For the love of god, don't quote the starting post...
These stats do not show directly that Axis would be OP, but it can give you a hint that something is seriously broken in this game due to the Axis dominance.
Good work with these statistics.
I see there are many people who thinks that Axis "popularity" is due to the fact that they are more "easy" to play. Let me ask you something: If a game has several factions, what would be the faction you would play the most? The most OP (strong overall, standard units and easy to play) or the one who is more challanging (high risk-high profit, cool units, etc)
That's the question you need to ask yourselves.
But in CoH2 we have one faction with both the coolest units and at the same time the strongest and the easiest to play. okw
Firstly, there are more team games than 1v1 games. I really do not understand why people must insist, that balance must flow up from 1v1. More people are playing team games, thus more people would gain greater enjoyment if games were balaned from a team perspective. It is my firm belief, that Relic has made a mistake with its balance philosophy by focusing on the least played game mode. Perhaps it is thus unsurprising that 1v1 is the closest to balace game mode, at the EXTREME EXPENSE of 77.6% of the games played.
Secondly, the 'most popular faction' is misleading. Axis and allies must always add up to 50% each, because you can't get into a mirror match in random queue. What this means is that due to the smaller number of allied players, top200 Axis players are constantly fighting lower ranked allied players. This creates an unfun experience for both sides; it can often be a roflstomp for one team, and far too challenging for the other.
Finally, USF needs massive help in 4v4. When the top 200 players are on occasion winning less than 50% of their games, something is seriously wrong.
To be fair, 3v3 was the least played game mode during this period. "Most popular Faction" is counted by how many games are played with each faction by the top 200 players.
He is not describing his method of pulling stats or have i missed that? If he is just scraping the stats pages from coh2.org ladder boards from time to time we have some errors in the stats. You can't count i.e. USA (what was his better known name again?) because he played no games since at least 1 week. You would have to calculate the difference from time to time and then calculate the stats from these differences...otherwise you would always recount the previous stats!
I think he wrote somewhere on the official forums about how he is doing this. I don't know if you didn't see the links but he have collected data for about 4 weeks in total and the pattern is the same.
Interesting stuff. A couple of immediate observations (which might be way off):
While the high OKW/Ostheer win rates (especially the OKW spike at the end) are notable, all of this data is from within one major patch (with a couple of small hotfixes). This means the big fluctuations in win rates are not neccessarily the result of balance changes. Perhaps significantly, each faction has at least one period of having the highest winrate (albeit a very small one for USF).
Ostheer winrate is generally pretty high, but they are the least played faction. Perhaps compared to other factions, Ostheer has a dedicated 'core' of players who know the faction very well?
Since OKW is far more played than Ostheer, the below-average winrates for Allies (especially USF) are mainly drawn from matches against OKW. This suggests that OKW is probably overpowered.
OKW win-rate improved in spite of the Kubel/munitions nerf. This suggests (at least to me, given my in-game experience) that tweaking the numbers on the Kubel isn't going to work - the unit needs to be reworked. The unit was originally felt to be under-performing and was buffed consistently to reflect this, but it seems that OKW players have realised how to use to Kubel to great effect, regardless of damage/suppression/RoF numbers.
Ostheer is the second most played faction after OKW.
These stats and pictures are not mine, they are created by a guy called "Legends" on the official forums. He have a program collecting information from the top 200 players in all game modes and all factions.
Yeah, the B4 player didn't invest in too many KV1s, he had to rebuild his B4s after Gluecksbringer killed them. This is a nice counterplay to one of the strongest Soviet 3vs3 strategies right now.