I'm mythicFOX a UK Malifaux Henchman, tournament regular, film nut, and all round geek.
Also the Malifaux devil, apparently.

Wednesday, 11 December 2013

Wave One Meta Analysis

With the conclusion of the UK tournament season at Joel-faux, I thought now would be a good time to take a look a the picture that's forming of the UK meta. I've exported some (publicly available) data from Rankings HQ and given it a quick once over.

Before I jump into the numbers I want to really stress that we're talking about a small sample of results, eight events, in a reasonably small meta. So I'd shy away from making sweeping statements about what this really tells us about M2e wave one.

Firstly I've broken down the players by faction;

Faction%
Resurrectionist23.9%
Neverborn20.4%
Arcanists19.7%
Guild12.0%
Outcasts12.0%
Gremlin7.0%
Ten Thunders4.9%

I'm not overly surprised to see Gremlins low on the list, after all they only have models for two masters to date. I wonder the extent to which established players are returning to playing their book one masters, which would account for the relatively low number of Ten Thunders players.

I also tried to take a measure of how the factions are performing. You would expect a faction to take a proportion of the rankings points at an event equivalent to their proportion in the field as a whole. So Guild representing 12% of the field should expect to gain 12% of the rankings points, all things being equal.

Below is a table created by comparing the percentage of the faction in the field to the percentage of rankings points that faction earned. So a faction that was 10% of the field and collected 11% of the available rankings points would be getting +1% of the rankings points. In effect this should give us a view of how a faction is over/under performing;

M2e Faction%
Resurrectionist+1.50%
Arcanists+1.28%
Neverborn+0.51%
Ten Thunders+0.03%
Gremlin-0.58%
Outcasts-1.21%
Guild-1.54%

As a footnote I've corrected for impacts of individual performance by only allowing each player to appear in the data once for each faction. Where a player would appear multiple times with the same faction I've used their average result.

It's interesting to note that based on a similar sample of results from M1.5 taken for events earlier this year the results look very different;

M1.5 Faction%
Neverborn+1.94%
Resurrectionist+1.78%
Ten Thunders-0.43%
Arcanists-0.44%
Outcasts-0.69%
Guild-2.14%

It's worth noting that alongside the obvious changes in position on the table that the factions performance are closer to zero.

That's really all I wanted to do with these numbers. I'd again caution against reading too much into them, they're a small sample of results. I'd also say I'm not making a judgement on what this means about faction balance in Malifaux, I think there's a lot more for us to learn before we get a real handle on how the game truly balances out.

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