This is cute and all, but also evidence this thread has run its course. Unless Boom Owl wants to give more detailed info, including posting actual lists in his new points to give an idea of the new role of aces, then the discussion is done and we can all make up our minds.

As much as I'd like to explore the idea, it sounds like it's a no-go.

2 minutes ago, Wazat said:

This is cute and all, but also evidence this thread has run its course. Unless Boom Owl wants to give more detailed info, including posting actual lists in his new points to give an idea of the new role of aces, then the discussion is done and we can all make up our minds.

As much as I'd like to explore the idea, it sounds like it's a no-go.

Oh, man. The temptation to be snarky and pour more fuel on the fire is so strong. You are right, of course. But when did any discussion on any forum end thusly? Heh.

For my part, I prefer, and have always preferred, Ace + swarm and Ace + support archetypes. TripAces always bugged the **** out of me. So this kind of discussion *always* draws me in, probably further than it rightfully should. And that's as far as I can contribute to your very good suggestion at this time.

At this very moment in a thread not far from here, Fort Extended lies to the galaxy while openly supporting the treachery of the loathsome upgrades. This fierce thread which we have built, upon which we post, will bring an end to the Trip Aces! To their cherished bids! All remaining Force Users will bow to the Point Adjustment! And will remember this... AS THE LAST CYCLE OF THE CHEAP ACES!!!

But also yea I am out.

Not gonna lie I created this thread primarily to say that Soontir should cost 69 pts.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

There's a lot of bull to this.

@Boom Owl , you make good threads, but you LOVE hyperbole. stop reaching for reasons and take your punches. Some things are not going to coincide with your point.

I make this plenty clear about myself and what I say. I'm wrong a lot, and also right a lot (see audacious balance). I've already spoken over and over abut it again, but audacious balance had the problem effect of making ace+swarm a dominant play style due to sheer generic efficiency. Sheer generic efficiency is an old problem all the way from 1.0 balancing. Your lack of understanding with heavily-limiting-upgrades also shows another thing: You don't understand why natural dice and a slow game are actually a play experience problem. You may think for now that generic matches are beautiful, but anyone with more experience tells you that after a few months, its remarkably boring, exceptionally prone to RNG, and creates a false meta where one particular archetype is advtanged. And that's my last gripe with you: I don't know why the aces traumatize you so, but you really don't seem to understand how biased you are to certain matchups and to certain factions.

3 hours ago, Blail Blerg said:

anyone with more experience tells you that after a few months

To add on this this, **** 4BZ versus TIE swarm meta. That can go die in a fire and I hope it never comes back. It's far more like work than playing a game.

13 hours ago, GreenDragoon said:

Called it! If only Xwing games were as predictable as these threads...

btw, 21st in a list of 7 factions is not low

It’s also not dominant or problematic. And a 20% percentile performance definitely is low.

Vader at 17.24% and Boba at 18.89% show that this is a very reliable number...

e: we should probably all play Ello Asty (38.07%) and Red Squadron Bomber (34.59%) instead, lol
Fenn at 19.79% and Whisper on nr40 at whooping 15.43%.

That’s just pointing out the asterisk I already said had to be there. You used to be a strong poster, what’s gone wrong?

I'm a little lost in the numbers... Are these percentages of all reported games, or just within faction? I find it hard to believe Ello is in 38% of all lists played, so I want to better understand what's being said here.

Also it may be worth noting the total percent of aces (init 5 & 6 pilots with good reposition options) vs all else, to give an idea of how often aces show up.

7 hours ago, Stay OT Leader said:

So wait, I just ran Metawing for every Extended event since the points change and Soontir is ranked 21st best pilot with a terrible 20.4% percentile performance.

I think Metawing agrees with me?

emphasis mine

7 hours ago, Stay OT Leader said:

Worth putting a big asterisk by Metawing in this case as there was virtually no big competitive Extended tournaments during this period, so any ranking for any Extended ships is pretty spurious as it wasn't really being tested.

How did that work? "Bold and italics at the same time, must be serious"? Anyway, your asterisk is for the wrong reason. I can't count how often I told you metawing is a bad source for performance, but you didn't listen back when I was a "strong poster", so I don't expect that to change now. Your first reaction was to counter performance ceiling with aggregated performance.

e: pbm is better (but also not good right now)

worlds winning list is at 70.3% , but high number of lists. Several Soontir lists (add up to 16% of Soontir lists) are higher.

1 hour ago, GreenDragoon said:

emphasis mine

How did that work? "Bold and italics at the same time, must be serious"? Anyway, your asterisk is for the wrong reason. I can't count how often I told you metawing is a bad source for performance, but you didn't listen back when I was a "strong poster", so I don't expect that to change now. Your first reaction was to counter performance ceiling with aggregated performance.

e: pbm is better (but also not good right now)

worlds winning list is at 70.3% , but high number of lists. Several Soontir lists (add up to 16% of Soontir lists) are higher.

Yes, I used bold and italics as an in-joke. And I always say metawing should be taken as a guide and I made extra effort to point that out this time.

Honestly. You used to be good but now you're just being sucked into the cheap points-scoring and 'gotcha' posts as everyone else resorts to because they aren't capable of more. You are and it's a shame you've gone low effort.

17 minutes ago, Stay OT Leader said:

Honestly. You used to be good but now you're just being sucked into the cheap points-scoring and 'gotcha' posts as everyone else resorts to because they aren't capable of more. You are and it's a shame you've gone low effort.

I think that's at least a little bit ironic

I’m always at least a little bit ironic.

4 hours ago, DarkArk said:

To add on this this, **** 4BZ versus TIE swarm meta. That can go die in a fire and I hope it never comes back. It's far more like work than playing a game.

YEEEEP

Definitely. I really enjoy being on the 'seven I1 ships' side of the metagame, but it would be a lot less fun if everyone else was just doing the same thing too because aces were extinct. I think the game overall is one of the best balanced states it's been in since I started playing in 2015. Complaining about anything now just sounds churlish.

8 hours ago, Wazat said:

I'm a little lost in the numbers... Are these percentages of all reported games, or just within faction? I find it hard to believe Ello is in 38% of all lists played, so I want to better understand what's being said here.

Also it may be worth noting the total percent of aces (init 5 & 6 pilots with good reposition options) vs all else, to give an idea of how often aces show up.

I ask again what the percentages mean. A bit 'o context would help frame the discussion for me.

Those links finally loaded for me, and I think it's saying Whisper is in 20% of in-faction lists, but only for the selected range: wave 6 extended (curated, large only). Is that the number we're discussing here? The soontir link is indeed only 13.8% but it's selected wave 6 only and all formats. Feels a bit like apples to oranges but again, I may be misunderstanding the context and intent. When I put Whisper in Wave 6 All Formats she's 10.5%, and taking Soontir to wave 6 extended (curated, large only) takes him to 22.7%. What's "Curated, Large Only" mean? Large events only?

Just to compare in the same searches, since the mix was confusing the **** out of me:

Extended Large only - Whisper 20.2% Soontir 22.7%

All Formats - Whisper 10.5% Soontir 13.8%

This site is neat, though the results are only as valid as its sample data. We may have to wait for tournament season to recover to make sure that's actually how the meta is going. And if large portions of games aren't reported (e.g. from whole countries or events) then... that potentially skews the results quite a lot. I'm not sure what's feeding the back-end data... list fortress?

Haha, when I plug in wullffwarro in the url it instead selects Lowhhrick. Perhaps Wullff isn't seeing much official play. (a tragedy !)

I had more thoughts on the neato pilot graphs (also extended ; exploring the dropdowns is worthwhile), but I tried to add a link with CTRL+K and instead pasted it into my hotbar and left the page because this forum is... adorably primitive. So uhh.. that got eaten. But yea, separatists and aces are pretty big deals.

What about Sun Fac......

Bottom-lines... I think...

Aces need to be appropriate within their own factions.

Boba and Soontir might be a tad cheap for the whole meta, but very nicely costed in their faction.

Poe, in my opinion, is costed close to perfect for the meta, but overcosted in his Faction.

Soontir should probably cost a little more, and Poe should cost a little less.

But, I'll say the meta we have right now is generally quite enjoyable.

Here's a toast for the devs.

Keep it up, gents.

X-Wing is super fun.

Yea, especially compared to where we came from (1E), things are really nice. I'd like to see the dominant lists a bit less dominant, of course -- I'm always up for flattening the curve a bit more to broaden the meta and make more lists & types of lists effective. In my ideal world, aces wouldn't be so dominant since they can be pretty NPE to fight, and lots of lists can't hack it because they're not built to deal with cagey, slow-play arc-dodgers. But outside of that fantasy land (which may or may not be achievable)... in the real actual game, so much more is viable these days and the game is a lot more varied and fun for the most part.

Sometimes when we get deep in the weeds of these discussions, we lose sight of that. I'll add my thanks to the devs.

While I have your attention n erf aces buff wullffwarro and torani kthxbye

56 minutes ago, Wazat said:

I ask again what the percentages mean. A bit 'o context would help frame the discussion for me.

different percentages from different sites.

The ones you mentioned from PBM are simply frequency within a faction I believe - the actual number is in the top left. And yes, I was checking a bit around and didn't wait for Whisper to fully reload the extended-all again before I copied the link.

On both sites, PBM and metawing, you find performance in percentiles. A number of 70% means that, on average (and btw hopefully by geometric mean now that I think about it?), this pilot placed 3rd out of 10, or 30th out of 100 players. There are some tricky pitfalls. For example, if 100 players attend a tournament, and the cut is to 32 people, then you expect more Poes in the cut if more players brought Poe. If 50 players bring Poe and he's perfectly average, then you'd expect 16 in the cut. If 100 players bring Poe, then 68 did not make cut and the average percentile is 50.

The biggest problem of 2.0 data crunching from my perspective is the jump to 7 factions and 2 formats. I made a snarky quip at SOTL, but it's an actual problem. 21st is a very good place for a pilot, on average top3 of a faction! We tend to forget that. But much worse, the increase to 7 factions pretty much doubled the necessary number of lists. The split between extended and hyperspace quadruples the necessary lists!

The main reason I dislike metawing, and partially PBM, is the data selection. I did my own for a while, with transparent and hopefully reasonable conditions. I said that a tournament needs 70% of lists entered in listfortress, a full cut, and at least 20 players overall. Metawing takes pretty much anything, and PBM has a "curated" option where whoknowswhat is included (it's actually listed at the bottom of thhe season overview)

here's a lengthy post from early 2.0

I don't understand why you'd want to waste design resources into propping up old pilots like Soontir who had their time in the sun. Metas change, pilots die off, and that's ok. Death is just another part of the cycle of the meta.

2 minutes ago, Chumbalaya said:

I don't understand why you'd want to waste design resources into propping up old pilots like Soontir who had their time in the sun. Metas change, pilots die off, and that's ok. Death is just another part of the cycle of the meta.

would you say... they should just not be so selfish and die once they’ve led a decent life, which is what mankind has done for millennia and isn’t a drain on the future waves?

35 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

would you say... they should just not be so selfish and die once they’ve led a decent life, which is what mankind has done for millennia and isn’t a drain on the future waves?

I agree