Big Thanks to Aahz for all the effort in coding and collecting all the data provided!
Median XL has over 70 builds and creating an environment where all builds have the potential to do 1-130 plus ubers equally as well is incredibly tough. I personally dislike the use of the word balance for me it has a connatation that every thing is equal. The concept of balance is contradictory by nature. Balancing the game around one group such as the average gamer might completely imbalance the game for another group the elite tier speed runners or elite tier lab runner. Whilst balancing the game around the elite tier player or an elite tier speed runners will put off the game for the average gamer or casual gamer for the difficulty being too hard. I think its fair to say that Median Xl wants to maintain the current player base and keep them challenged with a changing meta whilst also bringing in new players at the same time who can enjoy the mod.
People have a tendency of complaining how bad specific builds or their favourite build feel without any real comparison yardstick. Hopefully these metrics can give a point of comparison and people can see there is not such a huge disparity between the builds as it seems or in some case there is a huge disparity . It is best not to treat this data as black and white especially those with small sample sizes. Uber bossing are not included which is an integral part of the mod. Skill, knowledge and experience and afking are more likely to affect small sample sizes.
Rather than looking at overall balance, hopefully the data will show the different strengths and weaknesses of each build and with different questions and challenges being posed at different phases of the game. Hopefully with the data collected it can show which builds might need a reduction of its power in a particular phase of the game for being overtuned or potentially looking to buff the undertuned characters that struggle a lot.
The Data
Considering that 70% of people quit the game at level 120. I have grouped up the data into three categories early game will be from 1-100,100-120, 120-130. I have split up the data as best I could whilst trying to keep the integrity of data. I will make the assumption that people reading this have a general understanding of basic statistics and data collection. This data is not independently identically distributed so performing any kind of distribution analysis doesnt really make any sense. I have just used simple robust estimators such as the mean, percentile average to have a look at the data. This data will of course contain sampling bias.
Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.
I hope some of this is useful to the devs for considering changes and balancing to the game rather than seeing an amazon rework and melee sorc buffs every ladder in 2.x .
Note: Bubble charts are included in googlesheets linked at the end.
Ladder Start
One of the most important parts of the ladder where the player base is at its highest and the challenge a fresh ladder brings. Data has been split into three parts: The first three days of ladder from 1-100, The first two days of the ladder 100-120 and 120-130. (Probably my favourite part of the ladder due to the challenges it brings for HC, optimisation with limited resource, plus ubers with unoptimised gear).
Data is split into three parts: Early ladder as a whole, the elite players and the exceptional players groups these players have the greatest influence of how a ladder progresses.
Ladder Start all
1-100 1504 people on ladder start (first 3 days)
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100-120 307 players on ladder start (first 2 days)
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120-130 46 players on ladder start (first 2 days)
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Ladder Start exceptional tier
1-100 Sub 5 hour characters on ladder start 354 players
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100-120 Sub 5 hour 40mins 100 characters on ladder start
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120-130 Sub 10 hours 40 mins 40 characters on ladder start
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Ladder Start elite tier
1-100 Sub 3 hours 30 minutes 51 players
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100-120 Sub 4 hours 30 minutes 30 players
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120-130 Sub 7 hours 25 minutes 20 players
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Top Builds across the whole ladder
Some people prefer to enjoy a long ladder play different build or min max the same one. Most likely tweaked setup and potentially players on sc were using nithogur charm.
Top 100 players across the whole ladder
1-100
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100-120
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120-130
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Top 10 percentile of all players across the whole ladder
1-100 689 characters
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100-120 387 characters
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120-130 214 Characters
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Builds people struggle with
This data looks at the bottom 10% percentile of players and which builds they have struggled on the most.
1-100 bottom 20 builds
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100-120 bottom 20 builds
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120-130 bottom 20 builds
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Notes on the data collected:
sum is the number of players doing that build
I have not done an analysis on endgame so builds could function completely differently post 130.
Bottom 10% of time were removed to remove the impact of people afking or just being idle.
Some overlapping data, Warlock and Rising Dawn from 100-120, 120-130. Hammerzon, Stormzon, Bloodzon, MMzon and throwsin.
Anything less than 10k kills were considered to be tweaked or team runs and were not included from 1-100
Anything less than 16k kills were considered to be tweaked or team runs and were not included from 100-120
Anything less than 30k kills were considered to be tweaked or team runs and were not included from 120-130
Trophy farming from 1-130 can have a potential impact on the data. Although most people tend to farm trophys post 130 apart from TA.
Nephalim paladin is probably an outlier due to nithogur charm and nithogur charm could influence softcore time, although looking through the data it did not seem to have a huge impact imo.
Any transitions in data i.e claw to nagi have been treated just as nagi there were a handful of these and made the data rather convoluted to look at.
People might be change builds in the run most notably due to 0 skills or speed running optimisation.
Top 100 times are heavily influenced by Lynderika with 5 out the top 10 times. Lynderika's times are outliers.
Ladder start is the first three days of the ladder for 1-100 because it is not so heavilty influenced by tweaked gear
Ladder start is the first two days of the ladder for 100-120,120-130 because of the influence of tweaked gear on day 3
Thanks to Lynderika and Knack for some input and things I overlooked!
Thanks to Devs for this great mod!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... =631941428
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... d=54765529