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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