Prediction Time

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**EviscerationPlague**

Wayniac wrote:
EviscerationPlague wrote:
Wayniac wrote:
And have a larger than normal reach due to most "influencers" being tournament players, so they look like they have a louder voice than they really do. With so many youtube vids and stuff being tournament focused it looks like they are more of a majority.

And why is that a problem?
Because it puts the wrong narrative that tournament play should be the focus of the game.

Why not? It might mean we'll eventually not get trash rules instead of you defending something like if GW made Cultists 10 points a model.

**Daedalus81**

Wayniac wrote:
EviscerationPlague wrote:
Wayniac wrote:
And have a larger than normal reach due to most "influencers" being tournament players, so they look like they have a louder voice than they really do. With so many youtube vids and stuff being tournament focused it looks like they are more of a majority.

And why is that a problem?
Because it puts the wrong narrative that tournament play should be the focus of the game.

Well, then there is a perfect opportunity for someone to make quality content that is narrative focused.

**vict0988**

Wayniac wrote:
EviscerationPlague wrote:
Wayniac wrote:
And have a larger than normal reach due to most "influencers" being tournament players, so they look like they have a louder voice than they really do. With so many youtube vids and stuff being tournament focused it looks like they are more of a majority.

And why is that a problem?
Because it puts the wrong narrative that tournament play should be the focus of the game.

It should be the focus of balance discussions. How are you going to verify and why would you care about my experience in casual games vs SM?

**Dysartes**

Alrighty, then... and another event cropped up while I was working through things, which was odd.

Key:
Dropped after 1 round - Dropped after 2 rounds - Dropped after 3 rounds - Dropped after 4 rounds - Dropped after 5 rounds - Dropped after 6 rounds

Iberian Open Talavera - Toledo, Spain - 5 rounds (followed by a cut), 84 players

Spoiler:

The Great Game GT - Westminster, Maryland, USA - 6 rounds, 51 players

Spoiler:

Planet arKCanite At Comicon - Kansas City, Missouri, USA - 6 rounds, 40 players

Spoiler:

...why is Kansas City not in Kansas?

Major Mayhem - Valdosta, Georgia, USA - 5 rounds, 58 players

Spoiler:

The March Madness Grant Tournament - Jacksonville, Arkansas, USA - 5 rounds, 48 players

Spoiler:

Battlefield Birmingham 20 - Birmingham, ENG - 5 rounds, 46 players

Spoiler:

Free State GT 2023 - Holton, Kansas, USA - 5 rounds, 43 players

Spoiler:

Dropzone Games Central Island Open - Nanaimo, British Columbia, CAN - 5 rounds, 39 players

Spoiler:

OP's 1st GT Smash - Santa Rosa, California, USA - 5 rounds, 38 players

Spoiler:

War of the Roses 2023 - Stockport, ENG - 5 rounds, 34 players

Spoiler:

Pergőtűz LCOTSV 3 - Jászfényszaru, HU - 5 rounds, 34 players

Spoiler:

As event is only 32 players, will be looking at the top 4 only.
Carnage - Season 1, Round 1 - Leeds, ENG - 5 rounds, 32 players

Spoiler:

Codex: Space Marines Sub-Factions (12 events)
Top n spot

Spoiler:

Other Sub-Factions (12 events)
Top n spot

Spoiler:

Participation vs. top 8 slots for the 11 events with 33 to 128 entrants

Spoiler:

Note that I'm not going to reiterate the comparison for the 1 event with a top 4

SM Win Records

Spoiler:

**EviscerationPlague**

1. Kansas City was named after the native Americans there or something like that
2. Any lists for those Minotaurs and Carcharodons that showed up LOL

**SemperMortis**

Free state GT: Marines under-performed in the top 8, they also had 9th, 11th, 12th and 15th as well IE they missed top 8 spots by one game. #9 lost 2 games, both with a score of 78. He lost by 16pts in the 1st game vs the #4 placing list and by 8pts in his last game to the guy who placed 2nd. #11 lost 2 games with 76 and 73 #12 with 76 and 66 and #15th with 69 and 69. Again, they missed out on taking 4 more top 8 spots by mere inches.

OPs GT: Marines over performed but only by a little bit, but even still #11 was a DA player who lost 2 games, 1st game vs the #2 player, and the 2nd game Vs the guy who finished 3rd. But the game vs #3 he lost by 1pt! and had he won he would have catapulted himself to 3rd place.

So basically every single GT listed Marines either met or over performed vs their participation rate which is still a terrible metric since it yet again doesn't take into account the borderline horde of bad players or newbies who show up as Marines. But lets also run this to ground with Top 4 placings.
Marines had 16 top 4 placings out of a possible 40 including 4 1st place finishes out of 10. Realistically you can see that the problem children are the DA and IH but you still had Raven guard, Ultramarines, Space wolves and salamanders showing up.

Put another way, Marine factions took 40% of top 4 placings while also winning 40% of the tournaments outright. If you don't think that is over performing and TOP TIER than there is nothing anyone can ever do to convince you.

**Dysartes**

Semper, you really need to stop doing this - you're continuing to make yourself look foolish, and/or driven by your initial narrative and/or biased. You're not looking at the data and listening to what it is telling you - you're reaching to try to force it to fit in the box you set up at the start of the thread.

It's the same problem I've run into with managers at work - they come to ask for data to show "narrative X", and I have to tell them I'm not going to do that. If we can look at a question of "what does the data about Y tell us?", that's a much healthier position to look at it from.

And before you try to say I'm trying to defend Space Marines, I'm not - I'm trying to provide a neutral look at the dataset, with a focus on the question "How are Space Marines (and their sub-factions) performing compared to their event participation this week?". I'm going in with no pre-conceptions, no axe to grind - I'm just listening to the data.

Now, if you've got criticisms of my methods, I'm happy to listen to them, and answer questions on them. I will say that I'm not going to exclude anyone's participation in an event just because they happen to get a poor record with Space Marines that day. Trying to exclude people because you think they're "bad players" or "newbies" is too subjective for that, and if we're going to listen to the data, we should be as objective as possible.

I am curious why you only appear to have looked at ten out of the twelve listed events when trying to talk about top 4 - did the other two not fit with the story you are trying to tell?

And I'll agree that Space Marines had a stronger week this week than they did last week - I think they were four percentile points higher in terms of games won, off the top of my head (though I'd also argue that 54-55% isn't excessive for one week, but certainly something to monitor over a longer period). In terms of top 8 placement (across the 11 events where that was examined), they performed 50% better than their participation would expect - but if that's the point you cry wolf, other factions met that benchmark too. Chaos Daemons and World Eaters being the prime examples, with Custodes, Guard and Sisters not far off that mark either.

**SemperMortis**

Dysartes wrote:
Semper, you really need to stop doing this - you're continuing to make yourself look foolish, and/or driven by your initial narrative and/or biased. You're not looking at the data and listening to what it is telling you - you're reaching to try to force it to fit in the box you set up at the start of the thread.

It's the same problem I've run into with managers at work - they come to ask for data to show "narrative X", and I have to tell them I'm not going to do that. If we can look at a question of "what does the data about Y tell us?", that's a much healthier position to look at it from.

And before you try to say I'm trying to defend Space Marines, I'm not - I'm trying to provide a neutral look at the dataset, with a focus on the question "How are Space Marines (and their sub-factions) performing compared to their event participation this week?". I'm going in with no pre-conceptions, no axe to grind - I'm just listening to the data.

Now, if you've got criticisms of my methods, I'm happy to listen to them, and answer questions on them. I will say that I'm not going to exclude anyone's participation in an event just because they happen to get a poor record with Space Marines that day. Trying to exclude people because you think they're "bad players" or "newbies" is too subjective for that, and if we're going to listen to the data, we should be as objective as possible.

I am curious why you only appear to have looked at ten out of the twelve listed events when trying to talk about top 4 - did the other two not fit with the story you are trying to tell?

And I'll agree that Space Marines had a stronger week this week than they did last week - I think they were four percentile points higher in terms of games won, off the top of my head (though I'd also argue that 54-55% isn't excessive for one week, but certainly something to monitor over a longer period). In terms of top 8 placement (across the 11 events where that was examined), they performed 50% better than their participation would expect - but if that's the point you cry wolf, other factions met that benchmark too. Chaos Daemons and World Eaters being the prime examples, with Custodes, Guard and Sisters not far off that mark either.

or you could actually read my posts without your preconceived notions

The 10 instead of 12 was 1 i miscounted 1 event (happily admit I made a mistake) and 2 I hadn't included the event they said started on the 16th instead of the 17th because I had my blinders on searching for events on the 17th. So it changes the numbers from 16 in 40 to 16 in 48. or 33% which is still far too much.

As far as analysis, I dug into the events a bit and found that a lot of the time the Marines missed top 8 placings by a few points which hints that they are on the cusp of even more placings. The DA player who lost by 1pt and went from 3rd place to 11th is a great example of this. So not only are they over performing as is, but they have a host of players who didn't place who were figuratively a dice roll away from winning. And the analysis of "bad players or noobs" is important since it shows that bad players are dragging Marines W/L ratio down which is also why i think W/L ratio is a garbage metric on its own because nobody seems to account for this. In my opinion the best metric for how powerful a faction is at the highest levels is how many top placings they have, and in that category Marines are doing VERY well for themselves by your own data, and even better when you take into account the outlier lists who barely missed placing.

And finally, the other factions doing absurdly good? Realistically from last week the only faction which appeared to be oppressive besides Marines was Demons, World Eaters and IG. I don't know how you can say Custodes and SoB were "not far off that mark" when they each had 1 top 4 placing in 12 events. and 11 total placings in the top 8 over those same events (excluding the top 4 event for smaller attendance). And of those top 8 placings, most were Custodes. But even given that, the initial premise was

Based on the new updates I honestly predict SM to start running away with tournaments

not that there wouldn't be other top contenders. I'll happily state that Demons, IG and maybe even Custards need a slight nerf, but that doesn't change my premise nor does it prove it incorrect that Marines are in fact running away with the tournament scene. Not as ridiculous as DE and Ad-mech were to start this edition, but definitely they are the top dog right now.

**Slipspace**

SemperMortis wrote:

As far as analysis, I dug into the events a bit and found that a lot of the time the Marines missed top 8 placings by a few points which hints that they are on the cusp of even more placings. The DA player who lost by 1pt and went from 3rd place to 11th is a great example of this. So not only are they over performing as is, but they have a host of players who didn't place who were figuratively a dice roll away from winning. And the analysis of "bad players or noobs" is important since it shows that bad players are dragging Marines W/L ratio down which is also why i think W/L ratio is a garbage metric on its own because nobody seems to account for this. In my opinion the best metric for how powerful a faction is at the highest levels is how many top placings they have, and in that category Marines are doing VERY well for themselves by your own data, and even better when you take into account the outlier lists who barely missed placing.

The problem is, the impression you're giving off is that you're only doing this sort of analysis for SM. It also feels like you're only doing the "let's not consider the worst players" approach only for SM. Any faction's winrate will improve if you remove the worst performers, but doing so doesn't tell you anything about the performance of the faction as a whole. Just taking placings into account doesn't account for the number of players of a given faction. If the game is perfectly balanced, but half the players play one faction, you would expect to see the top placings dominated by that faction. There's no one data point that will provide all the information you need to show a faction is broken, but tournament winrate and placings are a decent barometer of how good the best lists in a given faction are. So far the results seem to be pretty balanced, with maybe a slight tendency towards certain SM builds doing well. It's nowhere near the domination we saw with Nids and Harlequins.

**Daedalus81**

We should probably kill this discussion anyway since it's all going out the window come June.

**Tyran**

It still is a long way to June, specially as we are getting a balance dataslate next month.

**vict0988**

Tyran wrote:
It still is a long way to June, specially as we are getting a balance dataslate next month.

Remove CORE from all Necrons units, great way to end 8th like we did 9th.

**SemperMortis**

Slipspace wrote:

The problem is, the impression you're giving off is that you're only doing this sort of analysis for SM. It also feels like you're only doing the "let's not consider the worst players" approach only for SM. Any faction's winrate will improve if you remove the worst performers, but doing so doesn't tell you anything about the performance of the faction as a whole. Just taking placings into account doesn't account for the number of players of a given faction. If the game is perfectly balanced, but half the players play one faction, you would expect to see the top placings dominated by that faction. There's no one data point that will provide all the information you need to show a faction is broken, but tournament winrate and placings are a decent barometer of how good the best lists in a given faction are. So far the results seem to be pretty balanced, with maybe a slight tendency towards certain SM builds doing well. It's nowhere near the domination we saw with Nids and Harlequins.

Well, since the entire point of this thread was me speculating that Marines would be broken with the new balance update its kind of Marine-centric by its nature. And I've broken down other factions before, in another thread about Orkz I compared Marines vs Ork player experience in a tournament, basically, you had 3/4ths of the Marine players having only played 2 or fewer GTs in the last 2 years while the majority of Ork GT players were experienced, having played significantly more GTs. Its anecdotally true for most people, borderline common sense, that the least experienced players are usually Marine players since GW does their best to bring in new players by utilizing Marines factions. When was the last time a "starter box" featured anything besides Marine Vs. Other faction? This edition was Marines vs. Necrons, 8th edition was Marines vs. Deathguard, I can't remember if Dark Vengeance was 6th or 7th edition but it was Marines vs. Spiky Marines. Point being that they generally have a plethora of newer players. But because i'm bored atm i'll run down the last 3 GTs and compare them against Imperial Guard and my Orkz.

Newbies = 2 or fewer GTs as that faction in 2 years
Newer = 3 GTs as that faction in 2 years
Experienced = 4+ GTs as that faction in 2 years

"The Great Game GT":

Spoiler:

Team arKCanite Presents: Planet arKCanite At Comicon 2023:

Spoiler:

Battle Ready Wargaming's Major Mayhem 40k Event: ***NOTE*** (This one hasn't been counted on ITC yet, so i added 1 game for everyone)

Spoiler:

So 3 Events

MARINES ended up with:
NEWBIES: 16 (48.48%)
NEWER: 4 (12.12%)
EXPERIENCED: 13 (39.39%)

IMPERIAL GUARD ended up with:
NEWBIES: 4 (44.44%)
NEWER: 1 (11.11%)
EXPERIENCED: 4 (44.44%)

ORKZ ended up with:
NEWBIES: 2 (25%)
NEWER: 1 (12.5%)
EXPERIENCED: 5 (62.5%)

**SemperMortis**

Adepticon: (Top 16) 238 players
1: IG
2: Dwarves
3: GSC
4: IG
5: Black Templars
6: Nurgle Demons
7: Necrons
8: Iron Hands
9: Knights Renegade
10: Minotaurs
11: Black Templars
12: IG
13: Space Wolves
14: Tau
15: Tau
16: Nidz.

5 of 16 lists were Space Marines, IG definitely over performed with 3 players in the top 16. Side Note to that is of the next top 16 players who didn't make it to the finals, 7 were Space Marines, 2 were IG. So in the top 32 players 12 were Marines and IG pulled in 5. I think its safe to say that both factions need to be tuned down a bit.

Münsterland GT 2: 28 players (top 4)
1: Tau
2: iron Hands
3: orkz
4: Dark Angels.

Courage And Honour VIII: 33 Players
1: IG
2: Custards
3: Tau
4: Iron Hands.

FactoruM GT Mar 2023: 40 Players
1: Dark Angels
2: Knights Renegade
3: Knights Renegade
4: Ad Mech

III GT Coliseum Murciano: 72 Players (Top 8) (why are european games so different?)
1: DE
2: Iron Hands
3: Custards
4: Orkz
5: Demons
6: Demons
7: DE
8: Blood Angels

Absolute Supremacy 40k Spring GT: 30 players
1: Iron Hands
2: Sisters
3: GSC
4: World Eaters

The Deck Box Masters 40K: 28 Players
1: Dark Angels
2: IG
3: World Eaters
4: Demons

All is Dust GT 40k: 60 players
1: World Eaters
2: IG
3: Harlies
4: Blood Angels
5: Dark Angels
6: World Eaters
7: GSC
8: World Eaters

The Manchester 40k Super-Major: 258 Players
1: Dark Angels
2: Space Wolves
3: Space Marines
4: Iron Hands
5: Dark Angels
6: Eldar
7: Tau
8: Dwarves
9: Iron hands
10: Knights Renegade
11: Necrons
12: IG
13: Demons
14: Necrons
15: IG
16: Demons.

Holy crap, Marines swept the top 5 spots.

Grand Onslaught 5: 44 Players
1: Dwarves
2: Eldar
3: demons
4: Dark Angels

Iron Cage: Bedford Beatdown: 52 Players
1: IG
2: Dwarves
3: GSC
4: Ad Mech

Imperialis Capilla GT 2 Aniversario: 37 Players
1: IG
2: Knights
3: Custards
4: IG

So all told the repeating theme seems to be Space Marines and IG with a lesser extent Demons, GSC and world Eaters.

**Dudeface**

All is dust and manchester throwing out the rulebook a little but the rest seems reasonable to me?

**Platuan4th**

EviscerationPlague wrote:
1. Kansas City was named after the native Americans there or something like that

Also, there's ALSO a Kansas City in Kansas.

**Dysartes**

Question - anyone know whether Goonhammer have just stopped updating their "Top Four" page since the announcement of 10th?

**SemperMortis**

It seems GW has agreed with me to an extent and nerfed Space Marines in general and Dark Angels specifically (rather harshly in my opinion). GSC got hit a bit as did Custards, somehow World Eaters and demons didn't really catch much but IG got hit rather hard with very specific nerfs.

Overall, I think its fair to say that World Eaters and Demons will now be top dog, but Marines aren't in a horrific spot, with several chapters walking away without any specific nerfs to them at all.

**EviscerationPlague**

SemperMortis wrote:
It seems GW has agreed with me to an extent and nerfed Space Marines in general and Dark Angels specifically (rather harshly in my opinion).

Nah, permanent Transhuman shouldn't be a thing. Good riddance.

**Karol**

And without it they are not worth running, they could at least left them with the mini transhuman, the +3 other armies get. But I guess having fun playing terminators is not fun. So we will see waves of RW instead, and maybe 1 brick of termis.

In general, the changes are unimportant so close to an edition change.

I did have a hearty laugh though, when a studio designers went on a "Do you guys know that vs armies like GK/1ksons opponents can double dip on kill secondaries?" as if it took them an entire edition to notice.

**EviscerationPlague**

Karol wrote:
And without it they are not worth running, they could at least left them with the mini transhuman, the +3 other armies get. But I guess having fun playing terminators is not fun. So we will see waves of RW instead, and maybe 1 brick of termis.

There's several issues with Terminators, and tacking on such a rule for a subfaction of a subfaction was lazy and not well thought out, fluff or crunch wise.

**Karol**

SemperMortis wrote:
It seems GW has agreed with me to an extent and nerfed Space Marines in general and Dark Angels specifically (rather harshly in my opinion). GSC got hit a bit as did Custards, somehow World Eaters and demons didn't really catch much but IG got hit rather hard with very specific nerfs.

Overall, I think its fair to say that World Eaters and Demons will now be top dog, but Marines aren't in a horrific spot, with several chapters walking away without any specific nerfs to them at all.

IG didn't really get hit hard. Their relic is still an auto include, and the part that is the problem part was not removed from it. And while it is nice that units of Kasarkin won't be deleting 2-3 units per turn, but now rather 1-2, when considering the unit price it is still to oppresive. IG are single handly responsible for stuff like big dreadnoughts, big knights etc being not worth buying or running in an army.

Custodes change nerfs their warden brick, which means custodes will be back to playing msu. Again, and a short time span where wardens were an actualy fun unit worth taking is now gone.

And most marine chapters didn't require nerfs, because they were already doing not that good or bad. No nerfs needed after AoC removal to BAs, and DW or IF don't need reigning in. What should have been looked in to was how the IH function over all, just taking away a character dread is probably not enough to bring them down under 50% win rates.

**Breton**

Karol wrote:
So we will see waves of RW instead, and maybe 1 brick of termis.

I was already thinking Ravenwing were being underutilized/under fielded. DW was a 0 second no-brainer, which is probably why nobody spent the 5 seconds to think about Ravenwing.

**bored1**

Wayniac wrote:
EviscerationPlague wrote:
Wayniac wrote:
And have a larger than normal reach due to most "influencers" being tournament players, so they look like they have a louder voice than they really do. With so many youtube vids and stuff being tournament focused it looks like they are more of a majority.

And why is that a problem?
Because it puts the wrong narrative that tournament play should be the focus of the game.

Why is this the "wrong" narrative? What does wrong narrative even mean here?

On another poster's point about tournament players being a small volume of sales ...can you elaborate? What is a "tournament player"? Where are you pulling your sales data?

And for OP...I think you draw some interesting conclusions from your results reporting. Do you have access to (sub)faction attendance data, and also dates as correlated to these events? (or, i suppose, which balance update they are within)

**Dysartes**

bored1 wrote:
And for OP...I think you draw some interesting conclusions from your results reporting. Do you have access to (sub)faction attendance data, and also dates as correlated to these events? (or, i suppose, which balance update they are within)

Semper hasn't been gathering/publishing such data - aside from the latest batch of events, though, you can find some of that data in my posts in this thread.

**EviscerationPlague**

Dysartes wrote:
bored1 wrote:
And for OP...I think you draw some interesting conclusions from your results reporting. Do you have access to (sub)faction attendance data, and also dates as correlated to these events? (or, i suppose, which balance update they are within)

Semper hasn't been gathering/publishing such data - aside from the latest batch of events, though, you can find some of that data in my posts in this thread.

There's not much point to it now either, seeing as we're getting a new edition in a few months likely.

**Dysartes**

Eh, if someone is interested in how things are looking towards the end of the edition, then it's worth someone doing - I just need to revise my methodology to make it more efficient before I do any more.

**Dudeface**

I agree a closing shot might be worthwhile

**Aash**

Personally I'd be interested to see how the final update to 9th pans out, and it would give a nice initial point of comparison to see how big a shakeup the new edition is when those results come through down the line.

In addition, having the data for the end of the edition allows us to tie 9th edition up in a neat bow and it becomes possible to compare one edition with another across its whole life cycle.

**Wayniac**

What I really want to see someone do is compare how 9th edition started with how quickly it began to bloat and spiral out of control. Just as proof whenever someone comes up about GW trying better it can be pointed to the show how quickly they ruin a good thing