Combat Statistics

Comments

• Hasar

  March 2015

   How would they even measure that?

  
  

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• Amranu

  March 2015

  Depends, group situations make it difficult but for instance could add an entry to a database whenever a player of a certain class is killed by another player if in the last few minutes they were not hit by another player.
  
  
  

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• Cooper

  March 2015

  I doubt this is something they record, as it is a 100% irrelevant statistic and not in any way meaningful.
  

  
  

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• Exelethril

  March 2015

  I think combat rankings are the closest indication.

  
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• Jovolo

  March 2015

  What would be the point? 

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• Cooper

  March 2015

  Jovolo said:

  What would be the point? 

  He thinks the win/loss ratio determines how balanced a class is for pk. 

  
  

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• Tael

  April 2015 edited April 2015

  Cooper said:

  Jovolo said:

  What would be the point? 

  He thinks the win/loss ratio determines how balanced a class is for pk. 

  I mean, objectively that is the way to measure balance, at least 1v1 balance - any other balancing strategy is just based on theoretical attempts to predict that ratio.
  
  The problems are:
  

  1. There are no "bookends" to fights in Achaea to make tracking discrete "fights" easier.
  2. You'd need to tier players somehow since the relative skill of different players is going to leads to very different ratios in the different tiers and you don't want to end up buffing jester just because newbie jesters frequently die to knights.
  3. It would have to be a very continual process since Achaean combat is ultimately a very chaotic system - some things are easy to balance, like damage, because you can just tweak it up or down a little bit, but most others have huge effects on combat. If someone discovers a new strategy for a class that only differs by one affliction from existing strategies, the class could easily go from being severely underpowered to profoundly overpowered.
  4. There are too few players, and even fewer combatants, to generate enough data to make the sort of clear balancing decisions that other competitive games use statistics like this to to inform. How many top-tier jester vs. sylvan fights even happen every month? I would guess not many. And that's just a single 1v1 combination. Including mirror matches, there are 289 possible 1v1s. Even sparse data is useful data, but we're not talking about using statistics for balancing the way League of Legends does here.

  So it's less that combat statistics would not be useful to balance things, because they absolutely would be, it's that combat statistics require a lot of scaffolding to be useful and that's probably not worth building in the case of Achaea because the data is going to end up being so sparse anyway.

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• Jovolo

  April 2015

  How do you measure the the actual relevance of just class in a win, though? That's something that's going to change from fight to fight, and from player to player. It would require a ridiculous amount of impractical statistical analysis. I doubt that's even theoretically possible

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• Lideron

  April 2015

  If one wanted to do it, the best starting point would be arena duels (1v1), as it removes a number of the other variables that would affect the data for all deaths.  Since arena duels wins are tracked on each character, and have a discrete endpoint, there's a chance this data exists or could be mined, but I agree that trying to do any meaningful statistical analysis  would probably be impossible, especially considering the changing nature of abilities and classes over the years, and as Tael pointed out, the small sample sizes that would likely exists for some of the combinations.

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• Jules

  April 2015

  Once multi-class goes in, what about tracking class switches that happen not long before a combat encounter, and especially changes that occur within a relatively small window between fights?  At the very least, you might get an idea of what the guys who consistently win consider to be the most indispensable classes in large groups, as well as their usual picks for 1 v 1 and very small groups.  And you could sort it to show things like people starting in certain classes and dying, and then switching classes and winning in the same situation against the same opponents.  That, at least, seems like a data point with some value.  Things do keep changing, so any data you'd get would be a snapshot, and people who understand when really big changes have been made would have to decide when cutoffs need to be made.  That said, with all the work that's been done, aren't we closer to being a more stable Achaea in that sense?  Still, things will probably still get tweaked from time to time. 

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