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Post by 36cygnar24guy36 on Aug 21, 2017 15:37:58 GMT
True, but the same issues applies for all countries to some degree, and yes the barrier to entry is less for Europeans as they have less far to travel, but Australia is just as far as the US, and they always do very well at the WTC. In most european countries im sure that the travel distance/expense to participate in a event is not as crazy as here. For the guys from FL to go to something like L&L once you add up flights, hotels, rental car, food is probably at least $1500 for the weekend. To travel from one side of germany, UK, and such to the other for a 2-3 day weekend event is much cheaper than that True, and we can speculate until the cows come home about what would happen if expense was not an issue, all we can do is look at what we have.
But if we are having that discussion then my counter point is the US has a much higher population and more players than European countries and Australia, and if the pool of talent is deep enough, then there should be enough players who are both good enough and have the funds to travel to and win major cons/WTC.
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isotope
Junior Strategist
Posts: 634
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Post by isotope on Aug 21, 2017 15:37:58 GMT
I understand, but they system for getting onto teams and such is fundementally flawed. In a perfect world we would all have an ELO, there would be regional qualifier events, etc. I completely understand that's not possible and that the cpatains of the teams have to do the best they can but there's no way the system actually gets the "best" players in the country onto the teams.
ELO is far far far from perfect and doesn't lend itself to comparisions between distinct pools of players. It's ok but not better than comparing the guys that actualy show up and use them as a representation of the whole...
It's far better than what we have now which is " afford to be able to spend $5k+ a year to tavel to 3-4 major events a year", then have enough vacation time and money left after making a name for yourself to even be able attend if you do apply and get accepted.
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Post by pangurban on Aug 21, 2017 15:39:00 GMT
Being a dark horse means the competition doesn't know you and thus isn't prepared for you. That's literally what it means. But the same would be true for the foreign players who would be against many more dark horses as they would face someone they don't know every round.
On top of that the Aussies returned with success year after year. Seems unlikely they were still Dark Horses
The US meta is relatively well-documented, compared to the rest of the world. I'd also expect a top European or Aussie player to prep for US lists somewhat when going to the US. I would not really expect a US player to prep for Euro or Aussie lists while playing in the US. Not that I'm suggesting the differences are massive, but a little can go a long way.
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Post by adakai on Aug 21, 2017 16:00:09 GMT
A few questions (because I am genuinely curious): 1. Do you guys think that the WTC format is a good indicator of strength of meta? Arent team format tournaments by nature a completely different meta than masters/champions format? 2. I understand Europe/Australia have some freaking good/awesome players that do place well in American Cons - but do many strong American players enter European cons? Like if we were to take the top American crop and place them in a european con, do you guys think that they wouldnt do well? 3. What are the current differences in meta/lists building? What are the boogeymen of Europe vs Australia vs US?
I think the WTC is a good indicator of lists/factions and the results show how strong the country is. You shouldn't copy/paste the lists and use them in individual tournaments without understanding them but that is true regardless....
ehhh but the way its formatted I feel like the match up choices are what really make or break it. Thats why in WTC lists you see such hard skews in some lists to specifically prep for 1 warcaster haha. By nature, the way the match ups go it shapes the meta...
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Post by Aegis on Aug 21, 2017 21:36:48 GMT
I agree. Team tournaments aren't the best to evaluate factions, since the matchup mechanicks make possible to play some skewed lists or warcasters that wouldn't perform well in a normal steamroller, and team decisions affect the outcome too much (if a player is the "sacrifical token", his faction could seem a lot worse than it actually is).
One of the last team tournaments has seen a team with 3 Skorne players winning it. That should hint that team tournaments work different from normal tournament, and aren't an accurate source to discuss about normal games.
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Post by jisidro on Aug 21, 2017 22:03:17 GMT
Because the power casters aren't there with their cookie cutter lists... RIGHT!
I?m not saying it's the same but to always say they aren't the best is deceiving. You can always find reason to say it's not the best source or it has X or Y diff but it IS a good source of info.
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Post by Aegis on Aug 21, 2017 23:04:17 GMT
Exactly what I'm saying. Don't take just the tournament that support your opinion. Are Cygnar and Cryx winning more than others? Sure. Are they absolutely dominating every tournament? No (about 3 tournament on 5 are won by factions that aren't Cygnar or Cryx, with all factions but trolls getting some wins). A tournament result only tells up to a certain amount on info and "proves" nothing, on both sides, but if you want to use it for data, then use all data available not just the one that supports your thesis. Also, UK and Norway in particular are country that historically always had an huge Cygnar over-rappresentation, and that always hosted some of the best Cygnar players in the world (since MK2), so examinating data only from those countries isn't very telling. I Specifically said that I was looking at the 4 big tournaments that have been held in the UK since MK3 started, because that's where I play. If I was to go to a European event it would be Clogcon, because that's the big one so from my perspective Cygnar are winning literally everything.
Also where has this line about the UK having historical Cygnar over representation come from?
Lets look at the 2 years before hand to show that this is very much a Mk3 phenomenon:
UK Nationals 2014 Jamie Perkins (Khador) Blood and Oil 2014: Bret Wilkie (Circle) SmogCon 2015: Robin Maukish (Circle) Welsh Masters 2015: Matt Goligher (Legion) Uk Nationals 2015: Al Johnstone (Cygnar) Blood and Oil 2015: Ed Smith (Cryx) Smog Con 2016: Pat Dunsford (Cygnar) Welsh Masters 2016: Richard Beech (Khador)
Doesn't support your statement about the UK being very Cygnar Heavy in MK2.
That said, maybe they were going but not quite winning. Let's take a look at the English WTC Teams They would be a good representation of top players in the Uk right?
England WTC 2014: Cygnar 1/10 England WTC 2015: Cygnar 1/10 England WTC 2016: Cygnar 2/15
Not even 1 a team. If England had as many strong Cygnar players as you say then you'd expect at least one a team, right?
Just out of interest I ran the same thing for Sweden team:
Sweden WTC 2014: Cygnar 1/10 Sweden WTC 2015: Cygnar 0/10 Sweden WTC 2016: Cygnar 2/15
I'll admit I know almost nothing about their meta so there could be extenuating circumstances such as all the Cygnar players coming down with a mystery illness.
When I said "since years" I meant about two years... If you start taking data since 2014 we are talking pretty much about pre-history! I think mid 2015 (2 years ago) is a good place to start looking, since pre-colossals Cygnar was actually a pretty meh faction that struggled quite a bit. Also, Jarle didn't even played warmachine until late MK2. Since pretty much the release of the Stormwall, Cygnar started to rise a lot in popularity, expecially in northern europe / UK, and a couple of Cygnar players won an huge portion of national tourneys there. Soon, you started to see a lot of Cygnar lists popping up in tournaments, much more than other factions, but that was limited just to that area until few months ago and Lances buffs. I don't really want to enter too much into this speculation about if that is due to northern europe Cygnar champions being very strong, US cygnar players being bad, or simply differences in the meta that makes the life easier or harder for Cygnar lists in some places, but for sure I wouldn't take just northern europe data to evaluate factions... It would be like take JVM home state data to evaluate Legion, it would make the evaluation pretty skewed. That said, I don't want to argue on the IF Cygnar or Cryx are OP right now, I don't have a clear opinion yet (aside from Lances being undeniably OP and so I'm glad to see them nerfed) and would like to see how other factions are when they get many functional themes like Cygnar and Cryx have, but in general I suggest evaluating things with the whole world data and not just some regional data, otherwise we end up with the usual useless argument about everyone looking only at the data that supports his opinion (Cygnar players could easily take just this Gencon data to support their claims, as an example) and practically doing a wall vs wall talk.
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Cyel
Junior Strategist
Posts: 685
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Post by Cyel on Aug 22, 2017 8:19:48 GMT
AFAIK the lists brought to WTC are more or less the regular all-comers, universal (doesn't mean balanced!) lists one would bring to a tournament. Yes, you can manipulate pairings to an extent, but it works for both teams so it evens out. And if paired badly nobody wants to give up the game without a fight (it's no wh40k when after seeing what you play against you shake hands and go for a beer;)) This is really not that different from being a bit lucky with pairings in a single torunament.
SR2017 will probably reinforce the balance between types of models in WTC armies as well.
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Arcaux
Junior Strategist
Posts: 724
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Post by Arcaux on Aug 22, 2017 8:42:40 GMT
When I said "since years" I meant about two years... If you start taking data since 2014 we are talking pretty much about pre-history! I think mid 2015 (2 years ago) is a good place to start looking, since pre-colossals Cygnar was actually a pretty meh faction that struggled quite a bit. Also, Jarle didn't even played warmachine until late MK2. Since pretty much the release of the Stormwall, Cygnar started to rise a lot in popularity, expecially in northern europe / UK, and a couple of Cygnar players won an huge portion of national tourneys there. Soon, you started to see a lot of Cygnar lists popping up in tournaments, much more than other factions, but that was limited just to that area until few months ago and Lances buffs. I don't really want to enter too much into this speculation about if that is due to northern europe Cygnar champions being very strong, US cygnar players being bad, or simply differences in the meta that makes the life easier or harder for Cygnar lists in some places, but for sure I wouldn't take just northern europe data to evaluate factions... It would be like take JVM home state data to evaluate Legion, it would make the evaluation pretty skewed. That said, I don't want to argue on the IF Cygnar or Cryx are OP right now, I don't have a clear opinion yet (aside from Lances being undeniably OP and so I'm glad to see them nerfed) and would like to see how other factions are when they get many functional themes like Cygnar and Cryx have, but in general I suggest evaluating things with the whole world data and not just some regional data, otherwise we end up with the usual useless argument about everyone looking only at the data that supports his opinion (Cygnar players could easily take just this Gencon data to support their claims, as an example) and practically doing a wall vs wall talk.
I mean the data for the last two years are there as well. Both Sweden and the Uk have less Cygnar WTC players than average, not more. I think the evidence suggests it's pretty conclusive Cygnar has not always been an over represented faction in those two nations. I concentrated on the countries you told me had high Cygnar representation, because I played in the UK at the time and knew it to be false. If anything the UK was a Legion hotbed in Mk2, which hurt Cygnar players due to Legion's strong MK2 game into Cygnar.
May I suggest it benefits you greatly not to have an opinion about this. It's much easier to say. Ahh well we don't know, let's keep Cygnar in this ridiculous position for another year and wait and see.
The fact is the best UK Cygnar players know they are overpowered and freely admit it. They play the thing that gives them the best chance of winning and rightfully so. They are competitive gamers and that is their responsibility. They aren't and shouldn't be shamed for this. The message doesn't appear to be getting through to PP though and so we'll keep seeing Cygnar winning everything in the UK.
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Post by pangurban on Aug 22, 2017 8:51:25 GMT
Jamie Perkins was pretty dominant with Khador in the UK (and elsewhere) for a big chunk of Mk II. Not sure where the "Legion hotbed" is coming from, unless we project the last year or so onto the entirety of that edition?
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Arcaux
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Posts: 724
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Post by Arcaux on Aug 22, 2017 9:06:40 GMT
Jamie Perkins was pretty dominant with Khador in the UK (and elsewhere) for a big chunk of Mk II. Not sure where the "Legion hotbed" is coming from, unless we project the last year or so onto the entirety of that edition? Because one player winning with a faction does not make a faction dominant.
Welsh Masters 2016: Most played faction Legion 30 players Uk Nationals 2015: Most played faction Legion 14 players
I wish I could provide more data for other tournaments, but we don't have many on Tiebreak and all the MK3 ones show Cygnar as the most represented faction.
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Post by Big Fat Troll on Aug 22, 2017 10:57:09 GMT
Jamie Perkins was pretty dominant with Khador in the UK (and elsewhere) for a big chunk of Mk II. Not sure where the "Legion hotbed" is coming from, unless we project the last year or so onto the entirety of that edition? As far as I can tell, almost every local tournament in my neck of the woods for months now has been won by Legion, and it's been different players. So the USA Midwest maybe?
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Post by pangurban on Aug 22, 2017 11:08:37 GMT
Jamie Perkins was pretty dominant with Khador in the UK (and elsewhere) for a big chunk of Mk II. Not sure where the "Legion hotbed" is coming from, unless we project the last year or so onto the entirety of that edition? Because one player winning with a faction does not make a faction dominant.
Welsh Masters 2016: Most played faction Legion 30 players Uk Nationals 2015: Most played faction Legion 14 players
I wish I could provide more data for other tournaments, but we don't have many on Tiebreak and all the MK3 ones show Cygnar as the most represented faction.
Just want to be clear on what we're talking about here: dominance in terms of representation or dominance in terms of results?
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Arcaux
Junior Strategist
Posts: 724
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Post by Arcaux on Aug 22, 2017 12:49:56 GMT
Because one player winning with a faction does not make a faction dominant.
Welsh Masters 2016: Most played faction Legion 30 players Uk Nationals 2015: Most played faction Legion 14 players
I wish I could provide more data for other tournaments, but we don't have many on Tiebreak and all the MK3 ones show Cygnar as the most represented faction.
Just want to be clear on what we're talking about here: dominance in terms of representation or dominance in terms of results? The original words I used were "Legion Hotbed". You started talking about Perkins being dominant and I replied.
My point was only ever that Legion were the most represented faction in the UK Meta in late MK2 which would have made it harder on Cygnar players. This is in stark contrast to other parts of the world where Cryx was the most played faction.
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Post by unmitigated on Aug 22, 2017 14:06:20 GMT
Looking at the last 12 months of DGI data for all placements (top N, with WTC restricted to top 8 for these purposes):
Cygnar - 48
Circle - 34
Khador - 33
Retribution - 33
Cryx - 28
Legion - 27
Protectorate - 24
Mercenaries - 20
Convergence - 12
Skorne - 11
Minions - 8
Trollbloods - 8
Restricting it to post-cryx/skorne rework:
Cygnar - 34
Cryx - 21
Khador - 19
Circle - 19
Legion - 18
Retribution - 17
Mercenaries - 15
Protectorate - 12
Skorne - 10
Convergence - 8
Minions - 3
Trollbloods - 3
Now note, a lot of these vary between top 3 and top 4 (and for WTC, top 8); also note that team tournaments this will artificially inflate some factions by definition, because there's no way to know which faction was the "deciding" factor in that team's finish. However, taking the figures of *placing* versus *winning* seems to corroborate the head-and-shoulders presence of Cygnar at top tables, representing close to any two factions below them, and any three in the bottom 1/2. Cryx gets close, but I think we all knew that.
Looking at the last ~3 months or so, the real "swing" of CID, we get a slightly different but still overall similar picture:
Cygnar - 20
Cryx - 18
Khador - 9
Mercenaries - 9
Retribution - 8
Protectorate - 7
Legion - 7
Skorne - 6
Circle - 4
Convergence - 2
Minions - 2
Trollbloods - 1
Now, again, tournament results are not the end-all-be-all of anything as we all know. However, they are an interesting metric and when a pair of factions, in the last quarter-year, are doing as well or better than multiple others, it's important to question why that is.
In the first dataset, there are 285 finishes, and 182 unique players* (though there are some overlaps due to spelling errors, and entries with only a first name). 53 of those players show up more than once. 27 are in the list twice, 19 in 3 times, 2 in 5 times, 3 in 4 times, and 2 in 6 times. The reason these stats are relevant is that while it does show that a subset (specifically ~26 players in 182 finishers) of our community does tend to win/place consistently as individuals (and members of teams), we have a plurality of unique finishers. This pretty handily crushes the "play skill" argument for a simple reason - If, across a field of largely (>66%) unique players, we continually see a trend of strong finishes for specific factions then representation, player skill, and finish are not causally linked. They are instead correlative as no clear statistical trend can be established at an individual level. Representation becomes a lower impact metric because the power-level-versus-representation argument is inherently a chicken and the egg paradox; there is no meaningful way to separate whether a faction is powerful because it is represented highly, or whether it is represented highly because it is powerful. Either way, overrepresentation of a sub set of factions is itself indicative of a problem.
Unfortunately due to the low amount of tournament data compared to a game such as, say, Magic: The Gathering or Hex: Shards of Fate, clear statistical analysis by list and archetype are hard to process, and given the variance level of best-of-one long duration games you would imagine that curves of finishes for specific factions would be flatter over time, rather than spiky (if you study data science to any degree).
The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the available data (and to be fair I'm using DGI's tournament listing back to August of 2016 for the above), is that there are clear outliers among a specific subset of factions, which is not easily linked causally to individual player, skill, or tournament representation in any meaningful manner.
EDIT: Since Discord asked for it, I'll post it here too. Meta from August 2016 to January 1, 2017
Retribution of Scyrah - 16
Circle Orboros - 15
Cygnar - 14
Khador - 14
Protectorate of Menoth - 12
Legion of Everblight - 9
Cryx - 7
Minions - 5
Mercenaries - 5
Trollbloods - 5
Convergence of Cyriss - 4
Skorne - 1
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