1 hour ago, The Jabbawookie said:

If his point was that MSU was basically dead, though, then the data reflects that.

Are you stating:

That MSU is reasonably competitive right now?

That squadless is perfectly good?

That super-activations aren't Lucifer in the flesh and other types of fleets exist?

You've said he's misinterpreted the data. What is the specific point you're trying to prove or disprove, and how does the data reflect it?

My point is Blail isnt interpreted data correctly.

His point was that MSU is dead. 23 people took "True MSU" to regionals. This is not dead.

Of the 23 people who took these lists to regionals, they all finished in the top half of the table and 8 of them in the top quarter. This is not dead.

"True MSU" is a very very niche definition anyway.

8 minutes ago, Ginkapo said:

"True MSU" is a very very niche definition anyway.

'The People's Liberation Front...'

'Splitter!'

The data does not really show us much beyond player choice for that period of time. it’s only showing one element of the picture. You really need to know the record of each of the players. As an example: if all the players who turned up with say pure MSU have a record of always being in the 25% year after, that gives a different picture than if all the players who turned up were novices with not record of winning or with a record of being in the bottom 25%.

You must always look to see what story the data can actually tell you and what it can’t. In this case, it’s player choice and raw results, it can’t really tell you of one type of fleet design is better or worse than another.

Data can be made many stories, but many of them are big smelly piles of digested grass.

Well, if the question is "can someone be competative with an MSU" then the answer seems to be yes.

Are there players using it at the Regional level? Yes.

Are they doing well? Yes.

Should you expect to see an MSU at a high level tournament (in the upper tables)? Can't rule it out.

If the question is "can *I* be competative with an MSU"...

I love the data, but it is something of a trap. Player skill and matchups combine to influence game outcomes more than fleet composition. Fleet composition is just the easier thing to analyze and debate on the internet.

Good players are out there winning with true MSU fleets. Skilled players can win with no squads, medium squads, and full squads.

I am generally lousy with full squads and no squads. But from 60-90 points I do quite well.

The fleet you have the most practice with is the fleet you will likely do the best with. The data is useful for telling you what you might expect to face and need to have a plan for.

The game is as balanced as it has ever been with a couple of aberrations. If it was all about fleet composition I wouldn’t be winning with the Jank I enjoy playing.

50 minutes ago, shmitty said:

I love the data, but it is something of a trap. Player skill and matchups combine to influence game outcomes more than fleet composition. Fleet composition is just the easier thing to analyze and debate on the internet

This is probably the most deciding factor in a tournament.

9 hours ago, player3691565 said:

The data does not really show us much beyond player choice for that period of time. it’s only showing one element of the picture. You really need to know the record of each of the players. As an example: if all the players who turned up with say pure MSU have a record of always being in the 25% year after, that gives a different picture than if all the players who turned up were novices with not record of winning or with a record of being in the bottom 25%.

You must always look to see what story the data can actually tell you and what it can’t. In this case, it’s player choice and raw results, it can’t really tell you of one type of fleet design is better or worse than another.

Data can be made many stories, but many of them are big smelly piles of digested grass.

True. Data is not the end all be all.

But if you're telling us to go with everyones random anecdotes instead, that's worse.

--

Other caveat. The issue of player choice, and good player choices vs bad player choices is a known phenomena and is well documented on the internet. My arguments DO NOT ignore them. You can find information about this phenomena and its interaction with winning data online and readily accessible. What you bring up is not a relevant argument due to that.

So, that's just not right. It has a direct correlation to what type of fleet design is better.

3 hours ago, shmitty said:

I love the data, but it is something of a trap. Player skill and matchups combine to influence game outcomes more than fleet composition. Fleet composition is just the easier thing to analyze and debate on the internet.

Good players are out there winning with true MSU fleets. Skilled players can win with no squads, medium squads, and full squads.

I am generally lousy with full squads and no squads. But from 60-90 points I do quite well.

The fleet you have the most practice with is the fleet you will likely do the best with. The data is useful for telling you what you might expect to face and need to have a plan for.

The game is as balanced as it has ever been with a couple of aberrations. If it was all about fleet composition I wouldn’t be winning with the Jank I enjoy playing.

The game is about as balanced as it has been historically. Which is not very compared to many other games. You will find examples stridently.

Again, the phenomena of player skill is already known in relationship to game outcomes. This is not a muddling factor, but a known, calculated offset.

There is also the issues of skill ceiling and skill floor that are being ignored when one looks at the info in this way.

The game is not balanced. Its that simple.
People also confuse this with: Is there a balance? Is it fun? Is it a "good game". Yes, its all of these. But it is not well balanced.

Look , you simply have to look at something like balance policies and history of a game like Starcraft 1 into Starcraft 2. Does your concept of balance and data collection also contain concepts like skill ceiling and skill floor? Does it contain understandings of meta age? Does it contain understandings of the concepts of opportunistic advantage? Does it have an understanding of the move away from rock-paper-scissors which is seen as an archaic balancing factor in modern policies? Does one understand the utilization of perfect vs near-perfect vs imperfect data and representation, and how each can be used and understood?

If yes, I'd love to hear more on your concepts and I will learn from you.

There are things that look unknowable, there are things that look similar but actually are completely not. Don't fall into any of those logical fallacy traps.

1 hour ago, Blail Blerg said:

There are things that look unknowable, there are things that look similar but actually are completely not. Don't fall into any of those logical fallacy traps.

Here's the thing. Your example is a computer game, where the developer can gather the results directly from the client, and see every detail. Also, balance adjustments can happen at a very fine level of detail. Compare Armada's balance to Warhammer and you've got a more fair comparison.

Armada gets one wave released a year, roughly. Once released, game components are generally not adjusted unless they exceed some degree of imbalance, and they are only adjusted in function, not cost. Counters can be released, but then they take up valuable room in the new products being released instead of cards that introduce new dynamics.

If FFG changed armada to:

1) allow adjustments to cards on a regular basis, including costs. (Annual card packs? digital apps?)

2) increased the ability to adjust cards to balance (multiply every cards cost by 10, and have a 4000 pt tournament fleet.)

Then we could have a much more fine-tuned ability to balance the game. Think APT's are too powerful? Raise their cost by 5% or 10%.

Skill floor/ceiling: Want a lower skill floor? Play Rebellion in the Rim, with only 1 upgrade per ship. The more interactions between upgrades, the higher the floor & ceiling become. Prime level play does need players to have a high level of skill. For Store Championships & seasonal kit tournaments, I've seen most of the regional level players show up with pretty janky fleets to avoid clubbing the baby seals while still having fun.

RPS - I believe that the RPS model is much more of a player-created simplification than the actual balance dynamic. Everyone needs to plan for common fleet archetypes, without going too far into building counters for one common archetype & being very vulnerable to others. Note that when a given fleet type gets very prevalent, it tends not to get past the cut, but instead has a big pile-up in the center of the tournament scoring 6-5. Yes, you could build a fleet with tech to fight one archetype, and then you are choosing to play RPS. Or you could build up a flexible core concept that you can use to fight any fleet.

Meta Age: Yes, people come up with counters mid-season & roll them out, and we're always seeing new trends that come up without any real trigger except people are now trying X.

Data quality: Trust me, the people that collect the lists & enter them into the spreadsheet are very aware of the limitations of the data. If we had something like the player ranking system used in Chess, we could try to get a sense of how quickly new players train up to become contenders at the regional level. But maintaining that sort of ranking is a huge effort, needs official support, and can quickly become another barrier to entry.

If we had a match-by-match record, we could evaluate a lot of things to a greater degree than we currently do. But it's hard enough to get full lists from a good percentage of the prime-level events. Trying to have people also record who played whom & what the outcome was for every match would basically require a full-time volunteer at every event.

1 hour ago, Baltanok said:

Here's the thing. Your example is a computer game, where the developer can gather the results directly from the client, and see every detail. Also, balance adjustments can happen at a very fine level of detail. Compare Armada's balance to Warhammer and you've got a more fair comparison.

Armada gets one wave released a year, roughly. Once released, game components are generally not adjusted unless they exceed some degree of imbalance, and they are only adjusted in function, not cost. Counters can be released, but then they take up valuable room in the new products being released instead of cards that introduce new dynamics.

If FFG changed armada to:

1) allow adjustments to cards on a regular basis, including costs. (Annual card packs? digital apps?)

2) increased the ability to adjust cards to balance (multiply every cards cost by 10, and have a 4000 pt tournament fleet.)

Then we could have a much more fine-tuned ability to balance the game. Think APT's are too powerful? Raise their cost by 5% or 10%.

Skill floor/ceiling: Want a lower skill floor? Play Rebellion in the Rim, with only 1 upgrade per ship. The more interactions between upgrades, the higher the floor & ceiling become. Prime level play does need players to have a high level of skill. For Store Championships & seasonal kit tournaments, I've seen most of the regional level players show up with pretty janky fleets to avoid clubbing the baby seals while still having fun.

RPS - I believe that the RPS model is much more of a player-created simplification than the actual balance dynamic. Everyone needs to plan for common fleet archetypes, without going too far into building counters for one common archetype & being very vulnerable to others. Note that when a given fleet type gets very prevalent, it tends not to get past the cut, but instead has a big pile-up in the center of the tournament scoring 6-5. Yes, you could build a fleet with tech to fight one archetype, and then you are choosing to play RPS. Or you could build up a flexible core concept that you can use to fight any fleet.

Meta Age: Yes, people come up with counters mid-season & roll them out, and we're always seeing new trends that come up without any real trigger except people are now trying X.

Data quality: Trust me, the people that collect the lists & enter them into the spreadsheet are very aware of the limitations of the data. If we had something like the player ranking system used in Chess, we could try to get a sense of how quickly new players train up to become contenders at the regional level. But maintaining that sort of ranking is a huge effort, needs official support, and can quickly become another barrier to entry.

If we had a match-by-match record, we could evaluate a lot of things to a greater degree than we currently do. But it's hard enough to get full lists from a good percentage of the prime-level events. Trying to have people also record who played whom & what the outcome was for every match would basically require a full-time volunteer at every event.

Honestly, Xwing is the other example. Xwing's balance generally continues to get better and better and more diverse than ever. That isn't similarly true to Armada. While I understand the caveats of digital, and Xwing's semi digital vs Armada's completely non-digital, saying it ties our hands isn't the whole truth.
And Xwing to Armada is going to probably be the most close comparison you can have. Frankly, also from what I know, I'd rather not Warhammer balance as a standard. There's enough people on the forums here who have complained about it.

7 hours ago, TallGiraffe said:

This is probably the most deciding factor in a tournament.

And nobody saying it aint so.

1 hour ago, Blail Blerg said:

Xwing's balance generally continues to get better and better and more diverse than ever. That isn't similarly true to Armada.

Respectfully, I have to disagree. I can say nothing useful about X-wing, but Armada is more diverse now than it has been since we started keeping data. While max squads continues to overperform, the degree of overperformance is smaller than it's been since wave 4. Squadless is showing up & performing better than it ever has.

2 hours ago, Baltanok said:

Respectfully, I have to disagree. I can say nothing useful about X-wing, but Armada is more diverse now than it has been since we started keeping data. While max squads continues to overperform, the degree of overperformance is smaller than it's been since wave 4. Squadless is showing up & performing better than it ever has.

lets not keep having high and max squads overperform knowingly and continuously. I'm glad we're denying it no longer. There were many who would deny it.

28 minutes ago, Blail Blerg said:

lets not keep having high and max squads overperform knowingly and continuously. I'm glad we're denying it no longer. There were many who would deny it.

Wait a minute. I don't think people have denied the presence of heavy squads in top lists. However prevalent they are, each archetype is viable and diverse in how you assemble your list. My understanding is that you want the game to change just so you can play a certain archetype easier even though other people are having success with it?

1 minute ago, TallGiraffe said:

Wait a minute. I don't think people have denied the presence of heavy squads in top lists. However prevalent they are, each archetype is viable and diverse in how you assemble your list. My understanding is that you want the game to change just so you can play a certain archetype easier even though other people are having success with it?

Oh people have denied it. Denied it for YEARS on these forums. With as Baltanok suggests, even harder and more damning and even stronger overperformance of max squads in the data sheets. You wouldn't believe it...

Thankfully enough, the Armada reddit is very plain in calling out the overperformance.

6 minutes ago, Blail Blerg said:

Oh people have denied it. Denied it for YEARS on these forums. With as Baltanok suggests, even harder and more damning and even stronger overperformance of max squads in the data sheets. You wouldn't believe it...

Thankfully enough, the Armada reddit is very plain in calling out the overperformance.

Okay. But you still want to change the system to the detriment of one play style for the benefit of another.

23 minutes ago, TallGiraffe said:

Okay. But you still want to change the system to the detriment of one play style for the benefit of another.

Yeah. I think you can come up with reasons why, time-wise historically-wise and how that relates to skill floor and skill ceiling and why player skill has already been factored into the argument. Now that you know the truth, it can set you free.

On 4/30/2020 at 10:20 PM, Blail Blerg said:

Was there a rule change about evade?

If I recall, this wasn't still enough to avoid the utter death of true MSU right? Just make having a few small ships/flotillas in a larger game still viable. (Basically the entire archetype is wiped out competitively from a data perspective right?)

Are there other major rules or meta changes?

Is there something that can be done rules/game mechanics wise to make dead archetypes viable again?

This is where you started, Blail. An assertion that MSU is dead. Utterly dead. Your description. Not a discussion about precise balance with one archetype being a bit/significantly more powerful.

MSU wins quite a large percentage of its games, but (in my limited experience) doesn't tend to win by a large enough margin to win large tournaments reliably. So people who intend to try to win large tournaments generally take heavy squadrons.

8 hours ago, Blail Blerg said:

Honestly, Xwing is the other example. Xwing's balance generally continues to get better and better and more diverse than ever. That isn't similarly true to Armada. While I understand the caveats of digital, and Xwing's semi digital vs Armada's completely non-digital, saying it ties our hands isn't the whole truth.
And Xwing to Armada is going to probably be the most close comparison you can have. Frankly, also from what I know, I'd rather not Warhammer balance as a standard. There's enough people on the forums here who have complained about it.

I haven't played X-Wing, so enlighten me. Could you please show me a data sheet for X-Wing that is the functional equivalent of the Armada data sheet we keep quoting? I'd like to see the evidence of X-Wing's diversity at the tournament level.

6 minutes ago, Bertie Wooster said:

I haven't played X-Wing, so enlighten me. Could you please show me a data sheet for X-Wing that is the functional equivalent of the Armada data sheet we keep quoting? I'd like to see the evidence of X-Wing's diversity at the tournament level.

X-wing has had that sort of data available for years. Mathwing, metawing, and currently ListFortress has every upgrade and every pilot and most archetypes listed and analysed so it's very easy to rank everything in terms of its success rate, as an absolute and as a number relative to how often it was used.

But with the same caveats: not every tournament and not every list gets entered into the database. There is a large bias towards events in the US just because they're more complete.

X-wing is probably in the best balance it has ever had, but it's also the blandest - in my opinion. The adage that the best list for anyone to use is whatever they've had the most practice with is definitely true.

Switching to adjustable points has really helped x-wing, because its release schedule is so hectic that getting them right from the moment that each product is released is pretty much impossible. Armada's slow schedule really helps with that even if it's really frustrating to wait so long!

13 minutes ago, Gilarius said:

X-wing has had that sort of data available for years. Mathwing, metawing, and currently ListFortress has every upgrade and every pilot and most archetypes listed and analysed so it's very easy to rank everything in terms of its success rate, as an absolute and as a number relative to how often it was used.

But with the same caveats: not every tournament and not every list gets entered into the database. There is a large bias towards events in the US just because they're more complete.

X-wing is probably in the best balance it has ever had, but it's also the blandest - in my opinion. The adage that the best list for anyone to use is whatever they've had the most practice with is definitely true.

Switching to adjustable points has really helped x-wing, because its release schedule is so hectic that getting them right from the moment that each product is released is pretty much impossible. Armada's slow schedule really helps with that even if it's really frustrating to wait so long!

Thanks! Metawing looks great.

4 hours ago, Blail Blerg said:

Oh people have denied it. Denied it for YEARS on these forums. With as Baltanok suggests, even harder and more damning and even stronger overperformance of max squads in the data sheets. You wouldn't believe it...

Thankfully enough, the Armada reddit is very plain in calling out the overperformance.

It hasnt been true for years.

Dont bring your baggage into another thread please. We've been over this far too many times.

Considering that there are 68 different squadrons and aces you can bring, if you are willingly ignoring that facet of the game, maybe you're just playing Armada wrong. Like playing Starcraft but refusing to use any units that require gas because "I should be able to win with 'ling swarms against anyone."

"I can't?!?!? Wow, way to make an unbalanced game, Blizzard."

On 5/4/2020 at 3:25 AM, Blail Blerg said:

Oh people have denied it. Denied it for YEARS on these forums. With as Baltanok suggests, even harder and more damning and even stronger overperformance of max squads in the data sheets. You wouldn't believe it...

Thankfully enough, the Armada reddit is very plain in calling out the overperformance.

Only in your own little delusional bubble. At this point, people have accepted the over performance of squads for far longer than it was denied. But you seem to want to continue to rehash something from three years ago . The fact remains the devs have tried time and again to reign in the worst archetypes. There's been a constant stream of upgrades and erratas that have weakened key squad heavy archetypes. Have they swung the pendulum hard enough? Probably not, but that doesn't mean they won't keep trying.

At the moment, Armada is not getting the frequent points rebalancing of Legion and X-Wing because they are constrained by the old contract for Armada, where every single FAQ (including the most recent one) has to go through a long approval process with Lucasfilm. I expect that will be changed in the near future. By my understanding, when the contract is renewed, Clone War offers the devs a chance to re-launch Armada in a great way. So rather than come in, start the same stupid fight you always have for the last three years, just calm down and enjoy the game. Or don't. No skin off my back either way.