2 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

Its 100% possible. Microsoft Paint helps.

The only explanation I've ever received over paint was this (FROM A LEAD DEVELOPER OF THE GAME)

I want a refund on paint explanations.

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.

2 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

Its 100% possible. Microsoft Paint helps.

I've been looking into having a notebook with me and doing simple thumbnail drawings of my flight paths in games. I'm interested to see the results and if it's something that can help improve play. Especially looking at how the obstacles have effected my flight paths for better obstacle placement in Turn 0.

1 minute ago, Brunas said:

The only explanation I've ever received over paint was this (FROM A LEAD DEVELOPER OF THE GAME)

I want a refund on paint explanations.

But I earned the right to just gimp noobz with muh gearz.

https://starfightermafia.blogspot.com/2018/10/article-4-x-wing-basics-2-vector-maps.html

The Real Art Of X-Wing

3 minutes ago, Tlfj200 said:

But I earned the right to just gimp noobz with muh gearz.

It's even better than that:

PvP community: how does this gear scaling work? We're seeing weird results and aren't really sure what stats matter and which stats don't

Developer: It's magic, don't worry about it. Here's a really condescending graphic.

AND THEY FIXED THE PURE OF HEART COASTAL SURGE EXPLOIT LEGITIMATE STRATEGY

RIOT

3 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

https://starfightermafia.blogspot.com/2018/10/article-4-x-wing-basics-2-vector-maps.html

These used VASSAL, that doesn't count! VASSAL IS CHEAT!

I feel like there are some very well established approaches out there that I don't know about on how to identify contribution of a pilot/upgrade to a list. Baseball knows WAR. How about LoL or DotA, do they have measures like this?

16 minutes ago, RStan said:

I've been looking into having a notebook with me and doing simple thumbnail drawings of my flight paths in games. I'm interested to see the results and if it's something that can help improve play. Especially looking at how the obstacles have effected my flight paths for better obstacle placement in Turn 0.

When I first started playing X-Wing I had a note book where I kept stuff like that.

The month before I decided to go to my first major X-Wing tournament it was filled with diagrams like below.

It wasn't super helpful since I had no idea how the game worked and that the real game is so much more reactive to the point its of limited use.

It was fun though and entertaining to look back at.

Reminded me of that connect the dots game.

Guess what list is the Dot at the top of each section?

2 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

When I first started playing X-Wing I had a note book where I kept stuff like that.

The month before I decided to go to my first major X-Wing tournament it was filled with diagrams like below.

It wasn't super helpful since I had no idea how the game worked and that the real game is so much more reactive to the point its of limited use.

It was fun though and entertaining to look back at.

Reminded me of that connect the dots game.

I see you plan two turns in advance.

@Boom Owl do you think those thumbnails would be more helpful if you had obstacle information? Looking at that, it seems to be a vital pieces of information missing from it that could've helped more. Otherwise there's not context of what you had to move around.

3 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

When I first started playing X-Wing I had a note book where I kept stuff like that.

The month before I decided to go to my first major X-Wing tournament it was filled with diagrams like below.

It wasn't super helpful since I had no idea how the game worked and that the real game is so much more reactive to the point its of limited use.

It was fun though and entertaining to look back at. 

Reminded me of that connect the dots game.

I think of football plays. Now where do the sick blocks go?

6 minutes ago, RStan said:

@Boom Owl do you think those thumbnails would be more helpful if you had obstacle information? Looking at that, it seems to be a vital pieces of information missing from it that could've helped more. Otherwise there's not context of what you had to move around.

Correct. This was X-Wing Core Box+2 Months me. Rocks were not on my mind at that time.

I sketched all those up because I had lost a huge # of games to single fat turret lists (Kanan/Biggs, Rac/Vader) with Whisper and wanted to head sim approaches.

I was just trying to figure how to keep Whisper alive against TLT and RAClo.

Ended up concluding where I moved or they moved didn't matter.

What I needed was Kylo Crew, more dice, or more health. Or two of those things.

10 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.

This is kinda what i'm getting at earlier with "The data is bi or even tri-modal"

A list can have different levels of success with (and probably against) different calibers of player.

GSC, 5/6 people either jousted my sloane swarm head on or attempted the world's most obvious overextended flank with Fenn. Matt was the first person to not lose a ship to me on turn 2-3. Clearly, matt is a higher tier of player.

But matt's list wasn't the correct list he should have used. He admits it himself: Guri should be Fenn+lando and was pretty useless in shifting tides of games.

Say boomowl had lost to Holt at Coruscant (meme format aside), Holt advances to top 16 at minimum. ****, say he somehow wins his top 16, and his top8 is Chumby who concedes for the memes? Top 4 somehow. You also know his list of Fat Wedge, Sabine, "luke gunner on a ship without a turret" is a dank meme from top to bottom.

Looking at all of the coruscant overanalysis other podcasts did, we know someone who people listen to would say that it's a good list since it made top 4. But it isn't.

Maybe you need to isolate the really good players in the data somehow?

19 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.

See... there kinda is... I'm actually surprised somebody hasn't gone back and done that sort of thing.

• On a match that is fully recorded, one can go back and look at the events of the match, discuss choices and strategies chosen.
• One can go back and discuss with the players their choices. (ie - oh god, why the BLEEP did I do that?!)
• One can use painty-type tools to draw important arrows and pause the match to discuss options that weren't taken and why some strange looking moves took place simply because of where the expected position was expected vs where it actually was in reality...

Most analysis on streamed games seems to be live... which is of course filled with idiotic suggestions from the peanut gallery judging based on what they would do - not what the current player is going to do.

Dang it... now I want to dust off my video editing software....

9 minutes ago, jagsba said:

I see you plan two turns in advance.

Only for openers. Even back then. Though I definitely thought there was a way to see the matrix beyond turn 3. (*There isnt)

@Tlfj200often rails against "results based thinking". While the context of these objections are, I think, focused against a single person's experience, I'm not sure the data quality we have is tremendously better.

Let's look at @Brunas's "10/10 non-supernatural Vader failed to make the cut" observation:

Some of those players might not be competitive, some might have had bad matchups, and some might have had bad dice. We don't know what led to those sub-cut performances. With 10 data points, we suspect there might be some meaning there, but it's definitely not definitive because there is no context and the system changes each time. Consequently, I'm always hesitant to use the data to say that "X is bad", because I think there's a high possibility that people of sufficient skill haven't thought about X very hard, and tested just as hard, and adjusted accordingly.

The safer way to look at the data is to use it to say "X is good enough" or "X is likely to be seen."

I simply don't have faith that this community exhaustively explores the possibilities enough to find all the energy minima. As a rule, they find a few easy ones and don't put much effort into anything else.

13 minutes ago, Kaptin Krunch said:

This is kinda what i'm getting at earlier with "The data is bi or even tri-modal"

A list can have different levels of success with (and probably against) different calibers of player.

GSC, 5/6 people either jousted my sloane swarm head on or attempted the world's most obvious overextended flank with Fenn. Matt was the first person to not lose a ship to me on turn 2-3. Clearly, matt is a higher tier of player.

But matt's list wasn't the correct list he should have used. He admits it himself: Guri should be Fenn+lando and was pretty useless in shifting tides of games.

Say boomowl had lost to Holt at Coruscant (meme format aside), Holt advances to top 16 at minimum. ****, say he somehow wins his top 16, and his top8 is Chumby who concedes for the memes? Top 4 somehow. You also know his list of Fat Wedge, Sabine, "luke gunner on a ship without a turret" is a dank meme from top to bottom.

Looking at all of the coruscant overanalysis other podcasts did, we know someone who people listen to would say that it's a good list since it made top 4. But it isn't.

Maybe you need to isolate the really good players in the data somehow?

Honestly, this is why traditionally I've put way more stock in solitaire games against myself (or preparation games with trusted opponents) than in tournament results.

For a result to mean something, I need to know what actually happened. I've seen so many proclamations of "X beats Y", using tournament results as a justification, and when I watch that game, see plenty of chances for Y to beat X.

I would say for those Non-SNR Vader's, they probably didn't spend those 12 points in a better way. If those 12 points enable a really strong combo/piece, then it could be worth it. And that also means that they couldn't cut 12 points elsewhere either. TL;DR - it's a long uphill battle to justify taking SNR off of Vader.

5 minutes ago, Scott Pilgrim2 said:

I would say for those Non-SNR Vader's, they probably didn't spend those 12 points in a better way. If those 12 points enable a really strong combo/piece, then it could be worth it. And that also means that they couldn't cut 12 points elsewhere either. TL;DR - it's a long uphill battle to justify taking SNR off of Vader.

It is, but that doesn't mean it's automatically bad, it's just harder.

11 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

@Tlfj200often rails against "results based thinking". While the context of these objections are, I think, focused against a single person's experience, I'm not sire the data quality we have is tremendously better.

Let's look at @Brunas's "10/10 non-supernatural Vader failed to make the cut" observation:

Some of those players might not be competitive, some might have had bad matchups, and some might have had bad dice. We don't know what led to those sub-cut performances. With 10 data points, we suspect there might be some meaning there, but it's definitely not definitive because there is no context and the system changes each time. Consequently, I'm always hesitant to use the data to say that "X is bad", because I think there's a high possibility that people of sufficient skill haven't thought about X very hard, and tested just as hard, and adjusted accordingly.

The safer way to look at the data is to use it to say "X is good enough" or "X is likely to be seen."

I simply don't have faith that this community exhaustively explores the possibilities enough to find all the energy minima. As a rule, they find a few easy ones and don't put much effort into anything else.

The only thing I take out of the non SNR Vaders not making the cut is that I'm more likely to see SNR Vader than not, and should plan accordingly.

This whole thing smacks of "how many turns ahead do you plan" because you've got people trying to make predictions when they shouldn't.

You can't look at a list with Vader that doesn't have SNR and say "You won't make the cut because the data says you won't" because that isn't what the data is saying. The data isn't saying anything about who's making the cut in a given instance. Now, if it was 10 Vaders being played by 10 players of similar skill in 10 of even roughly the same list Vegas is going to have heavy odds against you. At this point though, the only thing you can really ask yourself is "If I want to play non SNR Vader, what do I have to do differently?"

Gonna necromancy here a little, but as a rule people are bad at statistics. Even people that have had formal classes don’t usually internalize statistics like they do addition or geometry.

75% gets translated to “just about always” and 85% gets translated to “always” unless you are actively avoiding that or you have dealt with statistics more than 90% (all) of the population. We take a 70-30 as “I should always win this” but a 30-70 as “I could pull this out by outflying them” and don’t see a contradiction. People are lazy and like binning things in huge groups (not the British meaning) and good/bad are the easiest bins.

I really like seeing all this data and I am actively trying to not mess up interpretations, but I have to actively re-orient my thinking about things regularly. Stats are hard and can tell us very interesting things, but correlations aren’t causation and everyone accepts the first causal narrative that makes sense to them.

28 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

@Tlfj200look at @Brunas's "10/10 non-supernatural Vader failed to make the cut" observation:

Some of those players might not be competitive, some might have had bad matchups, and some might have had bad dice. We don't know what led to those sub-cut performances.

Quote edit failed, but close enough. I agree, especially in a sample size of 10. If we instead had 0 for 100, it still doesn't mean that Vader is always bad, but that any Vader that is good isn't found yet.

11 minutes ago, Micanthropyre said:

You can't look at a list with Vader that doesn't have SNR and say "You won't make the cut because the data says you won't" because that isn't what the data is saying. The data isn't saying anything about who's making the cut in a given instance.

...

At this point though, the only thing you can really ask yourself is "If I want to play non SNR Vader, what do I have to do differently?"

That

The answer might be to just not play SNR, but it's very likely "don't do whatever these 10 people did"

4 minutes ago, AEIllingworth said:

Gonna necromancy here a little, but as a rule people are bad at statistics.

Facts. We're so bad at stats have developers have started lying to us about their rng so we'll stop complaining it's broken

https://serenesforest.net/general/true-hit/

XCOM doesn't do this. How many times have you heard that xcom is broken because someone keeps missing 90%+ shots?

Just now, Brunas said:

Facts. We're so bad at stats have developers have started lying to us about their rng so we'll stop complaining it's broken

https://serenesforest.net/general/true-hit/

XCOM doesn't do this. How many times have you heard that xcom is broken because someone keeps missing 90%+ shots?

XCOM wrecks you so hard.

A lot of people have made a lot of fair comments in both directions on the validity of drawing conclusions with the data that we have. There definitely are issues when data just gets taken at face value. BUT often it's the best thing we have, and it is still a good starting off point for interesting discussions. So don't stop sharing your work @Tlfj200!

1 hour ago, LagJanson said:

Dang it... now I want to dust off my video editing software....

Please do...

Read this. Never posted....

Loving @jesper_h 's view. A page ago I was pondering how almost every game of 2.0 I've seen and played, was decided by decisions on the table, rather than ships and dice.

Which actually makes reading this current discussion quite interesting to me. It's not the way I look at the game. But it does still give me certain information about what I'll be going up against. Ways to think about how an opponent might expect his list to play.

I like to fly what I like. I do like effective things but it's more about making effective decisions with whatever it is you've put on the table.

The way I see meta is that it's just fashion. Things can be effective without being fashionable.

Edit. Wait. I missed some pages...