Intoduction
As one of the regular workers in the salt mines known as the CM meta debates on Discord, at some point I've felt that maybe a more statistical approach would help us toget that unbalanced crap nerfed alreadyachieve a better understanding of the game meta.
Since #new-round-alert until recently used to provide round starts, ends, maps and outcomes, that's most of the data we need.
The only thing missing is the server population. While we don't have it, we can assume that population is going to be roughly similar at a particular time of the day, every day. So each graph presented here would be outcomes and durations grouped by UTC roundstart hours.
Another thing to note is that I only have the outcome data starting from 2020-04-29, that's when it was added to the bot. That's very unfortunate, since I was really interested to see how much the statistics changed with the MOBA update.
Techwebs
Lets start with looking into how techwebs has affected the game meta. Here's the pre-techwebs outcomes vs techwebs:
While we can see that while before marines never hit 50% major rate, now they generally hit it all over the high pop, this is slightly misleading, because techwebs also removed marine minors, since now those are generally meaningless. If we combine faction majors and minors, we get this:
This is a lot closer, right? Well, here we can clearly see, that while techwebs buffed marine winrate, it's generally no more than 5%.
Another thing to note it that unga hour at 20 UTC, followed by xenomain hour at 22 UTC. And you can see a similar pattern in pre-techwebs meta, only offset by 2 hours. I'm not entirely sure why such offset happened, but it's probably combination of DST and lower population now, than in 2020.
Now lets look at round duration:
Here you can see, that the average round is roughly shorter by 5 minutes. Except for xeno majors, which now take up to 20 minutes longer, on the EU high pop.
Then, let's look at the 2 of the community's most favored maps and see how they changed with techwebs.
LV:
Note how both unga hour and xenomain hour are both present here. And you can clearly see that those timeslots that were already marine favored, favor them even more now. As for duration, you can see, that while marine majors are shorter now, xeno majors take much longer and this averages to a similar duration to the pre-techwebs state.
Big Red:
Solaris was surprisingly balanced before, but now it's really wacky. Here you can make the case of xenos winning harder too, whenever they were favored to win before.
For some comedy relief lets look at Trijent Dam:
Again, marines are winning even harder now. In fact I had to change my normal graph scaling to even display this correctly. Also note the xenomain hour in pre-techwebs graph, leading to a large amount of marine minors instead of majors.
Thanks to Grimreaperx15 for giving me permission to publish this.
Continued in part 2.