Profile of Grumpy

Glad that I could help.

The ability is fine and Guards are probably OP.

One might experiment with reducing duration to 5 but make it uninterruptible.

I play a fair amount of Soviets and don't mind it as it is. It's usually broken by smoke from Panzer tactician so that seems like a normal play-counterplay progression. I sometimes use it to save a retreating tank on my team or to slow down an opposing tank long enough to kill it. It works fine for its cost.

the duration is also very short. 5 seconds?

About five seconds, maybe a bit more - When it was longer, you could button and IL2 bomb most tanks. Most people don't like guaranteed 2-click wipes much better than guaranteed one-click wipes.

Is this just some exercise in trolling, to see how many people will play or get upset? Guards are mostly fine, with maybe a tiny bit too high of a weapon drop rate (because of the large number of weapons that can be dropped).

I mean, we already have a lot of complaints about t-70 into is-2; but I do wonder if the over-representation of OKW-to-Wehrmacht is in no small part because Grand Offensive fills so many gaps for OKW (early snares; good mobile heavy, etc.)

I'm not good enough to make any real predictions, but just going off of what I saw as "common" in the games.

That is what I am guessing happened, probably in response to the new heavy meta. It would be interesting to see if just toning down down the heavys (more CP's) help with OST or if the Panther and Stug need buffs. I play mostly 3's and 4's and don't like fighting IS2's with Panthers much. On some of the city maps they can be really hard to kill if used even somewhat cautiously.

I would skip on the first "free" (250mp/35 totally worth for tech that allows you to build one unit only Kappa) squad any day if I would get weapon racks, nades and snares all at once from it instead

Everybody who plays USF would do this if they could, but I think the balance team said it was off-limits as "free" officers are part of the core of the faction.

We do throw out outlying data as well, but really, even 3-0 are not that unusual and 3-1s should be as common as 3-2s if the outcome of a match is totally random (perfect match of player skills and everything is totally balanced). Sounds strange?

Ok, after one match the result will be 1-0 or 0-1 with a 50:50 split. After two matches the options are 2-0, 1-1, 1-1 and 0-2. After three matches, you have 3-0, 2-1, 1-2, 2-1, 2-1, 1-2, 1-2 and 0-3, so 2 out of 8 or 25% of matches will have ended in either 3-0 or 0-3 (last post I correctly stated that the chance of 3-0 is 12.5%, but forgot that the 0-3 would go in the same bucket...).

So, the remaining 75% of rounds will be at 2-1 or 1-2 after three rounds. Again, if the chance of winning is 50:50 for either player, we will have a 50:50 split between 3-1/1-3 or 2:2 results (which would end up in 3:2/2:3, obviously).

As a result, if match outcomes are completely random, 3-0/0-3 are expected in 25% of rounds, 3-1/1-3 in 37.5% and 3-2/2-3 in the final 37.5%. This was kind of unexpected for me, but the thing is that we do not actually play 5 games. If one player has three wins, the series stops. I guess we tend to sort of extrapolate that after 5 games the 3-0 would certainly end up in a 5-0, but potentially the other player could have won games 4 and 5.

If we look at the actual results, we see that we have 20 3-0/0-3 (which obviously are way too many to say that these where even matches), 7 3-1/1-3 and 5 3-2/2-3 so the 3-1/1-3 are not much of an outlier, really. Actually, if the player skills would be similar and all rounds end in 3:2s, you can be pretty certain that something else was unbalanced...



Sounds reasonable, but if you break it down that much you would end up with a small single digit number of matches per case. Match length seems like a good indicator, but on the other hand you have cases where a player throws the towel early because he lost a crucial unit (we even saw this in the last two rounds). Still, if you are interested, I could give you this data. And yeah, I guess statiticans would probably tell us to "Get more data!".



Well, seems like we overall agree then

Problems with automatch stats are, well: First up, I think there is a considerable skill gap even in the top 50 of players; I didn't check but I wouldn't be surprised if all players that made it to the main round are in the top 100 with at least one faction. And back when I did the post on the automatch stats, I actually looked into what I get when using only games of the top players; you quickly get to the point that you are left with very few matches. I don't recall the exact numbers (might be like 100 matches across all factions, a larger map pool (with uncertain starting positions) for the top 50 or so over three months) but there were so few that I dropped the idea of putting that in the article.

Another issue was pointed out by Momo4Sho in a similar discussion: Top players will often try out new strategies in automatch games, so they might not actually play to win. This is different in tournament games.

So, at the end of the day I guess this is actually close to my work enviroment where decisions have to be made based on multiple different pieces of information (which here could be player feedback, tournament stats, automatch stats...), none of which are conclusive by themselve but together hopefully form a somewhat consistent picture.

Overall we agree
The statement that I changed to bold was one of the points I tried making to Doomlord. If the factions were badly unbalanced, there would be a lot of 3/2 splits.

At this point, I still think it would be more helpful to interview tournament participants, especially the upper players, to find out why they're not picking Ost, rather than trying to do any more statistical analysis. Here is an analogy from my work. I was once asked to look into a problem on a paper machine. When the paper machine has the problem, the paper gets sent to a rework bin. That is really expensive. If it is happening a lot, the workers often slow the paper machine down, which is also expensive. I was asked to check into what is less expensive. I got a really surprising result. When I normalized for speed, slowing down didn't improve the defect rate at all, contrary to what people were saying. When I asked some of the workers about it, the general reply was "Ya, we already know that but it means we have to get up and fix it less often."

People will optimize what is best for them, regardless of what statistics say, and that is especially true for the small group of elite COH2 players. Some of the players switched from OST to OKW. Why? Does the heavy tank meta make OST a worse choice? Something else?

I also agree on your comments about the skill gap between players, but think it can extend a long way down the ladder. This has an effect that a lot of people don't realize when they are complaining about "balance." If someone's ranking is XXX, even if there is a balance patch, the XXX-1 players that are better than them are still going to be better, and the players that were beating them before are still likely to beat them, so their ranking and win rates aren't going to change much.

It would be interesting to look at both the tournament and automatch data sets sometime, if you can share. If you're not supposed to share it then no worries.