOV has the most games from Allied factions yet differs the most, UKF and USF differ the least yet have the least games played.
Are these differences significant? You say no. The honest answer is: We don't know for sure. But it's a lot of games, and the differences in the top player department is between 5-10% with 15k games played. The drops and other random mishaps that you mention are likely a very minor fraction of all these games.

I don't think that his data is better from the perspective of assessing balance. It is because you don;t really know who is in the top mix. There might be people who play only one or two factions, unlike in the tourney where players are usually really good at playing all armies. When such people enter the top of the graph they will blur the picture. And yes, the honest answer is we don't really know. In tourneys you know these things.

If it came across as if these is the be all end all conclusion, then this was not intended. But if a faction performs the worst with both high end low skill players, it's a decent hint that this faction might be weaker than the other factions.

It doesn't have to be like that, especially if the faction was the first faction introduced into the game. Their playerbase may be bigger. This will usually lower the peak of the Soviet graph.

This data is not the perfect set to prove faction strength, but at some point you have to see that your initial argument is based on your personal "game experience and my tourney and cast observations" stating that "Soviets are much more forgiving and generally easier to play with than OKW". You said I can't conclude from a simple graph how easy it is to play a faction, yet you do it from what? The 100-200 games a CoH2 fan can play in a month maximum (unless you have a full month of free time) + the 50 you watched? How do your observations suddenly beat data from 15k games? You said you know your statistics, but this is fully ignoring good scientific practice. You even agreed that the matchmaking will even things out for the majority of all players. So how does your personal game experience then translate into actual balance knowledge if you additionally have to filter out that all your matches were decided by the matchmaking algorithm to give you a chance of roughly 50% (I am assuming at this point that you are not in the top 5-10% of players)?

These stats would be ok if every player played all factions imo. If you have players playng only as Soviets, or only as allies/axis the stats will always be not informative enough. in tourneys players are forced to switch sides and this makes the difference imo (plus the fact that you can actually watch the game)

And again: How can you say that tourney stats could be a decent basis with those few games, split across 5 different factions and a small player and map pool, but then say you agree with the spreadsheets author that the games and players in his (much, much larger) data are possibly not enough to draw conclusions?
Nothing of this adds up.

Tourneys make players switch sides so they have to play at least one axis and one allied faction. IMO it changes a lot as the same player tests both sides. In the graphs there probably are quite a few players who play only one faction or their ranks with (usually axis factions?) are below the top tier. They blur the picture of balance in the graphs. We don't know how many such players there are even in the top tier. I also don't know if the players whose ranks got hidden with one army are in the graph.

(Sorry for a lot of repetitions)

You brush off statistics 315k games

Careful I don't brush it off. The differences are tiny. Such tiny differences aren't sort of "big enough" to influence a balance discussion much (I'm talking about all games now). If they were bigger that is another story. Too many factors will usually influence such differences, especially when the matchmaking system is at work. The graph is also a bit misleading as the 2% difference looks really big there.

by saying that there are some random factors like AT vs RT (which does not apply for 1v1 data), maps and others and assume that faction pick rate heavily influences win rate etc (as a statement without any proof or reasoning),

I might have copy pasted too much - of course we are speaking about 1v1. There are more arguments there, don't brush them off

but then proceed to say that a whole tourney of (can't remember) 100-150 games max played by a handful of players might "give a decent picture". This does not make any sense.

It actually does. There are cherry picked players and sort of the best possible match for each other there is. Of course it is not enough. But this is all we have got - no random drops due to a phone call, etc. No silly matchmaking due to waiting long for a player or no ping problems, no cheating, to name just a few factors.

However, the core of the caveats as well as your addition can be answered quite quickly, since they basically rely on the same argument, which is: Pure win rates do not tell you much due to the matchmaking mechanism always evening things out. We also had this discussion in the forums already so I will condense it a bit.

This assumption is true for the large majority of the ranks in the middle, yes. A mediocre player playing an OP faction will get matched against a better player using a normal faction so everyone will get a ~50% chance to win in the ideal case. This is your core argument why win rates do not provide any useful information.
But the theory falls apart on the edges of the graph: The top and lowest percent of the ladder will rarely get equal matches and usually be down matched (or up matched, respectively). We can see that nicely on the win rate graph. This also means that faction differences cannot be compensated that well anymore by just giving you are better/worse player. Hence, we see the actual faction strength more clearly. Most of your critiques also do not apply anymore at this point.

They do I'm afraid. I understand You had a discussion. The conclusion and arguments seem to be wrong. The ends of the graph is actually the worst part to use for comparison. Silly matchmaking on both ends will give you silly and random results and maybe even more importantly, it will be based on a rather small sample. Drops, experiments, good players just playing for fun against weaker ones - too many variables basically. And still the differences are too tiny to be significant. And still the number of games will be different for Soviets and UKF, for example. And my main critique is that the bigger the sample the more realistic result - closer to 50% in this case. Just wrong approach I'm afraid. Completely wrong.

The low and high end borders just show us different perspectives of the faction balance, for example how easy it is to learn the faction, how forgivable noob mistakes like forgetting units etc are.

U're making too many assumptions here, and not really counting all variables/reasons to win/lose. Actually it is impossible to enumerate them tbh. For example, trying to suggest that that low end will show You how quickly a player will learn a faction is just expecting far too much from a simple graph.

But in the end we can still see a lot of the faction strength. Obviously there are still some caveats, but I think it is a fair assumption that the influence of just random matchmaking, maps etc will be evened out to an acceptable degree if we look at those 15k games. Especially pros will veto the maps that are bad for their faction and leave a more normalized map pool of better balanced maps (which in turn is proven by the fact that those maps are usually picked for tournaments, since they are the most balanced and do not favor one or the other faction as much).

I'm afraid U can't see the faction strength there tbh - too many caveats. Explained by the author of the whole spreadsheet very well. Too tiny differences, too many variables, too few players for some factions with many more for other factions, etc influencing stuff. Ends of the graph, trust me, are the worst point for any analysis.

Actually maps part is probably the only part that shows quite accurately how maps influence each faction. But that is another story.

https://www.coh2.org/topic/105597/1v1-automatch-stats

These are 1v1 stats. Looking at the top/bottom 10% only, SOV are worse than other factions.

This is what U quote:

"This article also contains a lot of winrates. I would be careful to draw premature conclusions about the state of balance based on these numbers, for a couple of reasons:

Technically, the matchmaking is supposed to balance factions to some extent. Basically, if a faction is weaker, a player should be matched with a less skillful player playing a stronger faction (some examples on these concepts and the issues involved are found here). Obviously this scheme will fail at both ends of the skill range, but for the players in the middle of the ladder you could expect a 50%ish win-rate. Note, though, that there are a couple of things that the matchmaker probably does not take into account, e.g. faction performance on a certain map. And when match random teams vs. arranged team everything goes, I guess.

Now, matchmaking should work reasonably well when there are tons of players queuing for matches. That, unfortunately, is not the case. The result is that win rates are not very reliable. Consider an example where the only players queuing are

Faction A: Has a pro and three newbs queuing.
Faction B: Has four mediocre players queuing.

Now, the pro is likely to win while the new players likely will lose. The result is that faction A has a winrate of 25% and faction B sits at 75%, regardless of the actual faction balance. And then there is the chance of 80% what one of the three less skilled players create a thread about how OP faction B is and he even can back this up with numbers!"

AND this is what You quote


?
Inquirer:Can the winrates on the coh2chart.com used as an accurate gauge of current state of the balance?

!
No.
COH2.ORG


To the above I would add:

I'm into statistics mate tbh. Usually the case it that the more often sth is picked the worse winrate it will have. Soviets are almost as often picked as two other allied factions together. That is one of the reasons why their performance will be lower. Another is the fact that some really "fresh" players will have just this faction because they didn't purchase the USF or UKF. Since there is a bigger playerbase searching for game the matchmaking system will also be more accurate with Soviets than USF or UKF.

Remeber also that there are only two axis factions vs three allied factions which further complicates the comparison.

So it will probably be still a matter of opinion I'm afraid and quite difficult analysis of the actual gameplay through watching replays.

By the way: Great appreciation to the Siphon X. for gathering the data. Incredible and meticulous work.

This is a better idea than requiring an upgrade for their weapons, but personally I don't think they should change

If you required an upgrade for their armor they'd have to cheaper in MP and that's probably not a good idea

Some people complain they are too potent. Making say 40 muni armour upgrade wouldn't hurt the Soviet player much but would definitely make it easier for the opposing player to accept why they are so durable.