For those of you who have been following, I decided to start tracking battles in Blitz after Crusader6 had started it. For this I curse him. My first two posts on this topic can be found here:
http://forum.wotblitz.com/index.php?/topic/92842-what-100-battles-have-told-me-about-win-rate-mm-and-the-players-of-blitz/page__fromsearch__1
http://forum.wotblitz.com/index.php?/topic/93132-what-200-battles-have-told-me-about-win-rate-mm-and-the-players-of-blitz/page__fromsearch__1
Well, after a total of 79,200 manually entered points of data, here are my thoughts on: Win Rate, Match Making and the Players of Blitz (with a few other bits thrown in). When doing this effort I made a conscious decision NOT to play OP tanks and over the 400 battles (that I tracked tanks) I played 65 different tanks between Tiers VII-X.
Let's start with:
Overall results by battle count and update.
So what does the above tell me? Overall (as suspected) the players continue to get worse with every update. Granted I didn't do that many battles in 4.6 or 4.8 but yikes, I did notice it get progressively worse after each update. When I started this project I was sitting at 65.85% WR. Today, I am at 65.79%. I saw the sharpest decline in WR over the last 200 battles starting halfway through update 4.7 which continued into update 4.8. In 500 battles I had one draw.
By Tier, Tiers VII and X are a complete disaster while Tiers VIII and IX are actually quite enjoyable.
Your Skill Matters
As you can imagine, your skill has a direct impact on your ability to win. The better your skill, normally the higher your WR. With my WR included, Green had a higher WR than Red over 80% of the time. When you remove my WR from the equation, the % of those 402 battles that Green was better than red was 51% of the time. In essence of those battles Green had a Higher Wr than Red, I as a player impacted that average WR almost 30% of the time.
Top 10 Most Popular Tanks By Tier
I actually found the next results interesting. Now, these are for only battles 101-500 as I wasn't tracking tank type before that. I did find the results for Tier VIII interesting as the IS-6 and IS-5 did not show up at the top as I expected. Despite the nerf, the T49 is still one of the most popular tanks at Tier VIII. For Tier VII I was surprised to see so many SP1C's. Tier IX and X were as expected IMO.
The Players of Blitz
Well now, if you have a 50% WR, you are better than 51.34% (give or take) of the players of blitz. If you have a 55% WR, BE PROUD! You are better than 83% of the entire playerbase.
Overall in 500 battles I fought with 5802 players (not including me and not including repeats).
Of those players, next is how often I faced those with a 55% or higher WR in battle.
As expected, 60 and 65% and higher players are rare indeed and if you see one, recognize the name and hope to have them on your team again.
Platoons
People always say that platoons will have an impact on your WR. This IMO is not as big of an impact now as it used to be based on the changes that were made to MM and to Platoon MM in particular. Heck, when you look at my results, I actually lost MORE when I was platooned vs. when I wasn't. What having a Platoon CAN do is definitely increase OR decrease your team's average WR depending on the calibre of the player you are platooned with. What does this mean?
Simple and nothing scientific. The lower you are on the WR scale, the greater the importance of NOT platooning with someone of equal skill. The higher you are on the WR scale, be open to platooning with those on the lower end of the scale, IF THEY ARE WANTING TO IMPROVE.
Going back to this image:
In 102 platoon battles, Green had a higher WR than red 86% of the time. Remove the platoons (red and green) the average dropped to 58% of the time. Since I typically platoon with players between 55-65%, what this shows is that combined, it gave us a greater chance to win. The challenge though is that we only won 62% of our battles despite having a higher average WR 86% of the time. What does that mean? Could MM been pairing us with more players than the red platoon to compensate for our higher WR's? Not from the data I saw. Just that in platoon battles I wasn't as lucky with RNG.
In Summary
- As I and others have said before and will say again. Your skill matters. Those who struggle more in the game will complain more and more about rigged MM when it doesn't exist.
- There is no rigged MM.
- If MM was rigged, it was rigged in my favor and even after you remove me, Green had a higher WR more than 50% of the time. Awesome. I get rigged MM to benefit me.
- There is no rigged RNG.
- Worse losing streak I had was 5 in a row and two runs of 4 in a row. Why so low? Simple. I have a rule to turn off the game after 5 losses in a row.
- Platoon quality matters.
- IMO people with a 55% or higher Wr should only platoon with equally skilled players or those wanting to improve.
- IMO people with a WR between 50 and 55% should platoon only with those equal, better or those willing to learn
- IMO people below 50% WR should only platoon with 50% and above players and want to improve.
- The implementation of being able to select only supremacy battles was perfect in 4.8 and one of the best added features. Before that I was averaging 55% supremacy battles but never would get one when I had a supremacy mission. With the change, supremacy battles become more common as I needed them.
So, what has the above shown me personally? Ignorance is bliss. I actually like the game a bit less now than I did before. Why? Not because of the game itself but due to the fact that the players are progressively getting worse and there is no apparent attempt by WG to try and help them get better in game which is unfortunate.
Appendix
As an added, here are some additional bits of information such as the tanks I played, how many times I was in a particular map and just an overall snapshot showing what the different data pages looked like that I used.
First the Tanks I played. As you can see nothing really OP as I continued with my grinding tanks:
Next are the various maps:
And finally some of the snapshots of the data tracking sheets. Just to show it really happened.