This is the worst thing that has happened to my work productivity in a long time. Played around with a smaller subset of the results: (sorry about the formatting, I guess I don't have permissions to upload a screencap yet.)

Heh heh, happy to serve the greater troika of data and stats and work loafing!

The following is what I think you're looking for:

% Appearance based on total number of lists, Top 8:

% Appearance based on total number of lists, Final Table:

So this is straight up (Lists that have this ship in them)/(Total lists).

No, that's not quite right. It doesn't make the top 8 %19 of the time, rather, about %19 of the top 8 lists INCLUDE a YT1300. Slightly different things.

Jacob

Thanks for the clarification. Regardless, the YT-1300 is under-performing relative to its initial showing.

No, again. The YT1300 is the most common ship in the top 8 and the most common ship in the top 2. It's very likely to be outperforming other ships because of a variety of reasons, but it's very strong and doing very well right now.

Jacob

I see it's the most common, but it's not dominating at 40% or so as I suspected, the way some carry on. The Interceptor, Decimator, and Aggressor are close at 17%, 16%, and 15%, respectively. And if it was so op, the percentage of top 8 lists with Fat Han would be higher than the percentage of total lists with Fat Han. That isn't the case.

It's sad to see that the only way scum is getting played is with the brobots. I hope the new ships in this wave will bring some new viablilty for Scum.

Additionally juggler is a platform for delivering the data to folks who like to get their hands dirty (this thread!). There are 3 ways: either 1) download the Tableau desktop client and muck around in their, or 2) download all the tournament results as a big 'ol csv file and play around with it in Excel or Matlab or something , or 3) download all the data as a MySQL database and play around with it in SQL.

This is the worst thing that has happened to my work productivity in a long time. Played around with a smaller subset of the results: (sorry about the formatting, I guess I don't have permissions to upload a screencap yet.)

EDIT: Fixed it.

These results are pulled only from lists at Regionals and Worlds that placed 25 or better in Swiss. Note that Avg Swiss Rank is for each unique combination of ship and List ID#. The information shouldn't really be much of a surprise except for a few interesting oddities:

Tie Advanced - only six ships in six lists but still managed to place #1 somewhere and has a strong average performance. I have to assume that whoever is piloting these lists are quite good.

Star Viper - a best performance of only 4th place and not many performances in general makes me think an elite few are really trying to make this ship work.

Tie Fighter - the highest average list quantity and decent number of performances but less successful on average. Difficult to pilot or just outclassed by the current meta?

Very good work and very telling information on the ships. This is empirical data that can tell you a lot about the ships value and way better than looking at the over-costing and under-costing arbitrary point addition. I would say though the elite piloting issues should cancel out with enough data points so I wouldnt worry too much about that.

I see it's the most common, but it's not dominating at 40% or so as I suspected, the way some carry on. The Interceptor, Decimator, and Aggressor are close at 17%, 16%, and 15%, respectively. And if it was so op, the percentage of top 8 lists with Fat Han would be higher than the percentage of total lists with Fat Han. That isn't the case.

Two points: 1) your initial argument was that a decline in showing between earlier stages and final table showed that a ship wasn't overpowered. What should we conlcude if we discover that the reverse is true? 2) people aren't just whining about the 1300 - there are three ships that share the same characteristics, and those three ships show up 21%, 20% and 16% of the time at the final table.

That is dominance at a serious level. Throw in the agressor's impressive 21% (the main challenger to the turret homogeny, according to these stats) and there ain't much space left for any other builds at the final table. That's depressing, and it's exactly why people are a bit concerned.

You mention the interceptor's strong showing as proof of a healthy biodiversity in the game, but that doesn't seem legitimate in the same way as the agressor, as Fel is by far and away the most popular wingman for the decimator. Likewise the bandits and e wing. So, after we've compensated for this, the _only_ other ship to make a good showing is the bwing, at 10%, due to its super-low spammavle points cost.

Tl;dr Far from proving a lack of dominace or overpoweredness as you supposed, unfortunately this data shows that PWTs are still very much massively overrepresented in the meta.

I see it's the most common, but it's not dominating at 40% or so as I suspected, the way some carry on. The Interceptor, Decimator, and Aggressor are close at 17%, 16%, and 15%, respectively. And if it was so op, the percentage of top 8 lists with Fat Han would be higher than the percentage of total lists with Fat Han. That isn't the case.

Two points: 1) your initial argument was that a decline in showing between earlier stages and final table showed that a ship wasn't overpowered. What should we conlcude if we discover that the reverse is true?

If there was a statistically significant jump, then my first inclination would be that it's over-powered. However, it could be that the players who outperform other players happen to pick YT-1300s, and other players who don't outperform also pick YT-1300s

If the YT-1300 itself was overpowered, then I'd expect outperforming players who choose the YT-1300 and under-performing players who likewise choose the YT-1300 to both do exceptionally well in tournaments, relative to their initial representation in the field.

Can you tell I used to study quantitative analysis? Numbers can mean lots of different things, and it's easy to rush to false conclusions.

Given a large number of ships, we can expect only a certain number out of a normal distribution will be outside a standard deviation or two. Even if all ships were perfectly balanced performance-wise, you would never see every ship represented at 4% each. Some are going to be more favored, more in fashion, and randomized due to other factors beyond knowing.

So with 25 ships, any ship that is represented around 4% is represented fairly and those above and below are popular or unpopular:

Y-Wing (Rebel) and TIE at 7%; X-Wing at 6%; Firespray-31 (Scum) and A-Wing at 4%; Z-95 (Scum), Y-Wing (Scum), and Lambda at 3%; and Star Viper and Firespray-31 (Imp) at 2%, and HWK-290 (Scum) at 1%.

That's 11 ships out of 25 that are in the expected range. That's healthy diversity to me. Those that are popular include:

YT-1300, Aggressor, Decimator, Interceptor, Z-95, E-Wing, B-WIng, and Phantom

That's only 8 out of 25 ships. The thing that struck me here is that while the YT-1300 is the most popular of the popular ships, it is not widely more popular, only marginally more popular. My perception (this is an opinion) of the way some people (perhaps not you) go on about PWT, and Fat Han in particular, is that it so dominates the meta that it's just about the only thing they ever face and there's no diversity. These numbers tell me otherwise.

My perception (this is an opinion) of the way some people (perhaps not you) go on about PWT, and Fat Han in particular, is that it so dominates the meta that it's just about the only thing they ever face and there's no diversity. These numbers tell me otherwise.

There's more instances of Chewie than Han in the top 8, but nobody complains about him because he will rip their arms off

My perception (this is an opinion) of the way some people (perhaps not you) go on about PWT, and Fat Han in particular, is that it so dominates the meta that it's just about the only thing they ever face and there's no diversity. These numbers tell me otherwise.

There's more instances of Chewie than Han in the top 8, but nobody complains about him because he will rip their arms off

Never lose to a Wookie.

Functionally, Fat Han, Dash, and RAC don't make a difference. They fall under the same category: An arc dodging, fat turret ship for your chosen faction that can absorb a lot of damage and win by margins on points.

The Tie-Int is only there as an accessory for RAC.

So instead of going 'Look, han is only 20-odd percent of the meta!' instead it's really 'Look, han-like equivilencies are effectively 65-70 percent of the meta!'

That's horrid for diversity. Especially since most of those ships are only being used for one pilot or one build (do we really expect anything but loaded Corrans for E-Wings? Anyone but Fel really for Tie-Ints at such numbers?)

Functionally, Fat Han, Dash, and RAC don't make a difference. They fall under the same category: An arc dodging, fat turret ship for your chosen faction that can absorb a lot of damage and win by margins on points.

The Tie-Int is only there as an accessory for RAC.

So instead of going 'Look, han is only 20-odd percent of the meta!' instead it's really 'Look, han-like equivilencies are effectively 65-70 percent of the meta!'

That's horrid for diversity. Especially since most of those ships are only being used for one pilot or one build (do we really expect anything but loaded Corrans for E-Wings? Anyone but Fel really for Tie-Ints at such numbers?)

I highly disagree with that statement.

Fat Han and RAC are PS8+, allowing them to move last unless your opponent chooses a small number of pilots to deny them that ability. RAC is often seen at PS10, which, when coupled with an init bid (which isn't uncommon), it's next to impossible to shut down the arc dodging component he has.

Dash, Oicunn, and Chewy all have a much lower PS. The arc dodging aspect of their play is much less relevant, and while against generics they can take advantage of it, they cannot rely upon it for the rest of the meta.

And more often than not, the 75min round allows almost every game to be concluded, so the "1 hull left on a Fat Han" aspect is only relevant when you lose because you failed to kill the enemy. It's much less omni-present now that the games are extended. And the better counter against making the MoV less relevant (and therefore the living with 1 hull on a 60+ point ship a big deal) would be to properly play the number of rounds to place the cutoff at the proper place such that very few people are affected by MoV. In the PA regional, 6 of the 7 5-1 folks made it. Yeah, it sucks to be that 7th one, but in most cases, MoV didn't matter AT ALL. In contrast, the OH regional had 5 of the 9 4-1 players make the cut. I was the 6th and missed it by 11 MoV - less than a single prototype, which I lost in most games. The cut there sucked since it bisected the 1 loss players.

Thanks for the great & detailed reply Z0mb4d. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this. I do recognise that I am slightly biased, in that I enjoy any game with 1+ PWT in it much less than I would otherwise. I hope you're right about wave 7 rebalancing the game a little.

Because I obviously have nothing better to do, I decided to collect data from 2014 Regionals Results:

% of Appearance in Top 8 Lists:

% of Appearance in Final Table:

A couple of things to note:

Wave 4 (TIE Phantom, TIE Defender, E-Wing, Z-95 Headhunter) hit late in the season (June 26)

Tantive hit early in the season (May 22)

TIE Fighters had an increase in appearance at the final table vs. Top 8 by 8.83%!

YT-1300 had a decrease in the final tables by -3.48%

Now I just started playing last August, so I pose this question to those that experienced the meta shift: How come Han didn't have as much success last year, when all the upgrades that make Han "Fat" (C3P0, R2D2, Engine Upgrade, Title) were available throughout almost the entire season? Was he really that scared of TIE Fighter swarms? and why are they not viable any longer?

Interesting to me is a couple things from that chart:

- There is LESS YT1300 this year in the top 8 and, but MORE YT1300 in the top 2 than there was last year.

- There is MORE overall PWT ships in the top 8, but each are individually still LESS than the single PWT ship in the 2014 results.

- There is no individual ship that compares to the dominance of the Tie Fighter from last season this season, except if you add together multiple similar ships (YT/VT)

- Overall, the diversity last season was that you had a 5 ships dominating the meta last season in the top 8 (Tie, X, B, YT1300, Int), and really 1 individual ship dominating the top 2 (Tie)

Interesting to me is that people have been claiming that last years regionals were not diverse - I don't know that that statement is very accurate. It seems like 7 of 16 ships were featured in at least %10 of top 8 finishes, with about 4 more between %5 and %10. That's 11 of the 16, which isn't great, but isn't terribly mono-meta either.

Interesting also has been the claim that the current meta isn't diverse also. Considering that we have a larger pool to draw from this year (more ships) as well as a third faction (even more ships), it seems that the average top 8 is split pretty evenly between a variety of large base and small base ships. What's really cool to me is that there is no one ship that dominates like the Tie Fighter did last year.

I have more sympathy for the people who don't like to fly against the turreted ships available than I do for the people who complain about a lack of diversity. I don't know how other people read these results, but I think we have a greater diversity now than we did, and I'm anticipating an even greater diversity moving forward as more ships and upgrades are released.

Jacob

Now I just started playing last August, so I pose this question to those that experienced the meta shift: How come Han didn't have as much success last year, when all the upgrades that make Han "Fat" (C3P0, R2D2, Engine Upgrade, Title) were available throughout almost the entire season? Was he really that scared of TIE Fighter swarms? and why are they not viable any longer?

I'll try and give you my perspective on those questions and try and confirm dates, but I'll say there's a pretty good reason MJ separated out Wave 3 and Wave 4 in his regional results thread that gets lost when things are lumped together. Though I appreciate the work you did, it was really more like two separate regional seasons, and that includes for the falcon and, especially Han, but I'll get to that in a minute.

The release date of the tantive (which included 3PO and R2) in the US was June. I think the first regional it was legal was at Roseville. You can see that while 3PO did not take over the meta, there's an appearance by 3PO in the top 8 at least once from that point on in the rest of the US wave 3 tournaments. I mention US and focus on it, because release dates for the Tantive aren't as clear cut elsewhere (and the same is true for Wave 4), so I'm not sure that the "Fat" cards were available if you're using all of the regional data, including internationally. IE, more tournaments than you think may not have had access to those cards.

Even once those cards were released, they weren't enough for Han for a couple of reasons, in my opinion. A Wave 3 Fat Han (with a minimum of Gunner, 3PO, and Engine) would still have very inefficient wingmen since even without an EPT the best he can have is two X-Wings. Probably not good enough to consistently face the swarm, but I think it's why Chewie was seen more in the Top 8 after the release of 3PO than Han, since he could fit a couple of blues in there and wasn't as reliant on Engine upgrade. Interestingly, now that the phantom is gone, he looks like the preferred ship. So the answer to whether he was "that scared of swarms" is he was weaker to them.

Enter Wave 4 and the reason you don't see as many tie swarms after that. Wave 4 gave Han a much more efficient option for a wingman either in the form of Z-95s or Corran Horn. He also was able to add predator, which makes him significantly less reliant on actions when blocked and is a very good anti-swarm card in general. Of course, the other thing that was very hard on swarms was the pre-nerf phantom, something Han was very good at fighting. So, the Falcon gets better list options, improved cards, and becomes a much better option in the meta because of its ability to fight the phantom. Meanwhile, the swarm itself takes hits in the meta because of the phantom and predator. Since then, I think we've seen cards that continue to level out the swarm (Dash, Mangler, Lone Wolf, etc..) even though I think it can still be flown well, it's probably seen more effective cards introduced to combat it than any other card.

Please note, this is just my perspective on responding to your question about the meta and is not meant to be a complaint.

Interesting to me is a couple things from that chart:

- There is LESS YT1300 this year in the top 8 and, but MORE YT1300 in the top 2 than there was last year.

- There is MORE overall PWT ships in the top 8, but each are individually still LESS than the single PWT ship in the 2014 results.

- There is no individual ship that compares to the dominance of the Tie Fighter from last season this season, except if you add together multiple similar ships (YT/VT)

- Overall, the diversity last season was that you had a 5 ships dominating the meta last season in the top 8 (Tie, X, B, YT1300, Int), and really 1 individual ship dominating the top 2 (Tie)

Interesting to me is that people have been claiming that last years regionals were not diverse - I don't know that that statement is very accurate. It seems like 7 of 16 ships were featured in at least %10 of top 8 finishes, with about 4 more between %5 and %10. That's 11 of the 16, which isn't great, but isn't terribly mono-meta either.

Interesting also has been the claim that the current meta isn't diverse also. Considering that we have a larger pool to draw from this year (more ships) as well as a third faction (even more ships), it seems that the average top 8 is split pretty evenly between a variety of large base and small base ships. What's really cool to me is that there is no one ship that dominates like the Tie Fighter did last year.

The problem, especially with these last couple of conclusions is the same thing I mentioned in my response to VaynMaanen. It essentially lumps two different regional metas together as one. To effectively and accurately observe and comment on the diversity, I think that it needs to be split as MJ split it in his initial analysis. He actually tracked the appearance of the frequency of the top 1/3 of ships (4 in Wave 3 and 5 ships in Wave4) and the top 1/3 most seen ships represented 70% of the ships seen in both Wave though they were different sets of ships.

I see it's the most common, but it's not dominating at 40% or so as I suspected, the way some carry on. The Interceptor, Decimator, and Aggressor are close at 17%, 16%, and 15%, respectively. And if it was so op, the percentage of top 8 lists with Fat Han would be higher than the percentage of total lists with Fat Han. That isn't the case.

Two points: 1) your initial argument was that a decline in showing between earlier stages and final table showed that a ship wasn't overpowered. What should we conlcude if we discover that the reverse is true?

If there was a statistically significant jump, then my first inclination would be that it's over-powered. However, it could be that the players who outperform other players happen to pick YT-1300s, and other players who don't outperform also pick YT-1300s

If the YT-1300 itself was overpowered, then I'd expect outperforming players who choose the YT-1300 and under-performing players who likewise choose the YT-1300 to both do exceptionally well in tournaments, relative to their initial representation in the field.

Can you tell I used to study quantitative analysis? Numbers can mean lots of different things, and it's easy to rush to false conclusions.

2) people aren't just whining about the 1300 - there are three ships that share the same characteristics, and those three ships show up 21%, 20% and 16% of the time at the final table.

That is dominance at a serious level. Throw in the agressor's impressive 21% (the main challenger to the turret homogeny, according to these stats) and there ain't much space left for any other builds at the final table. That's depressing, and it's exactly why people are a bit concerned.

You mention the interceptor's strong showing as proof of a healthy biodiversity in the game, but that doesn't seem legitimate in the same way as the agressor, as Fel is by far and away the most popular wingman for the decimator. Likewise the bandits and e wing. So, after we've compensated for this, the _only_ other ship to make a good showing is the bwing, at 10%, due to its super-low spammavle points cost.

Tl;dr Far from proving a lack of dominace or overpoweredness as you supposed, unfortunately this data shows that PWTs are still very much massively overrepresented in the meta.

Given a large number of ships, we can expect only a certain number out of a normal distribution will be outside a standard deviation or two. Even if all ships were perfectly balanced performance-wise, you would never see every ship represented at 4% each. Some are going to be more favored, more in fashion, and randomized due to other factors beyond knowing.

So with 25 ships, any ship that is represented around 4% is represented fairly and those above and below are popular or unpopular:

Y-Wing (Rebel) and TIE at 7%; X-Wing at 6%; Firespray-31 (Scum) and A-Wing at 4%; Z-95 (Scum), Y-Wing (Scum), and Lambda at 3%; and Star Viper and Firespray-31 (Imp) at 2%, and HWK-290 (Scum) at 1%.

That's 11 ships out of 25 that are in the expected range. That's healthy diversity to me. Those that are popular include:

YT-1300, Aggressor, Decimator, Interceptor, Z-95, E-Wing, B-WIng, and Phantom

That's only 8 out of 25 ships. The thing that struck me here is that while the YT-1300 is the most popular of the popular ships, it is not widely more popular, only marginally more popular. My perception (this is an opinion) of the way some people (perhaps not you) go on about PWT, and Fat Han in particular, is that it so dominates the meta that it's just about the only thing they ever face and there's no diversity. These numbers tell me otherwise.

Because in my local meta, Turretwing is mostly what I face.

Also, let's not pretend that those E Wing or Interceptor numbers represent pilots other than Soontir or Corran, or that those Z's represent swarms. Those numbers represent turret escort ships for the most part.

Well, apparently the E-Wing is more popular then I was lead to believe! I wonder how many of them were Corran Horn?

Also, let's not pretend that those E Wing or Interceptor numbers represent pilots other than Soontir or Corran, or that those Z's represent swarms. Those numbers represent turret escort ships for the most part.

Well, apparently the E-Wing is more popular then I was lead to believe! I wonder how many of them were Corran Horn?

I think these same graphs would be very interesting in terms of individual pilot. I'd bet you'd see the following:

- Chewie is more common than Han (surprising)

- RAC is the most common Deci Pilot (not-surprising)

- Blount and commons for Z-95s

- Both Whisper and Echo are taken often enough

- Lots of Fel, little bit of Jax, not much else for Interceptors

- Corran is about the only E-Wing taken

- More common B's than any named pilot

- IG88B and C are by far the leaders, but there's a little bit of D in there. Almost no A.

- Kavil is the most popular named Y-Wing

- Scum Boba but no Imp Boba

- Vader is the only Advanced

There are probably more conclusions we could guess at. But it'd be interesting to see the results, and interesting to see how many surprises we'd get.

Also, this brings up a separate but equally interesting question on how we all define diversity. Some look at the above charts and see diversity. Others look at it and don't think the same. What about in terms of individual pilots? For instance, if we knew that the ~%20 Top 8 YT's were about %9 Chewie, %7 Han, and %3.5 Lando, would that change things? That would mean plenty of other ships with specific pilots would outrank the lead ship, especially considering that we all expect pretty much ALL the E-Wings to be Corran (~%12). Does that mean that we should view this as more diverse, or less? Just my morning thought.

Jacob

Functionally, Fat Han, Dash, and RAC don't make a difference. They fall under the same category: An arc dodging, fat turret ship for your chosen faction that can absorb a lot of damage and win by margins on points.

The Tie-Int is only there as an accessory for RAC.

Fat Han and RAC are functionally the same ****, with Fat Han being the bigger pain the ass. Dash, though, has jack **** to do with them.

Dash is not a dice bot when packing an HLC (if packing a mangler, I'd be surprised he could kill anything in this meta), because the blindspot and low PS makes him very vulnerable to basically anything that can boost (which is a lot of things nowadays). To distance them even further, Dash actually cares about being blocked since most of his strength lies in PTL. Not only does it power his attacks, but it lets him actually get them off by chaining rolls and boosts. PTL and a doughnut hole can be denied by skillful play, C3po/predator/gunner/PWTs cannot.

Dash also isn't terribly great at soaking damage. He's a 58 point Firespray with no evade; his idea of "tanky" is "range 3 with a focus" unless you maneuver well enough to obstruct shots against you (just remember that you can obstruct yourself )

Dash is a unique experience in that he has to combine his maneuverability with his ability in order to overcome his weaknesses. He's less of a simple arc-dodger and more of a guerrilla that has to lose his opponents in the tangle of debris and asteroids.

And yeah, Soonts is just RAC's errand boy. It's kind of funny that people fear him so much while RAC just cruises from taking up the bulk of lists with Whisper in Wave 5 and now just sauntered in smoothly with the next viable arc-dodger with no one batting an eye. I wouldn't say PWTs are OP, but I would call bull on anyone thinking Soonts, who hits as hard as a rookie pilot, would dominate the meta and not the monster that gives himself almost fully modified, basically unavoidable attacks.

Yeah, things like Guri/Xizor +5 Z's are about equal to a Soontir +5 TIEs list in power, or a Patrol Leader + 5 TIEs, or whatever. The 5 filler ships + 40 point 'super ship' is pretty good and is where I suspect the meta would go once turret players get their easy mode pancakes nerfed.

I wouldn't mind those types of lists dominating the meta as long as it wasn't to an extreme like how the pre-nerf phantom was.

Because I obviously have nothing better to do, I decided to collect data from 2014 Regionals Results:

% of Appearance in Top 8 Lists:

% of Appearance in Final Table:

A couple of things to note:

Wave 4 (TIE Phantom, TIE Defender, E-Wing, Z-95 Headhunter) hit late in the season (June 26)

Tantive hit early in the season (May 22)

TIE Fighters had an increase in appearance at the final table vs. Top 8 by 8.83%!

YT-1300 had a decrease in the final tables by -3.48%

Now I just started playing last August, so I pose this question to those that experienced the meta shift: How come Han didn't have as much success last year, when all the upgrades that make Han "Fat" (C3P0, R2D2, Engine Upgrade, Title) were available throughout almost the entire season? Was he really that scared of TIE Fighter swarms? and why are they not viable any longer?

What's interesting about this data is TIE Fighter and X-Wing were still dominant but have all but vanished since wave 4. Wave 4 brought the Z-95 and the Phantom. Shortly beforehand, the Tantive brought C-3P0, so it was still working its way into the meta. Swarms had a harder time dealing with these changes. At this point, X-Wings rapidly began falling in popularity as well due to the Z95 and the TIE swarm became much harder to win with.

Then MoV and Wave 5 became a thing. These changes utterly eliminated TIE swarms from viability. Dash could dodge arcs and pop a TIE per round, ultimately ruining MoV and most players' chances of making a top cut. Wave 6 provided more options for list building and players got yet another 2 ship build option.

FFG spent a lot of time and effort trying to combat the TIE swarm (turrets, Flight Instructor, Predator, Blount, Assault Missiles, bombs, HLC, Mangler, anything that dishes out crits) and ironically changing the tournament structure was the nail in the coffin.

Wait so there are more defenders than tie advanced in comp play, that surprises me.