I've only ever looked at tournament results to give me an idea what I'll be facing, not what I'll be playing. Isn't that what we should be using it for?

Also, @jesper_h...your "reputation" number is 666. That's ominous.

And, now it's not. Damnit.

13 minutes ago, jesper_h said:

There's been a trend in certain sections of this community (and other miniature/card gaming communities like it since the dawn of time) to take result trends and call it data. It's anecdotal evidence at best, and boy, I'm using the word evidence loosely here.

That's pretty close to "we can't know anything".

What are you trying to say, exactly?

7 minutes ago, jesper_h said:

To expand on that: we're seeing even here, right now, in this discussion.

Nordic Nationals just happened. Without any semblance of ownership (who was flying these lists), history (what matchups those players had), or context (how and why they won those matchups), conclusions are already being drawn as to why we're seeing more of X pilot or Y faction based on Z trend.

This also glosses over that we are capable of applying context to things. While we don't always have specific matchups, we will have overall lists, and then can see if the list was good for that specific tournament meta.

7 minutes ago, jesper_h said:

I'm not sure how helpful that is. Or, on the reverse, how harmful that is. Doesn't it just feed back into the echo chamber? And isn't propagating that echo chamber through the popular mediums (ie. podcasts) part of what got us into such a mess during first edition meta(s) in the first place?

No?

I mean, I agree the things you've listed as bad ideas are bad ideas.

I don't think there's much misleading about looking for general trends. You aren't going to find The Next Big Thing ™️ by looking at what everyone else has played, but it is helpful to see what other people have tried and failed with to not repeat past mistakes. 10 people (100%) played not supernatural Vader and didn't make whatever their cut was? Hints and leads towards that not being a path worth following.

EDIT: That's actually not a good example, because I don't have anything in front of me right now. tl;dr it's much easier to find bad things from looking at past performance than good things, which I still find valuable.

6 minutes ago, jesper_h said:

It's what people are inferring. When somebody with a platform says "Wedge isn't good", and then somebody wins a premier event with Wedge, the response from a portion of the community isn't "Oh, cool, well done to that guy for doing well with a list he made." instead it's "See! Wedge is good! You're bad!"

There's been a trend in certain sections of this community (and other miniature/card gaming communities like it since the dawn of time) to take result trends and call it data. It's anecdotal evidence at best, and boy, I'm using the word evidence loosely here.

Could it also be that we are applying hyperbole to our adjectives or failing to find a middle ground? Or maybe we are not communicating properly?

I feel like we are using different scales. Some people are thinking in binary (Good/Bad) - When people say Wedge is not "Good", then that means he's "Bad". But we can't assume that saying Wedge isn't "Good" means that the author is saying he is "Bad".

Are things better with a three point system of (Good/Okay/Bad)? Probably - my sense of this thread is that most people would agree that he is Okay.

Is it better to go to the tier system (S/A/B/C/D)? Five points gives a lot of room to make relative comparisons and I think that it defuses arguments because you have more wiggle room. You will be hard pressed to find anyone saying Wedge is S-Tier, but he slots into A/B Tier IMO and that makes for an interesting discussion.

Also have we really had a few dozen pages on if Wedge is good or not? Jesus.

2 minutes ago, Scott Pilgrim2 said:

Also have we really had a few dozen pages on if Wedge is good or not? Jesus.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone

6 minutes ago, gennataos said:

I've only ever looked at tournament results to give me an idea what I'll be facing, not what I'll be playing. Isn't that what we should be using it for?

Also, @jesper_h...your "reputation" number is 666. That's ominous.

I seeing tournament results just to get ideas for list building. Sometimes you get to see combinations you hadn't thought of and sometimes you may get a sense of how a general list you want to try does.

I'm doing our normal meta analysis, which absolutely just focuses on lists in cut.

But for the first time (and hopefully, going forward), we have FULL tournament data, and can probe the swiss as well. It's mostly just interesting - like the T-65 % and Wedge %s in swiss.

Is this usefull for meta? Sort of, but if a bunch of lists do poorly, im not going to change my lists around them. But now we can really see no one is bringing non-t65s to tournaments, and that is a weird data point for reflection.

It might mean nothing, but I just want to marinate on it for a bit first, before summarily dismissing it.

The alternative is, of course, we can keep all of this data breakdown to ourselves, if the public dislikes data so much...

9 minutes ago, Brunas said:

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone

We should smack whoever cast that first stone.

On ‎9‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 12:49 PM, Scott Pilgrim2 said:

I think that comes from him being a bit overcosted and more RNG in 2.0 than 1.0 - for 68 points and 4 hull he can just die really easily. IMO to be in the great tier a ship has to almost always be worth the points. He's really good, but he lacks consistency to carry a squad. Makes sense he would be on the Wedge tier.

17 minutes ago, gennataos said:

I've only ever looked at tournament results to give me an idea what I'll be facing, not what I'll be playing. Isn't that what we should be using it for?

I think so. It is also what we should be testing against when trying out a new list (or modification to an existing list).

Which falls into the question of "What can we know?" and then moves into "What can we use this knowledge for?"

I find it odd that @TLFJ200 keeps saying "this data doesn't really help you know the things you want to know" and some number of the responses are "but we want to know those things". We can know trends, which can give us a slight edge on some of our decisions. One right now that I would take into consideration is dropping Proton Bombs and Traj Sim for Advanced Sensors on Redline in my list, because I'm not seeing any formation swarms doing particularly well or showing up in high numbers. While that doesn't necessarily mean that formation swarms are "bad" it does tell me that I can tailor my list elsewhere.

Just now, Micanthropyre said:

One right now that I would take into consideration is dropping Proton Bombs and Traj Sim for Advanced Sensors on Redline in my list, because I'm not seeing any formation swarms doing particularly well or showing up in high numbers.

DON'T TELL THEM THE SECRET

SHUT

IT

DOWN

1 minute ago, Brunas said:

DON'T TELL THEM THE SECRET

SHUT

IT

DOWN

They will never believe it anyway because Tragedy Simulator broke 2.0 and the game is dead anyway.

1 minute ago, Micanthropyre said:

They will never believe it anyway because Tragedy Simulator broke 2.0 and the game is dead anyway.

I'm living in some sort of bizzaro time loop because @Rytackle follows a release schedule like a responsible human being.

I'm talking to Dee in the past, but it hasn't happened yet?!?!

12 minutes ago, Tlfj200 said:

That's pretty close to "we can't know anything".

What are you trying to say, exactly?

Making conversation, for the most part. But I think my actual point would be that evaluating something in isolation (ie. "is Wedge good?" or "is Redline overcosted?") based on tournament results can be misleading. It removes the player from the equation. That's not to say doing analysis is bad, but I feel assigning it too much weight (or in the Mathwing sense, inexplicable logical superiority) is a bit much.

10 minutes ago, Scott Pilgrim2 said:

Is it better to go to the tier system (S/A/B/C/D)? Five points gives a lot of room to make relative comparisons and I think that it defuses arguments because you have more wiggle room. You will be hard pressed to find anyone saying Wedge is S-Tier, but he slots into A/B Tier IMO and that makes for an interesting discussion.

[Again, in my personal opinion, yadda yadda] I just don't think this is that helpful. It's a helpful shortcut to a baseline analysis, but it removes all context from the equation if you just stamp "A Tier" onto Whisper and call it a day.

1 minute ago, Tlfj200 said:

The alternative is, of course, we can keep all of this data breakdown to ourselves, if the public dislikes data so much...

Do what you want man

Just now, jesper_h said:

[Again, in my personal opinion, yadda yadda] I just don't think this is that helpful. It's a helpful shortcut to a baseline analysis, but it removes all context from the equation if you just stamp "A Tier" onto Whisper and call it a day.

Which is fair - my thought was more of to get out of this loop of !Good = Bad.

1 minute ago, jesper_h said:

or in the Mathwing sense, inexplicable logical superiority

wedge jousts at a baseline efficiency rate of 94.3456984735698798%, assuming a wave 4 meta.

2 minutes ago, jesper_h said:

Do what you want man

Johnsonposting is my favorite thing ever

for future use

At any given time these are the three available X-Wing Topics to discuss:

• How good are already released things?
• How good will unreleased things be?
• In Game Tactics & Strategy
• Game Modes & Formats
• Memes
• Command & Conquer

33 minutes ago, jesper_h said:

Without any semblance of ownership (who was flying these lists), history (what matchups those players had), or context (how and why they won those matchups), conclusions are already being drawn as to why we're seeing more of X pilot or Y faction based on Z trend.

Just throwing in: that's the beauty of large numbers.

Last regional season after the MirandaNym nerf got to over 10'000 games on listjuggler, from 1825 lists. That is enough to tell whether Harpoons are an actual problem (they weren't except on OP ships like Miranda, Nym or QD), or whether Poe has potential (he had).

It's important to note that this information will always be descriptive, never prescriptive. But it can tell us why something worked in a certain meta, and we can learn from those reasons and try to apply them to future metas.

It's also interesting, your concern is an old one in military history: how much influence did an individual commander really have? What I described above has been done for millennia and is analogous to collecting stratagems. Sunzi did, Alexander did, Frontinus did. They all tried to look into the past and learn something. The principle is the same here (but of course with different stakes... those marbled dice are way more important!) and so is your concern.

2 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

It's important to note that this information will always be descriptive, never prescriptive. But it can tell us why something worked in a certain meta, and we can learn from those reasons and try to apply them to future metas.

9 minutes ago, Micanthropyre said:

They will never believe it anyway because Tragedy Simulator broke 2.0 and the game is dead anyway.

No, that's Sloane Thane Whisper tugboats?

18 minutes ago, jesper_h said:

It removes the player from the equation.

I wish there was a meaningful way to discuss individual players, their approach/choices/etc, more in depth. I find that infinitely more interesting that list breakdowns.

Just now, gennataos said:

I wish there was a meaningful way to discuss individual players, their approach/choices/etc, more in depth. I find that infinitely more interesting that list breakdowns.

Yeah, me too.

3 minutes ago, gennataos said:

I wish there was a meaningful way to discuss individual players, their approach/choices/etc, more in depth. I find that infinitely more interesting that list breakdowns.

Its 100% possible. Microsoft Paint helps.