Plasmoid, I actually did a little investigation along similar lines to you a while back whilst Team England was looking at what races to take for Eurobowl. The problem that you have in your analysis is that it is too general to be really useful. That is to say that who cares if a race is really good at beating up stunties when if you are looking to place high in a tournament or go to something like Eurobowl you're not going to face them. When you are balancing the races, who are you balancing for? The person who is looking to win, or the person who finishes half way? The balance will be different because the teams faced will be different. It's why some teams are thinking about dropping Lizards from their UKTC 4 - in a format where you will meet Wood Elves 25% of the time Lizards get bummed. Right in the skink hole.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 1765530758
The idea here was to look at what races performed well in different competitive environments. The base data will be a bit different to yours so it won't align (and because I was looking at how well teams did against others mirror matches were deliberately kept in), but the second tab is the important one as it allows you to weight the teams you will face.
This is what helped (in addition to some excellent players who are far more experienced than I) lead to the Team England thought process that (especially in a Eurobowl style environment) the teiring is:
1a Woodies, Undead, Lizards, Dark Elves
1b Dwarves, Amazons
1c Chaos Dwarves, Norse, Skaven
2a Necromantic, Humans
2b Chaos Pact, High Elves, Pro Elves, Orcs
3 Everything else (there are tiers within this but we didn't bother spending time on them as they are all much of a muchness when it comes to Eurobowl, no matter how much DocMaxx likes Slann!!
)
But you can see that there is a rolling meta. By default we looked at what Team England took to see what teams would counter us well, and Chaos Dwarves came quite high. Right now we are discussing whether a team like Necromantic is too volatile (Lycos had an MVP 5-1-0 in Orebro followed by an underwhelming Porto; not his fault he is a great player, but that's what a team like Necro gives you). Interestingly when you look at just the top 4 teams Amazons do incredibly well, and Lizards do incredibly poorly (cos Wood Elves). Also this data is old, and a lot of it was taken before people figured out Dark Elves, so you even have a temporal meta to contend with.
That leads to another interesting thing with your meta-analysis, if you change your tiering are you just swapping one meta for another without really balancing things? We saw at last year's NAF how the uptake of the Eurobowl rules meant that we just swapped out a Tier 1 race for Necromantic. Nothing was balanced, it was just swapped. So you have to be careful in your adjustments as you need to think a few moves ahead!
Perhaps most interesting (at least to a nerd like me), is that when you pick Am, CD, DE, Dw, Li, No, Un, and WE the top 8 teams that do well against you are Un, WE, Li, CD, Dw, DE, No, Am. Is this the equilibrium we have been searching for?
straume wrote:Actuall I think I read somewhere that someone (Wulfyn?) did a test on this and compared Orc results for managers with 50+ NAF matches and those with 50- and found no difference in performance.
Yep! I did this to specifically test the hypothesis that Orcs perform poorly because new players take them, and the most important part of any analyst's job is to disprove their own ideas! Again the numbers won't align with Plasmoid's as I did this a while ago, but Orcs ranked 14th overall. When I restricted their results just to Orc players who had played in 60+ tournament games they came... 13th. The real surprise was Humans who overall ranked 15th, but when in the hands of an experienced player performed an excellent 8th. Undead, on the other hand, dropped from 2nd to 5th! So whilst it is true that Orcs are generally played just by newer players (only Chaos had a lower experience than them), and they do have an unusually high number of games (only Undead got close and were still <90%) it seems like as good as they look on paper Orcs just are not cutting it at the current tournament meta even with experienced players. Also, fwiw, very few of the top Eurobowl nations pick Orcs, and I think that this tells us something as well.
Would be interesting to see this repeated as it was a couple years ago now and the meta may have changed again.
But yeah, interesting stuff - please do continue!
edit: yeah would really have helped if I had opened the spreadsheet for access! Open now, sorry all.