WTC Stats

The smple size is not pretty small... it's as big as you're going to get without changes.

70% is a lot, it's a big higher than it usually was... low 60%s... But which cmpetitive games are you refering to?

With the theme force releases I, surprisingly, am giving PP a pass on this one. I'm prepared to see how the themes shake things up. Looks like a case of the rich getting richer but theme forces is a known area where players don't get it right at first.

Remember Solos saying Cryx was fine in the beggining of MkIII? Perhaps it wasn't very good but it was certainly playable when you consider the changes that got made and the results they keep having. If I'm not mistaken Ghost fleet was all there minus the theme list and the hellslinger.

OK cool, not quite what I suggested but it still shows the result everyone here has been asking for: Cryx the faction wins a player moar games (might be useful to post it here too?).

As I am sure you are aware, in the linked to analysis you do not include a measure of player skill and team skill in your regression model, so this could be further improved (check out glmms if you have not already done so). Also you did bivariate not multinomial logistic regression.

While I applaud you for taking a proper analytic approach and making it clear that headline summary stats like a 70% win rate may not tell the whole story, I think it is disingenuous in this case to dismiss analysis of individual games won because of the team tournament setup. Sure, we have a good expectation that the matchup process and goal of team rather than individual wins might affect the win rate of different factions differently. However the WTC data also has a number of advantages for asking whether one faction is more likely to win given all other factors being equal: 1.) variance in player skill should be much lower than most typical steamrollers; 2.) everyone there is playing to win with what they think are their best possible lists for the format; 3.) the number of unique players is high and each player plays 6 times; 4.) you have data on player and team wins, so these variables can be included in analyses and modelled. As long as the limitations of the data are explained, and the analysis is appropriate, then I do not see a problem.

This is not to detract from your team-win analysis, which is v interesting, esp the result of having 2 cryx on a team increasing team wins (I might have missed this, coming late to the conversation, but is this true of other factions too? There were quite a few double Khador).

To everyone disagreeing with the Prof re. including player win rate in analyses, I'm on the Prof's side here - we know player skill in an important variable in game outcomes and I cant think of a better way to measure it with the data available. Prof is doing the right think looking at VIF's (variance inflation factors - a measure of how correlated all the variables you are using to predict wins are).  

On that, I think that one of the problems of CID may be a power level bias.

In general, if you discuss in CID a model of a faction perceived as strong, people tends to start with the objective of "not giving another strong thing to a strong faction", and so tend to propose changes aiming to averange-meh models (an example was SoT with Cygnar, were people complained for buffs to a really weak theme and generically sub-par models just because "Cygnar doesn't need more powerful options").
When instead on CID there is a faction perceived as "weak", the general mentality is "let's give it something nice to boost the faction, they need it".

While in general I can understand the reasons for the mindset, I think that we should always aim for competitive but not OP models, whatever the faction.
The reason is that if you introduce weak models to a strong faction, you don't actually lower its power, you just corner it into the most optimal builds, removing variety.

If instead you give an OP thing to a weak faction, maybe it will do a little better, but you will create a situation like beginning of MK3 Circle where a generically not so good faction were inflated by having 2 OP casters (WW and Una2), a situation that is not desiderable at all.

In general, both strong and weak factions should get good quality but not OP models, so in the long term the situation would even in an healthy way, with a variety of different competitive options viable for everyone.

People Witch Hunt anything that makes them need to adapt the lists they want to bring. Wurmwood shit on the powerful gunlines people want to play, better nerf Wurmwood. Today's Witch Hunt is Deneghra1, despite all of the evidence & data pointing to the fact Coven has been the actual problem within Cryx since August 2016, but since they don't force list adaptation like Deneghra1 who cares. 

Yea no, a lot of Dark Host's buffs came from people who made suggestions having never played the prebuffed models. Bane Warriors didn't need anything, their UA didn't need anything the second it became Free in theme, Desecrators didn't need to be touched, Tartarus didn't need anything the second he became free in theme, etc. the entirety of the Dark Host cycle should have been focused on balancing Bane Knights & Bane Riders since literally everything else was fine before CID or was overcosted & becoming free. Instead of focusing on Riders & Knights time was split with people testing Battle Engines, we had random thrall changes for some reason, and a week was spent debating the Desecrator, which was perfectly fine & didn't need any changes, something people would have known if they ever actually played it.

People in CID need to stop trying to turn CID cycles into "how can I get the most models included in this cycle for buffs?" and start focusing more on the initial models included. There was literally no reason to throw Kraye into the Gravedigger cycle. He's not really designed to play in the theme and all of the focus on him took a lot of time away from the initial models proposed in the CID to the point that Long Gunners never actually got looked at or really tested at all. 

So far CID hasn't done much for the players it seems.

The problem is that "list adaptation" often translates to "if you don't devote a list in your pair to dealing with this, GG." That's the place that Wurmwood (and Caine2 and High Reclaimer and una2) was in, and it's the place that D1 Ghost Fleet is in right now. The question isn't "is this list unbeatable", it's "can a list not specifically built for this challenge have a decent game?"