Planned changelog

[Leaf]

Either it is a massive coincidence or the winrates should not total to 100%. The winrates should total to the rate of existing companies, and not those that have ever existed. Im guessing what you just pulled up is the toral winrates for the war that includes deleted companies but correct me if Im wrong. This doesnt show how Terror or KCH compare to other factions at all. It is a different statistic drawn from a different data-set. It isnt really relevant or comparable.

Edit: somehow didnt see that second link or other pages on the first. What I guessed here should have been obvious, and we can at least compare between Wehr doctrines

[robieman]

This is an unbelievably high win rate for this many games played. Past 100-150 range it should start to even out. In League of Legends if a champion has a 42% win rate its considered a dead champion.

This huge axis advantage is indicative of two possibilities:

A: Axis is the favored side for better players, meaning in your average game the axis team is a stack or something similar to a stack and thus wins the game more often than not.

B: Allies is incredibly under powered, this means on average despite even teams the axis have the on the field advantage.

I believe both of these problems are a serious concern, which ever one it is. Id feel much more comfortable if its option A for the numbers to be reversed in the allies favor. Axis is generally the favored faction in terms of design by OMG players, by being both the favored faction and the more powerful faction it especially discourages allies play.

Option B Is an especially bad situation because this balance patch may likely help axis as Dr. Nick suggested based on experience from previous years. This could have dramatic effects on player base morale if the situation does not improve for another month. I am literallly not having fun playing allied companies at the present moment. This mod only has so much steam before players lose interest and stop checking in. It could be months before the often called "revive occurs" if this stiatuion is as bad as it seems to me from talking to players.

[matrin]

These stats are fairly worthless without any proper context or sourcing. Also, once again, given the small number of players in the community, individuals can have a huge impact on W/L ratio of each side. It is also incredibly irresponsible for a member of the Dev team to post such statistics in support of an argument they are making to people who do not have such access to the raw data. Especially given that the dev in question has been identified as a major statistical outlier in his own data set. I would even go as far as to call it an abuse of power.

As to the points Robie made. First, you cannot compare a game that has, on a good day, about a dozen to two dozen matches, to a game that has literally thousands of matches a day. Matches that are auto-matched to boot.  The margin of error is just too great because of the low data set. I mean even removing just one players stats, the outlier company from the terror list, from the total win loss ratios of axis and allies. This changes the balance from 58/42 to 54/46. A single player had an 8 point W/L ratio impact on the entire mod. This means that we have to take great care in how we use what numbers we have, and not quote them like scripture blindly.

[robieman]

How is it an abuse of power to post stats players do not have access to? Its not like there are more stats hanging around the corner that are being hidden... this is transparency and your accusing him of literally the opposite.

I mean even removing just one players stats, the outlier company from the terror list, from the total win loss ratios of axis and allies. This changes the balance from 58/42 to 54/46. A single player had an 8 point W/L ratio impact on the entire mod. This means that we have to take great care in how we use what numbers we have, and not quote them like scripture blindly.

Quote them like scripture blindly? I am taking great care in how I utilize the statiscs, I spelled out the two possibilities. If your suggesting that for some reason axis has this winrate because extremely good players such as razor prefer axis than its option A of my post.

Every time people bring statiscs up in this mod there is a fury of reactionary comments that suggest stastics are worthless becaus the mod is so small. What evidence do you believe we should utiliz, player speculation? Its very frustrating to see this kind of response to a single post offering context to a greater problem many players are speaking out about.

Also for the record you cannot remove a single players impact in the stastics because this is an aggregation of non 1v1 games. Every game has more then a single winner and loser, when you remove one player from the data set there are multiple others who were effected in the data set stil there.

[sdauz]

These stats are fairly worthless without any proper context or sourcing. Also, once again, given the small number of players in the community, individuals can have a huge impact on W/L ratio of each side. It is also incredibly irresponsible for a member of the Dev team to post such statistics in support of an argument they are making to people who do not have such access to the raw data. Especially given that the dev in question has been identified as a major statistical outlier in his own data set. I would even go as far as to call it an abuse of power.

As to the points Robie made. First, you cannot compare a game that has, on a good day, about a dozen to two dozen matches, to a game that has literally thousands of matches a day. Matches that are auto-matched to boot.  The margin of error is just too great because of the low data set. I mean even removing just one players stats, the outlier company from the terror list, from the total win loss ratios of axis and allies. This changes the balance from 58/42 to 54/46. A single player had an 8 point W/L ratio impact on the entire mod. This means that we have to take great care in how we use what numbers we have, and not quote them like scripture blindly.

Dude calm your jet, that a bucket of hyperbole

[RazorSixActual]

It will require some dev effort to persist old companies for stat purposes. I have tried to show the source data so you know exactly what I am working with and can reinterpret or recalculate using them. I do think these have some value for showing trends.

Not sure how to respond to your other points matrin, I have already expressed my opinion that wehr needs nerfs generally and I believe the limited and imperfect data I present supports that. We can certainly add a stats viewer to the new site, on this one they are tied with the admin panel.

[skaffa]

Should atleast keep some kind of zook buff.

[Stu]

Before we get worked up about the battle stats, there are some things to remember:

- Are all players skill-levels even? Nope
- Do players evenly play both factions? Definitely not
- Would more information from more battles be helpful? Certainly
- Are there other factors at play that effect win rates? (Teams, strategies used, random outcomes, etc) Absolutely

Our data set is imperfect. No doubt about it. It doesnt tell us why or how the axis are more successful, and should not be treated as scripture.

But at the end of the day, it shows us a bit of the bigger picture, which is that the axis are coming out on top. It is evidence (however imperfect) that shows that this is more than just a frustrated sentiment of some of our players (including myself at times).

Before folks complain about the proposed changes or discredit opposing points, try an unfamiliar faction or doctrine and feel how the shoe fits on the other foot. For me, going back to Wehr (and for a time, American Armour) this war has definitely been an interesting experience.

[Stormtrout]

This is an unbelievably high win rate for this many games played. Past 100-150 range it should start to even out. In League of Legends if a champion has a 42% win rate its considered a dead champion.

If you plot the cumulative wins over the war, allies were winning at 150 games. a meta developed from around ~175 games in, that has seen the 100 or so games yield epic axis winrates around 70:30, its a very recent development. The range of cumulative axis win rate this war has ranged from 44% to its current 58%. I would take any numbers you can derive here some scepticism.

*All based on Razers sheet.

[robieman]

This is an unbelievably high win rate for this many games played. Past 100-150 range it should start to even out. In League of Legends if a champion has a 42% win rate its considered a dead champion.

If you plot the cumulative wins over the war, allies were winning at 150 games. a meta developed from around ~175 games in, that has seen the 100 or so games yield epic axis winrates around 70:30, its a very recent development. The range of cumulative axis win rate this war has ranged from 44% to its current 58%. I would take any numbers you can derive here some scepticism.

*All based on Razers sheet.

Thats a very interesting observation and provides good insight on why the morale feels suddenly so rock bottom. 70:30 games is terrible.

One thing I will say is I do not believe it is the players causing it; pretty much everyone I have seen in the last 30 or so games has been playing both sides of the field. Perhaps some a bit more than others.

Really I think the biggest cause Stormtrout is the Allied meta that kept allies competitive became stale and countered well. Not nearly as many Infantry spam companies and the fee that do are playing at this point against players who know what they need to do to beat it. Additional allied strategies that are effective will undoubtedly help.

[matrin]

I may have been a little overzealous in my points regarding Razor, but the sentiment still stands.

First of all, I understand the spirit of what you want to do and are trying to do Razor. However, I think there are better ways you could have gone about it. I think it is important to recognize that OMG has a long history of people blurring the lines between jobs and, frankly, of people with power abusing that power for their own self interest. The information you are able to retrieve is dramatically greater than that a normal OMG user could, and as such you have a duty to responsibly disclose it before you use it and disclose it - partially or even entirely - for your own purposes.

After all, was not that supposed to be a big part of the new OMG restart? That we would have a clearer separation of powers between the service branches and that outside of a core group of leaders, so users would not get a louder voice or special privileges just because of who they were?

Second of all, my point is that relying on incomplete, fundamentally misleading stats is only going to create more incomplete, misleading agendas.

How exactly are we supposed to use a set of data that is heavily skewed, massively incomplete and potentially misleading? Would you get on board a 737 if your pilot told you that someone had smashed his instruments the night before, but its okay, hes sure he can manage the flight with a compass and a road map from 1954?

If you would not, then why would you say - for sure and for certain - that these stats are our best bet? That we should cling to them and follow their wisdom. Even and especially when it is clear, for instance, that there are some massive outlier users in every category of the data presented alone (for instance, 5 out of 12 Terror doctrine companies that exist right now have statistically exceptional performance - that is, a more than 20% deviation from a 50% WLR - some for the worse, some for the better.)

This data even has a massive self-selecting bias problem. Players who are on losing streaks tend to delete their companies, fundamentally removing some of the most important data - the individual losses. For all I know, there are individual axis players with sub 20% win ratios, and individual axis players with over 80% win ratios, and both could be having a massive impact on the gross factional Win/Loss scheme but we cannot see it. The point is though, I dont know. You dont know. Nobody knows, so it is fundamentally, objectively false for somebody to say that they know, or even say they have evidence that suggests they know.
All we have evidence of, even minor evidence of, is that there is a massive WLR disparity between all of the current, active Wehrmacht war companies.

To me, that disparity looks like a mighty personal one, not a systematic one.

That doesnt seem like a good justification for any sort of balance argument, unless we want to start nerfing and buffing individual players.

Because that is the point. Balance changes are not meant to, and cannot, target individual players. They have to address systematic issues with balance. They have to resolve reoccurring, identifiable issues. Personally I think at this stage we will only be able to address those issues in a qualitative, often theoretical way, without much big data to support us.

We also cannot deny or turn aside balance concerns just because weak, frankly unrelated data suggests that perhaps there is a mysterious bigger issue lurking over the horizon. Otherwise we may as well give up on trying to balance OMG entirely because somebody will always have some tangential data that loosely indicates that maybe X is not the problem so we should study Y instead, until the Y supporters point the finger at Z, and we pass the buck further down the road accomplishing emphatically more nothing.

Otherwise, we are just reinforcing the same bad habits we always have

Which leads me to my final point. I believe that we need to take serious stock in whether or not the the current ideas and attitudes we are using. I argue that it is not and that is what is driving most of the dim perceptions of balance in the mod. No amount of VP changes, stat buff changes, pricing changes, or availability changes can fix the fact that OMG doesnt feel like a functional game with a responsive balance and design team. It is haunted and beholden to the decisions of people who are no longer involved with the mod and who had some frankly and I think agreeably poor sense for design and for balance. To top that off, I see a lot of responses from Dev members in forum posts defending the status quo with many arguments akin to "that is how we have always done things."

If that is all there is to expect, changes based on how things have always been done, then that is fine, but I hope that you and everyone playing OMG are okay with the mod continuing to be the same satisfied group of people, a group that tends to get smaller with passing time.

[robieman]

How exactly are we supposed to use a set of data that is heavily skewed, massively incomplete and potentially misleading? Would you get on board a 737 if your pilot told you that someone had smashed his instruments the night before, but its okay, hes sure he can manage the flight with a compass and a road map from 1954?

If you would not, then why would you say - for sure and for certain - that these stats are our best bet? That we should cling to them and follow their wisdom. Even and especially when it is clear, for instance, that there are some massive outlier users in every category of the data presented alone (for instance, 5 out of 12 Terror doctrine companies that exist right now have statistically exceptional performance - that is, a more than 20% deviation from a 50% WLR - some for the worse, some for the better.)

I will keep what I want to say about this as short as I can: The data does point to problems, with outliers or not, and utilizing it to contextualize a problem is in no way intentionally misleading players. For instance, in the last few days I have talked with about 10 different people about the recent state of the game, and all of those people have offered personal testimony that there is an issue. This personal testimony is valuable, but alone is this going to drive change in the mod? To further exemplify this issue, despite the fact that I have heard from so many people, are these people all willing to testify to their feelings on their forums? No, they havent. Now however, with the further bit of evidence that suggests axis games have swung (FOR WHATEVER REASON) wildly into axis favor, we can confirm at some level a problem exists. Personal testimony should not be the sole drive in recognizing possible issues. Possibly misleading data or not, offering it has helped establish the very real fact, as in without any possible chance to refute, that the axis have somehow won about 70 games of their last 100.

Players can choose to interpret the above information in many ways, what they cannot do is ignore the fact that 70 of the last 100 games should never be happening.

Please note I will be creating a new thread specifically for discussing data and why I believe data is reliable, and the form of evidence we should pay the most attention to in the mod (as far as evidence goes). This thread will be in general discussion. I encourage all players to pursue this discussion there.

[Alex]

This is just upsetting to read everyone is putting a ton of effort in to the mod just to receive harsh criticism and accusatory remarks.

We constantly talk about how we can make decision making more transparent every time we meet. We are on our first balance patch and people are losing their minds.

How about providing some constructive feedback rather than baseless accusations and moaning?

[The Anchor]

Can I get a tldr for that post there matrin... its like a 1000 word essay, goddamn.

Razor plays axis, axis is strong, Razor agrees that axis is strong, everyone agrees axis is strong, Razor can back it up with stats that support his argument, get over it.

Lets start addressing the problems with the current meta game, lets mix it up and allow allies more options to counter the axis strength, and its not like the Allied side doesnt have answers, its that the answers are too expensive and get outvalued.

[sdauz]

In the good old days, allies would have had a defensive timer.