The tiny sample size is part of the reason I didn’t bother including this info. Also, I feel like the most common IDs would end up trending toward the middle, since they covered all parts of all top 8s. Interesting results, though. I think the faction breakdown is the most useful, as opposed to the individual ID breakdown.
Well I mean all of this would be way more accurate if we had full results from stores. There are probably plenty of poor results for everything that would balance this out.
No, of course not. But a 33 person Regional should not count more than a 64 person regional because the same amount of swiss rounds are played and it’s still a top 8 cut (if FFG tournament rules are followed).
That being said, I’m not sure what new information we gain by weighing towards attendance count at all, the interaction with location is just far too big.
Edit: I also think it’s impossible to say how much harder a tournament gets if you add more players to it.
What was the rest of the field like?
Full field for all 3 events is on Acoo: http://www.acoo.net/tournament/country/poland/1/ - nothing very special, many Anarchs, lots of NBN
Quipped, did I?
I know my Argus also won the Western Australian regional.
I think what we really want to account for are two effects: statistical variance of a smaller field of players, and strange meta-stable equilibriums that might exist in very small metas (e.g. two people have honed in on PE and Silhouette as the strongest decks in their two player meta…).
The latter is harder to account for without some ad-hoc fudging; I don’t mind @hypomodern’s attempt here but it’s always going to be somewhat arbitrary. The former effect we should probably be more formal about. I can’t think of the maths from the top of my head, but it’s certainly a solved problem.
Well at least you’ve admitted it’s the deck that wins now, and not you.
Of course this flies in the face of what Damon tells us #NoTierOneDecks
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Walked right into that one, I suppose.
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Yeah, I’d love to get more formal, and I am sympathetic to the “small tournament of world-beaters is harder than large tournament of chumps” argument, but it’s hard to weight on anything other than rounds when we only have the top-8 players and not enough worldwide connectedness to really rank players. Like you said, in the absence of full data you have to start making arbitrary decisions somewhere.
I will say that it seems like the top-8s “pass the eye test” as far as known good players popping up. The basic heuristic here is simply that it is more decisive to win events with more rounds of play, and that navigating a top-8 (or top-16!) is way harder than a top-4. So we attempt to weight by rough swiss round buckets. I think this holds up pretty well; you’ll note that the weighting did not cause any “weird” jumps, but did make an impact on the margins, flipping a couple of IDs a couple of spots here or there, which is about what you’d expect.
Which, yes, does mean that region X with events that cap out at 34 players can’t contribute as much to the weighted rankings at region Y with 70-120 player events, but I don’t think that’s unfair if what we’re looking for is a global weighted index of ID performance. As long as the events are clearing a basic variance bar (>16 players) you’re contributing proportionally to your population, though winning a 24 person, four round, top-4 cut regional is counted as placing in the middle of the top-8 at one of the UK’s ginormous 120 person, 7-round, top-8 cut event. So it all still matters.
It might be pretty neat to discretely bucket events by region and or size so you can cross-compare metas if that’s your thing.
Of course, the one thing this can’t capture 100% accurately is player preference :)! I mean, perhaps you’ll get things like the Best Deck just being really boring to play, or stale, prompting large events to fill up with people playing janky fun decks? 
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I’m sure nobody would possibly ever do this, and if they did, they’d never win.
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To quote Spags: “A top tier player with average dex will always beat an average player with top tier dex.”
I think really good players can win with jank, as long as the fundemental synergies and core strategy of a deck aren’t complete garbage.
I would contest that point, depending on the definition of ‘average’ in both cases. Assuming we have tier 1 2 3 for both players and decks, I don’t think it’s safe to say that a tier 1 player with a tier 2 deck will always beat a tier 2 player with a tier 1 deck. I think everyone has come to the understanding that sometimes your deck just wins for you, or conversely, sometimes your deck fails you (aka you failed you by bringing that deck).
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‘Always’ is a fairly silly thing to say in a game that is at least partially determined by card draw. On average, the better player will win based on their skill over the power of their deck. It won’t happen every time, but most of the time skill will win out.
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The spirit of the quote remains true - I doubt Spags was making a definitive statement - but he was making the valid point that on balance being a better player is more valuable than having the ostensibly better deck.
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++ to this. It was true at one point that skill always mattered significantly more than your deck, but I don’t think it’s been true for a good while now. (I remember it not being uncommon a couple of years ago to see new players being encouraged with “You can have a decent chance with a core set and a lot of practice,” but that seems laughable now. Can you imagine trying to play a core deck against, say, modern Astrobiotics? shivers)
There are now quite a few strong decks that create pretty unbalanced matchups with the majority of decks. Astrobiotics, CI shutdown and IG Bioethics are the ones that immediately come to mind - all of them are just going to beat you without really trying unless you know what you’re doing and bring a serious-face runner deck.
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I also think the game has been around long enough that there are at least several tier 1 players in every meta. This means that at tournaments, the top 4 or 8 is probably composed of very competent pilots (still prone to mistakes, of course). It is my opinion that match-ups and RNG are more impactful now than ever in ANR, at the competitive level.
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EDIT Just realized I posted this in the wrong thread. Oops. Oh well.
Regionals this weekend (June 25th unless otherwise noted):
- Europe
- Stockport, UK
- Lyon, France
- Oslo, Norway
- Palma de Mallorca, Spain
- Poznan, Poland
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Brussels, Belgium (June 26th)
- Thessaloniki, Greece (June 26th)
- Australia
- Brisbane, Australia
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We had some changes today…
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I confess that part of me wanted to make a deal of it in this post, but the UK is still part of Europe, even if it isn’t in the EU, so I left it as-is.
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