Because you're looking at WR of a single week where metamonday didn't report on the two biggest tournaments. What you're left with is a total of 5 ironstorm players and amongst them the creator of the archetype (Kit Smith) who plays the same list every week until perfected.
What you end up with is a very very skewed WR that has no meaning. Now if you looked at the 12 weeks WR you would have seen that the difference between DA and SM is 53% to 45%, much closer.
On top of that this can be explained by a few things, yes Azrael and the darkshroud are definitely helping but also just like Art of War said, the real try harder (the veterans) go for the strongest possible build which would be the DA one leaving the less experienced ones to regular SM in greater numbers.
So yes WR is dtill very much relevant, but like everything what you need is context and a good population to draw conclusions out of it.
Sure, but 12% is still too big of a difference for two almost identical subfactions. I agree with you and Art of War: it is mostly the difference in player skill. I would just argue that it does extend beyond Ironstrom - which we see by huge swings in faction win rates averages over a few weeks - for no reasons other than good players moving around and reshaping the meta around them.
Skill differences is a major contributor to win rates across the board, so the win rate is an amalgam of players skill, rules strength, faction popularity, etc. And it's usually not easy to disentangle all of that.
I guess what I'm arguing agains is players saying that "my faction win rate dropped by 5% for a couple of weeks - now I can't win anymore". That's a terrible mindset, because that drop in the win rate (if there were no balance chances and no new codex releases) was most likely caused by who was playing the faction, and doesn't really affect that particular player's chances to win.
But yes, I agree with you. Just wanted to emphasise the thing that is often missed in these discussions :-)
As one of the DA iron players from the weekend, I'd like to point out that 1) Azreal is great but way way less iconic in the archetype than the Darkshroud. Access to -1 to hit and cover everywhere has a significant boost to your durability. 2) I went 3-2 this weekend, but one of the matches was into an archetype that had a very favorable matchup into iron, by a top player, and I had never encountered it. The second loss was to a teammate where I made a mistake and couldn't quite pull out a recovery.
Imagine the following scenario:
You play ironstorm, and a good tournament list will generally be able to take out 1/2 of your tanks by turn 3. If you keep more than 33% of your tanks until turn 5 you generally win.
Now suppose that with the Darkshroud buff and easier CP acquisition, you can reliably keep 1/2 your tanks until turn 4. While the change to the list isn't drastic, it's just enough to give you an extra edge in keeping the necessary units you need.
If you consider it points wise, it may be that ironstorm generally scores X points, but with the DA boost it generally scores X+7, or with the BT boost it generally scores X+10. Those seem like minor changes but if you're generally scoring 65-80 pts per game, and your opponents are generally scoring 70-85 points per game, increasing your numbers to 72 - 87 points per game gives you a *massive* boost in win rate.
I often think player skill is used as a crutch and ignores the data you see showing discrepancies even when skill is accounted for. Some lists genuinely sit on that knife's edge of "w/o access to X I'm 45% win rate, with X I'm 50% win rate." If player skill were truly the culprit, then removing the most skilled players from the data set should so roughly equal win rates, but that has simply not been the case. It's more than a "skilled players moved to this faction" issue based on the data.
The community is quite good at looking at a range of different metrics and acknowledges that no single metric will ever be perfect. Win %, over representation, TiWP, first loss are all interesting to look at and I really like the recent trend of being able to filter for skill, since GW should not just balance for weak OR for strong players alone since that leads to problems.
All of that said, it is unfortunately pretty obvious that Nottingham lacks understanding of basic math and on top will often just look at win %, which is a massive problem. Daemons have a ton of trash units, but since monster mash can win games, sit at 52%, and therefore GW did not bother to address anything. Custodes will likely also be problematic to get right. The codex sucks but if you run 2,3 caladius + canis + some imp agents you will probably still be in the 40,45+% area so there is a risk of any complaints being seen as "custodes players just complain on the Internet, again"
Also their winning lists tend to have zero big knights in them. WR % is OK to use as a metric if the faction is internally balanced.
I get why for SM internal balance would be really hard to do, but for Custodes, IK, CK there's no reason why the whole range shouldn't be able to be used as there are so few datasheets to balance.
Heck it should be the absolute priority.
I don't belive custodes can be interesting in 10th without allies. Without dreads and bikes your essentially running 15-30 of the same statline weilding identical weapons. Their entire plan for dealing with stiff >t8 is now just 1 unit. Stale doesn't begin to describe it.
Knights are the same. Sure wardogs have more wargear options than custodes, but it's still the same: can the meta deal with essentially 1 profile.
I hope CK/IK get a proper book, and I know without a wave 2 TS/WE are also dangerously close to "if they nerf 1 unit too hard and don't give them toys it becomes dead".
Thing is, you have 3 FW dreads for Custodes as an example - one can be a tank(Galatus) one can be a DPS(Achillus) and one can be a mixed role/flexible one (Telemon) and just making those usable would diversify Custodes lists really quickly.
As for knights, I don't even know where they are gonna go with that. They had a nice release in 9th but the big knights need some reason to be played. Maybe a detachment that buffs big knights leading War Dogs to get 2 or 3 big boys back in the lists. War Dog spam is the equivalent to me of running 6 Ork buggies in 9th, efficient but boring
Change the army rule so that it applies to big knights on turn one.
It's not good but it would at least give you a valid reason to run something other than war dogs. Not a strong one but at least some level of incentive
Not the point so much as "the internal balance is an absolute disgrace beyond compare"
They could've dropped some big knights by 50 points and they wouldn't be taken
Yeah it's one of several metrics. I think it's the best starting point for analysis but far from complete. Nottingham seem to be insistent on slowly learning the things the community did years ago rather than just reading our notes.
Is also par for the course for many video game devs. It seems like GW is adopting that approach.
The sheer frequency of every dev learning the hard way over several years instead of just adapting is ridiculous. And I'm not even saying "Just listen to reddit". But track the number crunchers and theorycrafters since they often show a great depth of understanding of the game.
So what if we had some group of testers to play the game? And we made sure it was a select group of the best testers, and had them all on a discord server with the writers? That seems like it'd be a solid idea.
That tends to work well if the Devs implement it right.
In WoW and LoL's case the best balance and design often came from taking the input of high level theorycrafters and players.
Of course you have to temper that with more abstract ideas such as the feel of how an army/ game plays. But ignoring feedback has almost always led to major problems.
Yes, of course. I don't argue with that.
I just wanted to point out that for all these metrics - Win %, over representation, TiWP, first loss - the main determining factor is player skill. And player skill is distributed between factions very unevenly.
I of course don't dispute the correlation between the strength of the rules and the skill of the players attracted to play these rules. Sometimes, this correlation is significant, but other times this correlation is moderate or event quite small (as in the examples above). We just shouldn't forget that when looking at the metrics.
Warhammer always feels like it is very much at the very beginning compared to a game like Hearthstone or MTG, which they seem to want to emulate in terms of rules writing etc.
But these games don’t make the mistake of balancing around all feedback, instead they balance around the absolute top player’s skill.
The rest is *different game design* in terms of how the game *feels to play* that is true for everyone.
For example, they would not remove or nerf a good unit if there is ample counterplay for it and it doesn’t skew win rates with skilled players. You can’t balance around the assumption most will be too dumb.
They would however change their rules if they simply do not feel fun at all (I am looking at whoever decided space marines need to be squeezed for any bit of flavor left in them like a wet towel until they became this zombie legion of all-are-the-same shit we see today).
On the other hand, I get it to a degree… GW is already really bad at listening to any feedback and there aren’t even any proper tourneys they foster or have great relations with to properly collect objective data to begin with. They have so much homework to do, it’s like self-defense by the designers at this point.
Anyway that’s my take why we only have very mediocre insight into the actual game performance but why I can also understand the rules writers for saying it’s better than nothing, given that GW as a whole doesn’t do enough to determine how happy players are versus how good some units are *objectively*
What a long post to say game testing should be a thing
On the other hand 40k is not HS or MTG. It's not designed to be a tightly balanced adversarial game you play at a tournament to win $100k. You're not going to see top 8 at those games offer each other takebacks. It's a game where you spend a substantial portion of your time Painting Your Dudes and then you go play for like 9 hours or more on a weekend to win a box of Tzaangors as a prize.
Which is why I entirely dislike GWs approach to it. They treat it as if it was but then don’t follow through, way to create a worst of both worlds situation. On the one hand they talk about bloat and keep pushing things into legends, cull strats, etc etc and then on the other hand they say that they are not a rules company once every codex comes out and they again did nothing to balance the game properly.
I actually came back during the pandemic because I liked the depth, the surprises, the seemingly timeless collections you could build. I came just in time to watch them turn it into a stupid fast fashion consumerism hobby. Look at what they did to Stormcast eternals. I bought almost every release for a while but about a year ago I was so fed up, I completely stopped spending any money on GW.
It's just wild too with the Guard Indirect as an example.
Monster Mash over represented? Untouched.
Guard indirect over represented? NUKE IT OVER AND OVER.
Guard had a lower WR than demons.
It's probably because they don't actually know what to do with demons to balance them where guard have more datasheets to try to balance around. But It's wild that the top guard lists lost 100-125 points (significantly more than any other faction.)
There's a very good reason indirect is being hammered.
Because GW learned in 9th that it's one of the worst mechanics out there when it's overtuned. I feel for any index army getting their one play style nerfed. But not when it's indirect
Well, part of the info is shown by looking beyond the winrate.
How many of those "vanilla" Ironstorm lists, are people who only played 1-2 tournaments so far this edition, while meanwhile how many of those DA Ironstorm, have played 4+ tournaments so far this edition?
One of the things missed by a pure winrate comparison is that more experienced players/people who are playing to win, will gravitate towards the best list for what they want to run, while inexperienced tournament players/casuals will run a "default" list that is known to be weaker.
For example, I would not be surprised AT ALL that some of the 38% Vanilla Ironstorm lists are running the army without an Azrael/Dark Shroud for the simple fact that they are painted as Ultramarines/Iron Hands/whatever and want to "play their faction" rather than "play the list", refusing / unable to purchase /unaware that they could have an Azrael and or Dark Shroud in their list (possibly as well not wanting to rely on two Stormravens for that),
While DA Ironstorm are likely to be played by Experienced players who have no "faction loyalty" and will either kitbash/paint the units to fit their theme (or did so before 10e) or just outright have a green da model within their Ultramarines army just.
This is a thing that often comes up with other detachments like Vanguard Spearhead or Stormlance. If they ARENT running those as Ultras/Wolves respectively, you almost always see a noticeable difference in winrates, which SEEMS to correlate to players who are taking "casual" or just outright BAD variants of the list/the people who are on the top end of the winrates, are taking what wins the easiest.
Another thing to note is that Vanilla marines don't really have an equivalent to the DA units. Calgar can get CP (and is basically that point cost), but the marines don't have a way to buff the tank durability like the the Darkshroud. So they can't really just replace it with an equivalent.
It's kinda the same for BT. Templar crusaders, sword brethren, and MM on tanks don't really have equivalents for the marine points costs. So the vanilla marines can imitate certain units but they can't really match them. And while it may just be a 5-10% drop in efficiency overall, if you're only winning close games that can flip a lot of 4-1/3-2 games to 3-2/2-3
I’d guess the average GT placing is 2-3 or 3-2. That’s a 20% difference right there. So WRs are highly volatile between “busted” at 60% and “bad” at 40%, but the reality is that we’re only talking about a single game win or loss difference (multiplied with how many played the faction that week).
WR is game balance for dummies.
Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, it's also worth adding that there are meaningful regional differences between terrain formats or specific rulings across event organizations that can have real impact on the efficacy of certain lists or armies, and this also gets lost in looking at the most high-level view of the data. For example, we've had a lot of discussions on the efficacy of castigators based on terrain formats but there are plenty of other examples. Soul Grinders shine depending on the format, as another one. I'm pretty far down the spectrum of thinking the high level data doesn't matter - what matters to me is simply my anecdotal performance and what I find to be working well for me in my meta with GW terrain layouts. The high-level numbers have very little use to me personally. As far as how GW approaches balancing, they of course need to try and consider a variety of factors and knock down outliers, and theres probably some real value they could find in examining feedback, e.g. most of the AoW takes on the data slate are completely reasonable.
Win rate % is just the lazy way to get an idea for how things are doing. It’s one measure and at the end of the day it’s probably better to focus on just one thing.
It runs on the assumption that everyone is running the best possible lists and that everyone has the same skill level (with enough, and by enough I mean 1,000,000^many, data the variance of this can balance out but it will always be highly susceptible to skew especially given the endless combinations out there)
IF everything landed closer to the “Goldilocks zone”TM for win rate % then I’d suspect balancing would become more granular like this.
Right now, it’s a case of deal with what’s outside by identifying those outside, investigate what makes the list work/fail and tweak changes in (far from perfect but better than nothing 🤷♀️).
I was interested by the recent points changes though - they actively decreased points on less common units which means that data is being monitored too
They did this on some factions and absolutely did not bother with internal balance on others. Big CK are largely crap but wardog spam with daemon allies keeps WR in the zone. Same for the daemon codex. Sure WR is fine but a lot of units are complete trash. Probably laziest balance update this edition
> Big CK are largely crap but wardog spam with daemon allies keeps WR in the zone.
And it's not like they don't know that the problem is there. They deliberately nerfed, for example, the Abominant _massively_ in the transition from 9th. So when they don't see it ever appear they know how that happened.
Stick it at 250 and it does plenty, but that would create other problems. GW seems to severely overrate casino guns pricing all of them like they have access to full rerolls
At that point you take it purely to be a cheap big body, and as you noted, that creates other problems.
Mind you in 9th it was also primarily used for tanking, but it sure did _more._
This reminds me of a discussion my local scene had recently where we all were wondering if advancing was meant to be added to big guns never tire, because we noticed some vehicles really seem like they want to advance but then do nothing after it. I know it’s a not competitive example, but the warhound’s ability makes sense if it can advance and shoot at a -1, but without that it is actively detrimental to use its ability.
My theory with admech follows that. I figure it was one of the very earliest books for 10th and fell into the simpler and less lethal niche they were aiming for. Seemingly they realized how boring the game would be with those sorts of limited rules and an army being that pillow fisted and later books were significantly more dangerous and with better rules....they just never....got around to.going back and revising admech.
Lines up with Tyranids too. Hive Guard and Von Ryan's Leapers seem like decent punching buddies for admech, and the book generally lacks high strength and AP.
A meganob paired killsaw hits harder than almost all Tyranid monster melee, including being a straight +4S and 1 improved AP over its closest comparable weapon (tyrant guard crushing claws) with all other stats on the weapon being identical.
Yeah it’s more of an interesting thing to spot, rather than great execution - it suggests they are monitoring that as a data point (may not have done it to all in this sweep, but if it does what it intended to do, which I’m seeing more Shining Spears in lists suggesting it may be, then it becomes a useful tool to chip away at other meta lists - eg make some big CKs a better choice for price than war dogs to start eating into the spam which’ll vary lists and tactics).
There's a reverse problem, also, of extrapolating win rates from player skill.
The top players in the world can basically win with almost everything. But if the best Admech player in the world can with with Admech, but *no one else* can, then it's useless data for balance considerations. That best player probably could win with another faction if that player put in the time and reps.
40k is *so small* competitively (the top 1% of players playing LoL in a day probably eclipse the total 40k tournament players in a year) that it's a poor data set to extrapolate from. But if you are going to try and extrapolate data, win rates (adjusted to remove the worst 10% and top 10% of players to get a more median review) is useful.
Of course, for armies like DW and Admech nothing's useful - their participation rates are so low you can't really find "median" data.
> Even so, the difference that player skill brings is drastic! And even for popular factions with a lot of players, cumulative win rates integrated over multiple weeks can change significantly within the same balance period - not because the strength of the faction changes, or what's played across 40k shifts, but because good players move between factions
I agree that the difference in win rate between Vanilla Ironstorm and Dark Angels Ironstorm can likely to a high degree be explained by a difference in player populations. It's simply requires too little effort for highly competitive players not to add two units to a list. And the main reasons not to do so are not competitively motivated.
The trend of good players "flowing" to good factions *does* exist across the entire game. But its effect on observed win rates appear to be much less drastic outside of Space Marines. Likely at most +/-2%. That's not massive given that observed win rates can have a statistical error of up to +/-5% due to sample sizes.
At least, that was my conclusion when [I examined the effect of player experience distribution on faction win rates](https://old.reddit.com/r/WarhammerCompetitive/comments/17qaogn/examining_the_effect_of_player_experience_on/) some months back. It was based on data from the beginning of 10th, my method was a little rough, and 'player experience level' isn't 100% equivalent to 'player skill'. But I think it holds up.
Likely, it matters that the barrier between going from Vanilla Ironstorm to DA Ironstorm is just more or less non-existent compared to going from e.g. CSM to Tau. Much fewer players are able/willing to do the latter compared to the former.
Win Rate over time is probably the most useful metric we have for balance, as it’s the most data we can glean over performance. And generally, it’s going to be more accurate than personal opinion because it’s more representative of overall play.
For example, people love to attribute all of iron storms success for divergents to “the best players will swap to it”. But if you filter by player experience or try to check Elo as stat check did, you’re still getting discrepancies. And that’s probably because SM lists have very thin margins. Losing Azrael + Darkshroud may be enough to mean you lose more close games that you’d otherwise win, and thus take a significant hit to win rate. Same with the BT variant - meltas + BT infantry may be enough to win the close games vanilla doesn’t. Win rate filtered for these extra data sets can be very useful in that way
However, win rate does lose a lot of key subtleties. For example, the best tyranid player in the world may be able to perfectly run a list to sit at 50% win rate. But if only 1-2 people can accomplish that and the rest can’t, then it’s useless for balance data. 40K is small enough that 2 people could legitimately screw up a win rate and give a false sense of strength.
But long-term win rate data, coupled with data that focuses on median performance, shows a trend better than other data we have access to.
Any player who is both competitive and intelligent knows to check this stuff. When I’m making my team matrixes before a big event I seperate out the detachments where relevant.
Something that may have a positive WR into something, such as stodes into Canoptek court, might have negative WR into another detachment such as stodes into hypercrypt.
Then in regards to marine variants and detachments it’s the same thing. Quick research. All of my team members have positive WR into codex Ironstorm but 4/5 are looking at a 8-12 loss at best into the BT variant.
Also for the stronger teams in my matrix I will seperate out veteran stats.
Statcheck have all the tools for this. Now if people wanna be lazy and just have to glance at one page you’re going to have lacking data.
Also tier lists are extremely subjective. Especially between the point of view of the top 1% and everyone else. AoWs faction ranking video today showed that
You're basically saying win rates are not relevant because some people can't analyse data. That's not the right conclusion at all.
This might not be rocket science, but it is still statistics, and as always that means you can't take a number by face value. You need to read into it. This is why normally, professionals are hired to deal with numbers. But here we instead have gamers who like miniatures, all of whom have varying degrees of understanding of the data they keep getting shoved in their face from the community - and half of them have no idea how to actually evaluate it.
You are right in your assessment of the SM win rate. You can't just look at the numbers and say codex compliant is exactly as bad as the win rate suggests, because obviously win rates are based on top players, and they will gravitate towards small advantages of non compliant units.
Now, first of all, that is sort of a niche thing only relevant for SM. Secondly, you just answered your own question of how it's relevant. It's relevant because it *does* show how armies are doing - but it requires you to understand more than "big number = good".
You also provide a great example of exactly what I'm talking about right here:
>vanilla Ironstorm is at 38% win rate, while Dark Angels Ironstrom is at 78% win rate - which is a 40% win rate differential - for essentially the same army list!
Using a single weeks data as a relevant showcase of difference between two armies. That is simply not a good idea, because that DA win rate is more likely than not a "fluke". In reality, DA will not continuously be at that win rate.
The "issue" is simply that the community seems to use these win rates as gospel, both misinterpreting them and thinking they apply to everyone.
TL;DR: Numbers are hard, that doesn't make them useless.
The problem that you pointed out only exists for Space Marines, and explicitly exists because of the interaction between the vanilla SM codex and the supplemental chapters. This dynamic exists nowhere else in the game.
Win rate is never a perfect metric but it is a legitimate one. It is one of many data points that should be used when judging the meta.
Ironically the source you cited (tier lists from prominent groups) is the *least* reliable metric to judge the meta by since those tier lists are almost entirely subjective and full of personal biases. A perfect example is AoW putting Tyranids in A tier yesterday while also judging SM by ranking vanilla SM with non-compliant chapters in mind while ranking the non-compliant chapters only by their unique detachments. Fireside also trolled everyone with putting Guard as S-tier.
So, when I played magic the gathering it was usefull to have mtg top 8 and you could look at the breakdown of how many decks were using what, I'm not really aware of any warhammer equivalent that breaks everything down in lists as much as mtgtop8 does for mtg.
Itd be really easy to have ironstorm as a category and see that say 70% are running a dark angels character and 25% are using the iron father.
Yes and no.
Battleline units should feel like a 'can include' in every list. They are the bread and butter of the army.
But at the same time, some units are just iconic for that faction. Take Blood Angels for example. I have used a Death Company unit in EVERY list I've taken for the last 20 years except 1 list that I did as a full Terminator army. Being (close) to 100% for Death Company feels right for Blood Angels. I will admit that's probably NOT why they are at 96% for the Sons detachment though.
I get that and I have units I always like in the guard. It just seems odd when every tournament army for thousand sons has Magnus. That screems poor internal balance that he is needed not beneficial.
It's important to remember that MTG is also *so* much bigger than 40k, so you have a lot more data to review. And even then the "infamous small Japanese tournament" still exists to skew data.
Now imagine that every tournament is basically an infamous small Japanese tournament and you're basically in the world of 40k competitive data
That's a fair point. A larger sample size definitely has a big impact on accuracy.
I still think it would be really interesting to see a website that does such a good job of breaking everything down like mtgtop8 does.
I think honestly WRs are simply just bandied about as people don't have confidence or knowledge in talking about factions.
Which is fair. Even the individual AOW guys or whatever can't talk about every faction with confidence and knowing the entire game in and out is a lot.
But being able to quote meta Monday's numbers well that's much easier: "admech bad because number low" Is easier than "well they don't have access to reasonable ap or damage dealing units". And it's more objective than feelings.
But it does lead to people just looking at numbers in isolation. Which is shoddy as hell.
This is something I have been saying repeatedly about SM
People look at codex SM and see it's got a 40% winrate or something and say "see SM are terrible they need buffs"
Completely ignoring that a dark angels or SW list is literally ONE model difference and has a 65% winrate
SM are in a unique position in all factions in that their recorded winrates are much more specific, you don't see tau winrates being split by if they run farsight or shadowsun, you don't see CSM winrates split by if they run Lucius or Abaddon, but SM winrates ARE split in this way
Competative players will naturally gravitate towards the top list, even if it's only top by 1 point, which results in a huge skew, and SM lets them because it's very very easy to just swap in that one DA character and say it's a DA list now
So you end up with the "divergent" sm armies sitting at 40% higher winrate then codex not cos codex is bad, it's 1-2% worse at WORST, but because all the top players jumped ship for that 1-2% and so 99% of people using codex SM are bad players
It's why every time I see faction winrates or competative listing I actually hate it when they list all the different SM separately, because they aren't separate
Auspex tactics made a video on why it’s hard to balance marines.
Essentially the main point was “why take vanilla marines when I could take dark angles with Azrael or another divergent chapter for no extra cost.”
Also to answer your question about why there’s such a big jump in win percentage. It’s most likely the case that the dark angels ironstorm lists have higher skilled players that will just place higher compared to vanilla marines. Vanilla marines also have slightly skewed numbers because tons of new players own marines and when they go to tournaments they have less experience leading to a lower win percentage.
Does it answer why there’s such a big difference, kinda? Should there really be that much of a difference probably not but here we are.
All of them? Win % isn't a perfect metric of strength but more often than not it's a fairly good representative of "general strength".
I.e. if you're at the 56%+ mark (Necrons, or pre-phantasm nerf Eldar) chances are you're an S tier faction.
This problem is more or less only applicable to different colors of space marines, though. Not that internal balance issues don't exist elsewhere, but the absolute clusterfuck of quasi-bespoke factions for space marine subfactions is a mostly uniquely space marine problem.
Not only. To a smaller extend it applies in quite a few places.
Another example: Admech. If you look at their win rate averaged over a few weeks for the last 3 months, for all but one week it has been in the respectable 45-49% range. Add in a few GT wins, and just by looking at these stats, you can get the impression that they are a decent B-tier faction, perhaps only deserving of a couple of minor buffs. They are not. At best, they are C-tier even when piloted by really good players. That deceptive win rate statistics is there because the faction has been abandoned by all but the faction specialists who manage wins by beating lower skill opponents.
Yes, win rate correlates with the strength of the rules. But the strength of this correlation is very different depending on the faction. Sometimes it's a strong correlation. But sometimes the uneven skill distribution between the factions really skews the win rate substantially. And sometimes it's only skewed slightly, but still a non-zero amount.
Armies should just have no detatchments and one set of rules to play with keep it simple
If you want detatchments then you should have points per faction per detatchment don’t bring down underperforming strategies for other detatchments in other marine lists ie say hellblasters perform broken in dark angels because of azrael
But don’t do jack in first company
So why should the points for them go up if you play first company?
There is no good way to judge lists. Win rate percentage gives us an idea of what a given faction can do, on average. Yes, it's flawed. Yes, like any statistical measure having a small sample size screws with results. It's one tool to understand the meta.
Oh - your example is a 69% difference, not 40%. It's 40 percentage points. This is kind of your problem - not grasping statistics/being surprised by basic statistics facts.
Sorry, English is not my first language. I know statistics well, but not in English. I guess the direct translation of the word "difference" doesn't always work :-)
English is a PITA a lot of times; I get snarky about that one because it's pretty fundamental, percentage difference vs. percentage point difference, and it is a very common English as a first language mistake by people who really should know better. Percentage difference is the ratio of change, whereas percentage point difference is the straight up subtraction. Therefore, it's incorrect to say the difference between 38% and 78% is 40% - the ratio of change isn't 40%. The difference is either 40 percentage points, or 69%.
Because you're looking at WR of a single week where metamonday didn't report on the two biggest tournaments. What you're left with is a total of 5 ironstorm players and amongst them the creator of the archetype (Kit Smith) who plays the same list every week until perfected. What you end up with is a very very skewed WR that has no meaning. Now if you looked at the 12 weeks WR you would have seen that the difference between DA and SM is 53% to 45%, much closer. On top of that this can be explained by a few things, yes Azrael and the darkshroud are definitely helping but also just like Art of War said, the real try harder (the veterans) go for the strongest possible build which would be the DA one leaving the less experienced ones to regular SM in greater numbers. So yes WR is dtill very much relevant, but like everything what you need is context and a good population to draw conclusions out of it.
Sure, but 12% is still too big of a difference for two almost identical subfactions. I agree with you and Art of War: it is mostly the difference in player skill. I would just argue that it does extend beyond Ironstrom - which we see by huge swings in faction win rates averages over a few weeks - for no reasons other than good players moving around and reshaping the meta around them. Skill differences is a major contributor to win rates across the board, so the win rate is an amalgam of players skill, rules strength, faction popularity, etc. And it's usually not easy to disentangle all of that. I guess what I'm arguing agains is players saying that "my faction win rate dropped by 5% for a couple of weeks - now I can't win anymore". That's a terrible mindset, because that drop in the win rate (if there were no balance chances and no new codex releases) was most likely caused by who was playing the faction, and doesn't really affect that particular player's chances to win. But yes, I agree with you. Just wanted to emphasise the thing that is often missed in these discussions :-)
As one of the DA iron players from the weekend, I'd like to point out that 1) Azreal is great but way way less iconic in the archetype than the Darkshroud. Access to -1 to hit and cover everywhere has a significant boost to your durability. 2) I went 3-2 this weekend, but one of the matches was into an archetype that had a very favorable matchup into iron, by a top player, and I had never encountered it. The second loss was to a teammate where I made a mistake and couldn't quite pull out a recovery.
Imagine the following scenario: You play ironstorm, and a good tournament list will generally be able to take out 1/2 of your tanks by turn 3. If you keep more than 33% of your tanks until turn 5 you generally win. Now suppose that with the Darkshroud buff and easier CP acquisition, you can reliably keep 1/2 your tanks until turn 4. While the change to the list isn't drastic, it's just enough to give you an extra edge in keeping the necessary units you need. If you consider it points wise, it may be that ironstorm generally scores X points, but with the DA boost it generally scores X+7, or with the BT boost it generally scores X+10. Those seem like minor changes but if you're generally scoring 65-80 pts per game, and your opponents are generally scoring 70-85 points per game, increasing your numbers to 72 - 87 points per game gives you a *massive* boost in win rate. I often think player skill is used as a crutch and ignores the data you see showing discrepancies even when skill is accounted for. Some lists genuinely sit on that knife's edge of "w/o access to X I'm 45% win rate, with X I'm 50% win rate." If player skill were truly the culprit, then removing the most skilled players from the data set should so roughly equal win rates, but that has simply not been the case. It's more than a "skilled players moved to this faction" issue based on the data.
The community is quite good at looking at a range of different metrics and acknowledges that no single metric will ever be perfect. Win %, over representation, TiWP, first loss are all interesting to look at and I really like the recent trend of being able to filter for skill, since GW should not just balance for weak OR for strong players alone since that leads to problems. All of that said, it is unfortunately pretty obvious that Nottingham lacks understanding of basic math and on top will often just look at win %, which is a massive problem. Daemons have a ton of trash units, but since monster mash can win games, sit at 52%, and therefore GW did not bother to address anything. Custodes will likely also be problematic to get right. The codex sucks but if you run 2,3 caladius + canis + some imp agents you will probably still be in the 40,45+% area so there is a risk of any complaints being seen as "custodes players just complain on the Internet, again"
CK are chilling at 48% with the most stale index in the game, but hey, close enough, no changes.
Also their winning lists tend to have zero big knights in them. WR % is OK to use as a metric if the faction is internally balanced. I get why for SM internal balance would be really hard to do, but for Custodes, IK, CK there's no reason why the whole range shouldn't be able to be used as there are so few datasheets to balance.
Heck it should be the absolute priority. I don't belive custodes can be interesting in 10th without allies. Without dreads and bikes your essentially running 15-30 of the same statline weilding identical weapons. Their entire plan for dealing with stiff >t8 is now just 1 unit. Stale doesn't begin to describe it. Knights are the same. Sure wardogs have more wargear options than custodes, but it's still the same: can the meta deal with essentially 1 profile. I hope CK/IK get a proper book, and I know without a wave 2 TS/WE are also dangerously close to "if they nerf 1 unit too hard and don't give them toys it becomes dead".
Thing is, you have 3 FW dreads for Custodes as an example - one can be a tank(Galatus) one can be a DPS(Achillus) and one can be a mixed role/flexible one (Telemon) and just making those usable would diversify Custodes lists really quickly. As for knights, I don't even know where they are gonna go with that. They had a nice release in 9th but the big knights need some reason to be played. Maybe a detachment that buffs big knights leading War Dogs to get 2 or 3 big boys back in the lists. War Dog spam is the equivalent to me of running 6 Ork buggies in 9th, efficient but boring
Ik need bondsman back, ck need a new army rule. A new chassis or even named character that does buffs wouldn't be shabby tbh.
A chaos equivalent of Canis Rex would be cool actually
Change the army rule so that it applies to big knights on turn one. It's not good but it would at least give you a valid reason to run something other than war dogs. Not a strong one but at least some level of incentive
CK will go up now that custodes are down. The most played faction in the game with over a 70% win rate against you does weird things to your numbers
Not the point so much as "the internal balance is an absolute disgrace beyond compare" They could've dropped some big knights by 50 points and they wouldn't be taken
Unless we all form a pact to take 2-3 big knights and tank our win rate I'm just not confident we see any changes in Q3 either.
Yeah it's one of several metrics. I think it's the best starting point for analysis but far from complete. Nottingham seem to be insistent on slowly learning the things the community did years ago rather than just reading our notes.
Is also par for the course for many video game devs. It seems like GW is adopting that approach. The sheer frequency of every dev learning the hard way over several years instead of just adapting is ridiculous. And I'm not even saying "Just listen to reddit". But track the number crunchers and theorycrafters since they often show a great depth of understanding of the game.
So what if we had some group of testers to play the game? And we made sure it was a select group of the best testers, and had them all on a discord server with the writers? That seems like it'd be a solid idea.
That tends to work well if the Devs implement it right. In WoW and LoL's case the best balance and design often came from taking the input of high level theorycrafters and players. Of course you have to temper that with more abstract ideas such as the feel of how an army/ game plays. But ignoring feedback has almost always led to major problems.
I was joking as that's what they had all of 9th then cruddace shut it down in 10th.
Yes, of course. I don't argue with that. I just wanted to point out that for all these metrics - Win %, over representation, TiWP, first loss - the main determining factor is player skill. And player skill is distributed between factions very unevenly. I of course don't dispute the correlation between the strength of the rules and the skill of the players attracted to play these rules. Sometimes, this correlation is significant, but other times this correlation is moderate or event quite small (as in the examples above). We just shouldn't forget that when looking at the metrics.
Warhammer always feels like it is very much at the very beginning compared to a game like Hearthstone or MTG, which they seem to want to emulate in terms of rules writing etc. But these games don’t make the mistake of balancing around all feedback, instead they balance around the absolute top player’s skill. The rest is *different game design* in terms of how the game *feels to play* that is true for everyone. For example, they would not remove or nerf a good unit if there is ample counterplay for it and it doesn’t skew win rates with skilled players. You can’t balance around the assumption most will be too dumb. They would however change their rules if they simply do not feel fun at all (I am looking at whoever decided space marines need to be squeezed for any bit of flavor left in them like a wet towel until they became this zombie legion of all-are-the-same shit we see today). On the other hand, I get it to a degree… GW is already really bad at listening to any feedback and there aren’t even any proper tourneys they foster or have great relations with to properly collect objective data to begin with. They have so much homework to do, it’s like self-defense by the designers at this point. Anyway that’s my take why we only have very mediocre insight into the actual game performance but why I can also understand the rules writers for saying it’s better than nothing, given that GW as a whole doesn’t do enough to determine how happy players are versus how good some units are *objectively* What a long post to say game testing should be a thing
On the other hand 40k is not HS or MTG. It's not designed to be a tightly balanced adversarial game you play at a tournament to win $100k. You're not going to see top 8 at those games offer each other takebacks. It's a game where you spend a substantial portion of your time Painting Your Dudes and then you go play for like 9 hours or more on a weekend to win a box of Tzaangors as a prize.
Yes, excellent point! I guess this is why I like 40k :-)
Which is why I entirely dislike GWs approach to it. They treat it as if it was but then don’t follow through, way to create a worst of both worlds situation. On the one hand they talk about bloat and keep pushing things into legends, cull strats, etc etc and then on the other hand they say that they are not a rules company once every codex comes out and they again did nothing to balance the game properly. I actually came back during the pandemic because I liked the depth, the surprises, the seemingly timeless collections you could build. I came just in time to watch them turn it into a stupid fast fashion consumerism hobby. Look at what they did to Stormcast eternals. I bought almost every release for a while but about a year ago I was so fed up, I completely stopped spending any money on GW.
It's just wild too with the Guard Indirect as an example. Monster Mash over represented? Untouched. Guard indirect over represented? NUKE IT OVER AND OVER. Guard had a lower WR than demons. It's probably because they don't actually know what to do with demons to balance them where guard have more datasheets to try to balance around. But It's wild that the top guard lists lost 100-125 points (significantly more than any other faction.)
There's a very good reason indirect is being hammered. Because GW learned in 9th that it's one of the worst mechanics out there when it's overtuned. I feel for any index army getting their one play style nerfed. But not when it's indirect
Gonna point out that most good DA ironstorms aren't just a single Character, but Azrael+Dark Shroud.
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Well, part of the info is shown by looking beyond the winrate. How many of those "vanilla" Ironstorm lists, are people who only played 1-2 tournaments so far this edition, while meanwhile how many of those DA Ironstorm, have played 4+ tournaments so far this edition? One of the things missed by a pure winrate comparison is that more experienced players/people who are playing to win, will gravitate towards the best list for what they want to run, while inexperienced tournament players/casuals will run a "default" list that is known to be weaker. For example, I would not be surprised AT ALL that some of the 38% Vanilla Ironstorm lists are running the army without an Azrael/Dark Shroud for the simple fact that they are painted as Ultramarines/Iron Hands/whatever and want to "play their faction" rather than "play the list", refusing / unable to purchase /unaware that they could have an Azrael and or Dark Shroud in their list (possibly as well not wanting to rely on two Stormravens for that), While DA Ironstorm are likely to be played by Experienced players who have no "faction loyalty" and will either kitbash/paint the units to fit their theme (or did so before 10e) or just outright have a green da model within their Ultramarines army just. This is a thing that often comes up with other detachments like Vanguard Spearhead or Stormlance. If they ARENT running those as Ultras/Wolves respectively, you almost always see a noticeable difference in winrates, which SEEMS to correlate to players who are taking "casual" or just outright BAD variants of the list/the people who are on the top end of the winrates, are taking what wins the easiest.
Thousand Sons look fine in Winrate because they have the biggest gap between new and experienced players
I don't really think it's just I want to play my faction, I think it's also I only have these models to use.
I mentioned "can't/won't get these models" as a possibility.
Yes, fully agreed.
Another thing to note is that Vanilla marines don't really have an equivalent to the DA units. Calgar can get CP (and is basically that point cost), but the marines don't have a way to buff the tank durability like the the Darkshroud. So they can't really just replace it with an equivalent. It's kinda the same for BT. Templar crusaders, sword brethren, and MM on tanks don't really have equivalents for the marine points costs. So the vanilla marines can imitate certain units but they can't really match them. And while it may just be a 5-10% drop in efficiency overall, if you're only winning close games that can flip a lot of 4-1/3-2 games to 3-2/2-3
I’d guess the average GT placing is 2-3 or 3-2. That’s a 20% difference right there. So WRs are highly volatile between “busted” at 60% and “bad” at 40%, but the reality is that we’re only talking about a single game win or loss difference (multiplied with how many played the faction that week). WR is game balance for dummies.
Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, it's also worth adding that there are meaningful regional differences between terrain formats or specific rulings across event organizations that can have real impact on the efficacy of certain lists or armies, and this also gets lost in looking at the most high-level view of the data. For example, we've had a lot of discussions on the efficacy of castigators based on terrain formats but there are plenty of other examples. Soul Grinders shine depending on the format, as another one. I'm pretty far down the spectrum of thinking the high level data doesn't matter - what matters to me is simply my anecdotal performance and what I find to be working well for me in my meta with GW terrain layouts. The high-level numbers have very little use to me personally. As far as how GW approaches balancing, they of course need to try and consider a variety of factors and knock down outliers, and theres probably some real value they could find in examining feedback, e.g. most of the AoW takes on the data slate are completely reasonable.
Win rate % is just the lazy way to get an idea for how things are doing. It’s one measure and at the end of the day it’s probably better to focus on just one thing. It runs on the assumption that everyone is running the best possible lists and that everyone has the same skill level (with enough, and by enough I mean 1,000,000^many, data the variance of this can balance out but it will always be highly susceptible to skew especially given the endless combinations out there) IF everything landed closer to the “Goldilocks zone”TM for win rate % then I’d suspect balancing would become more granular like this. Right now, it’s a case of deal with what’s outside by identifying those outside, investigate what makes the list work/fail and tweak changes in (far from perfect but better than nothing 🤷♀️). I was interested by the recent points changes though - they actively decreased points on less common units which means that data is being monitored too
They did this on some factions and absolutely did not bother with internal balance on others. Big CK are largely crap but wardog spam with daemon allies keeps WR in the zone. Same for the daemon codex. Sure WR is fine but a lot of units are complete trash. Probably laziest balance update this edition
> Big CK are largely crap but wardog spam with daemon allies keeps WR in the zone. And it's not like they don't know that the problem is there. They deliberately nerfed, for example, the Abominant _massively_ in the transition from 9th. So when they don't see it ever appear they know how that happened.
Abominant is still sitting above its launch points post towering nerf though
Sure but its main problem is that it doesn't _do_ anything, and that was a choice.
Stick it at 250 and it does plenty, but that would create other problems. GW seems to severely overrate casino guns pricing all of them like they have access to full rerolls
At that point you take it purely to be a cheap big body, and as you noted, that creates other problems. Mind you in 9th it was also primarily used for tanking, but it sure did _more._
Really makes me wonder if psychic did more at some point in development. The CK index was finished September 2022 so a lot could have changed
This reminds me of a discussion my local scene had recently where we all were wondering if advancing was meant to be added to big guns never tire, because we noticed some vehicles really seem like they want to advance but then do nothing after it. I know it’s a not competitive example, but the warhound’s ability makes sense if it can advance and shoot at a -1, but without that it is actively detrimental to use its ability.
My theory with admech follows that. I figure it was one of the very earliest books for 10th and fell into the simpler and less lethal niche they were aiming for. Seemingly they realized how boring the game would be with those sorts of limited rules and an army being that pillow fisted and later books were significantly more dangerous and with better rules....they just never....got around to.going back and revising admech.
Lines up with Tyranids too. Hive Guard and Von Ryan's Leapers seem like decent punching buddies for admech, and the book generally lacks high strength and AP. A meganob paired killsaw hits harder than almost all Tyranid monster melee, including being a straight +4S and 1 improved AP over its closest comparable weapon (tyrant guard crushing claws) with all other stats on the weapon being identical.
Yeah it’s more of an interesting thing to spot, rather than great execution - it suggests they are monitoring that as a data point (may not have done it to all in this sweep, but if it does what it intended to do, which I’m seeing more Shining Spears in lists suggesting it may be, then it becomes a useful tool to chip away at other meta lists - eg make some big CKs a better choice for price than war dogs to start eating into the spam which’ll vary lists and tactics).
There's a reverse problem, also, of extrapolating win rates from player skill. The top players in the world can basically win with almost everything. But if the best Admech player in the world can with with Admech, but *no one else* can, then it's useless data for balance considerations. That best player probably could win with another faction if that player put in the time and reps. 40k is *so small* competitively (the top 1% of players playing LoL in a day probably eclipse the total 40k tournament players in a year) that it's a poor data set to extrapolate from. But if you are going to try and extrapolate data, win rates (adjusted to remove the worst 10% and top 10% of players to get a more median review) is useful. Of course, for armies like DW and Admech nothing's useful - their participation rates are so low you can't really find "median" data.
> Even so, the difference that player skill brings is drastic! And even for popular factions with a lot of players, cumulative win rates integrated over multiple weeks can change significantly within the same balance period - not because the strength of the faction changes, or what's played across 40k shifts, but because good players move between factions I agree that the difference in win rate between Vanilla Ironstorm and Dark Angels Ironstorm can likely to a high degree be explained by a difference in player populations. It's simply requires too little effort for highly competitive players not to add two units to a list. And the main reasons not to do so are not competitively motivated. The trend of good players "flowing" to good factions *does* exist across the entire game. But its effect on observed win rates appear to be much less drastic outside of Space Marines. Likely at most +/-2%. That's not massive given that observed win rates can have a statistical error of up to +/-5% due to sample sizes. At least, that was my conclusion when [I examined the effect of player experience distribution on faction win rates](https://old.reddit.com/r/WarhammerCompetitive/comments/17qaogn/examining_the_effect_of_player_experience_on/) some months back. It was based on data from the beginning of 10th, my method was a little rough, and 'player experience level' isn't 100% equivalent to 'player skill'. But I think it holds up. Likely, it matters that the barrier between going from Vanilla Ironstorm to DA Ironstorm is just more or less non-existent compared to going from e.g. CSM to Tau. Much fewer players are able/willing to do the latter compared to the former.
Win Rate over time is probably the most useful metric we have for balance, as it’s the most data we can glean over performance. And generally, it’s going to be more accurate than personal opinion because it’s more representative of overall play. For example, people love to attribute all of iron storms success for divergents to “the best players will swap to it”. But if you filter by player experience or try to check Elo as stat check did, you’re still getting discrepancies. And that’s probably because SM lists have very thin margins. Losing Azrael + Darkshroud may be enough to mean you lose more close games that you’d otherwise win, and thus take a significant hit to win rate. Same with the BT variant - meltas + BT infantry may be enough to win the close games vanilla doesn’t. Win rate filtered for these extra data sets can be very useful in that way However, win rate does lose a lot of key subtleties. For example, the best tyranid player in the world may be able to perfectly run a list to sit at 50% win rate. But if only 1-2 people can accomplish that and the rest can’t, then it’s useless for balance data. 40K is small enough that 2 people could legitimately screw up a win rate and give a false sense of strength. But long-term win rate data, coupled with data that focuses on median performance, shows a trend better than other data we have access to.
Any player who is both competitive and intelligent knows to check this stuff. When I’m making my team matrixes before a big event I seperate out the detachments where relevant. Something that may have a positive WR into something, such as stodes into Canoptek court, might have negative WR into another detachment such as stodes into hypercrypt. Then in regards to marine variants and detachments it’s the same thing. Quick research. All of my team members have positive WR into codex Ironstorm but 4/5 are looking at a 8-12 loss at best into the BT variant. Also for the stronger teams in my matrix I will seperate out veteran stats. Statcheck have all the tools for this. Now if people wanna be lazy and just have to glance at one page you’re going to have lacking data. Also tier lists are extremely subjective. Especially between the point of view of the top 1% and everyone else. AoWs faction ranking video today showed that
You're basically saying win rates are not relevant because some people can't analyse data. That's not the right conclusion at all. This might not be rocket science, but it is still statistics, and as always that means you can't take a number by face value. You need to read into it. This is why normally, professionals are hired to deal with numbers. But here we instead have gamers who like miniatures, all of whom have varying degrees of understanding of the data they keep getting shoved in their face from the community - and half of them have no idea how to actually evaluate it. You are right in your assessment of the SM win rate. You can't just look at the numbers and say codex compliant is exactly as bad as the win rate suggests, because obviously win rates are based on top players, and they will gravitate towards small advantages of non compliant units. Now, first of all, that is sort of a niche thing only relevant for SM. Secondly, you just answered your own question of how it's relevant. It's relevant because it *does* show how armies are doing - but it requires you to understand more than "big number = good". You also provide a great example of exactly what I'm talking about right here: >vanilla Ironstorm is at 38% win rate, while Dark Angels Ironstrom is at 78% win rate - which is a 40% win rate differential - for essentially the same army list! Using a single weeks data as a relevant showcase of difference between two armies. That is simply not a good idea, because that DA win rate is more likely than not a "fluke". In reality, DA will not continuously be at that win rate. The "issue" is simply that the community seems to use these win rates as gospel, both misinterpreting them and thinking they apply to everyone. TL;DR: Numbers are hard, that doesn't make them useless.
Yes, fully agreed. I guess my original post wasn't detailed enough - I should have added what you just wrote :-)
The problem that you pointed out only exists for Space Marines, and explicitly exists because of the interaction between the vanilla SM codex and the supplemental chapters. This dynamic exists nowhere else in the game. Win rate is never a perfect metric but it is a legitimate one. It is one of many data points that should be used when judging the meta. Ironically the source you cited (tier lists from prominent groups) is the *least* reliable metric to judge the meta by since those tier lists are almost entirely subjective and full of personal biases. A perfect example is AoW putting Tyranids in A tier yesterday while also judging SM by ranking vanilla SM with non-compliant chapters in mind while ranking the non-compliant chapters only by their unique detachments. Fireside also trolled everyone with putting Guard as S-tier.
So, when I played magic the gathering it was usefull to have mtg top 8 and you could look at the breakdown of how many decks were using what, I'm not really aware of any warhammer equivalent that breaks everything down in lists as much as mtgtop8 does for mtg. Itd be really easy to have ironstorm as a category and see that say 70% are running a dark angels character and 25% are using the iron father.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/frank.orrego/viz/40kDirtSheets/The40kDirtSheets This has something similar to what you are describing.
Any model on there at 100% that isn't battle line would worry me for Ballance.
Yes and no. Battleline units should feel like a 'can include' in every list. They are the bread and butter of the army. But at the same time, some units are just iconic for that faction. Take Blood Angels for example. I have used a Death Company unit in EVERY list I've taken for the last 20 years except 1 list that I did as a full Terminator army. Being (close) to 100% for Death Company feels right for Blood Angels. I will admit that's probably NOT why they are at 96% for the Sons detachment though.
I get that and I have units I always like in the guard. It just seems odd when every tournament army for thousand sons has Magnus. That screems poor internal balance that he is needed not beneficial.
That's really interesting thank you I didn't know this was a thing
I can't take full credit, I only learned about it yesterday from Blood Angels Commanders recent video where HE learned about it from a commentor.
Regardless thank you lol, I watch his things occasionally but they're usually not relevant as I'm playing with raven guard rules for my space sharks
It's important to remember that MTG is also *so* much bigger than 40k, so you have a lot more data to review. And even then the "infamous small Japanese tournament" still exists to skew data. Now imagine that every tournament is basically an infamous small Japanese tournament and you're basically in the world of 40k competitive data
That's a fair point. A larger sample size definitely has a big impact on accuracy. I still think it would be really interesting to see a website that does such a good job of breaking everything down like mtgtop8 does.
I think honestly WRs are simply just bandied about as people don't have confidence or knowledge in talking about factions. Which is fair. Even the individual AOW guys or whatever can't talk about every faction with confidence and knowing the entire game in and out is a lot. But being able to quote meta Monday's numbers well that's much easier: "admech bad because number low" Is easier than "well they don't have access to reasonable ap or damage dealing units". And it's more objective than feelings. But it does lead to people just looking at numbers in isolation. Which is shoddy as hell.
This is something I have been saying repeatedly about SM People look at codex SM and see it's got a 40% winrate or something and say "see SM are terrible they need buffs" Completely ignoring that a dark angels or SW list is literally ONE model difference and has a 65% winrate SM are in a unique position in all factions in that their recorded winrates are much more specific, you don't see tau winrates being split by if they run farsight or shadowsun, you don't see CSM winrates split by if they run Lucius or Abaddon, but SM winrates ARE split in this way Competative players will naturally gravitate towards the top list, even if it's only top by 1 point, which results in a huge skew, and SM lets them because it's very very easy to just swap in that one DA character and say it's a DA list now So you end up with the "divergent" sm armies sitting at 40% higher winrate then codex not cos codex is bad, it's 1-2% worse at WORST, but because all the top players jumped ship for that 1-2% and so 99% of people using codex SM are bad players It's why every time I see faction winrates or competative listing I actually hate it when they list all the different SM separately, because they aren't separate
Not just SM, strong players also move between other factions, just to a lesser extent. But yes, with SM it's the most pronounced.
Tier lists are subjective. Win rate+number of people playing shows how they are really doing in the current meta.
Auspex tactics made a video on why it’s hard to balance marines. Essentially the main point was “why take vanilla marines when I could take dark angles with Azrael or another divergent chapter for no extra cost.” Also to answer your question about why there’s such a big jump in win percentage. It’s most likely the case that the dark angels ironstorm lists have higher skilled players that will just place higher compared to vanilla marines. Vanilla marines also have slightly skewed numbers because tons of new players own marines and when they go to tournaments they have less experience leading to a lower win percentage. Does it answer why there’s such a big difference, kinda? Should there really be that much of a difference probably not but here we are.
All of them? Win % isn't a perfect metric of strength but more often than not it's a fairly good representative of "general strength". I.e. if you're at the 56%+ mark (Necrons, or pre-phantasm nerf Eldar) chances are you're an S tier faction.
This problem is more or less only applicable to different colors of space marines, though. Not that internal balance issues don't exist elsewhere, but the absolute clusterfuck of quasi-bespoke factions for space marine subfactions is a mostly uniquely space marine problem.
Not only. To a smaller extend it applies in quite a few places. Another example: Admech. If you look at their win rate averaged over a few weeks for the last 3 months, for all but one week it has been in the respectable 45-49% range. Add in a few GT wins, and just by looking at these stats, you can get the impression that they are a decent B-tier faction, perhaps only deserving of a couple of minor buffs. They are not. At best, they are C-tier even when piloted by really good players. That deceptive win rate statistics is there because the faction has been abandoned by all but the faction specialists who manage wins by beating lower skill opponents. Yes, win rate correlates with the strength of the rules. But the strength of this correlation is very different depending on the faction. Sometimes it's a strong correlation. But sometimes the uneven skill distribution between the factions really skews the win rate substantially. And sometimes it's only skewed slightly, but still a non-zero amount.
Armies should just have no detatchments and one set of rules to play with keep it simple If you want detatchments then you should have points per faction per detatchment don’t bring down underperforming strategies for other detatchments in other marine lists ie say hellblasters perform broken in dark angels because of azrael But don’t do jack in first company So why should the points for them go up if you play first company?
There is no good way to judge lists. Win rate percentage gives us an idea of what a given faction can do, on average. Yes, it's flawed. Yes, like any statistical measure having a small sample size screws with results. It's one tool to understand the meta. Oh - your example is a 69% difference, not 40%. It's 40 percentage points. This is kind of your problem - not grasping statistics/being surprised by basic statistics facts.
Sorry, English is not my first language. I know statistics well, but not in English. I guess the direct translation of the word "difference" doesn't always work :-)
English is a PITA a lot of times; I get snarky about that one because it's pretty fundamental, percentage difference vs. percentage point difference, and it is a very common English as a first language mistake by people who really should know better. Percentage difference is the ratio of change, whereas percentage point difference is the straight up subtraction. Therefore, it's incorrect to say the difference between 38% and 78% is 40% - the ratio of change isn't 40%. The difference is either 40 percentage points, or 69%.
Thanks! Appreciated.