Hey space nerds,
The Alliance Tournament XX has concluded. Congratulations to the The Tuskers Co for taking the trophy this year. To summarize the tournament I’ve compiled some statistics. Unless stated otherwise, those include the Feeders tournament. My goal with these statistics is for them to be primarily entertaining and only secondarily informative and what I present here is only a small subset of the data I’ve gathered. Stats are kept shallow on purpose. Still it might give some people an idea on how to get started analysing a tournament like the AT or a fun read at least.
Ships
Over the course of 4 weekends, 55 teams participated in a total of 133 single matches and destroyed a grand total of 1695 ships. Out of 270 legal ships, 75 have been fielded at least ten times.
Throughout the tournament only one ship has had the perfect record of a 100% win rate and it’s the Dominix. To be fair, with only 11 appearances it has barely made it into the statistic, but still not a necessarily expected result. Only three teams decided to draft the Dominix, those being Rote Kappele who used it in their win versus Of Essence, We Form V0LTA who fielded it versus the Goonswarm Federation and of course The Tuskers Co in their triple Dominix comp, taking out Truth Honour Light, Platinum Sensitivity, and Barcode with it.
Other notable winners are Shield Octo ships like the Ferox Navy Issue and the Phantasm, the Typhoon Fleet Issue in Kingslayer setups and the Bhaalgorn as a popular flagship choice. The obvious losers of this year’s tournament are two prominent Tech 2 Logistics Cruisers in the Scimitar and the Oneiros, and way behind with an abysmal win rate of just 15%, the Orthrus.
Meta
Let’s see how different teams regarded different classes of ships. The following graph shows which types of ships have been banned, divided into groups of teams that have made it a certain distance into the tournament. For clarification, “Top 4” in the following statistics means “the four teams that made it the furthest into the tournament this year”. It does not concern the seeds going into the tournament.
Obviously this just a very high level insight, as the variance in play styles and opportunities within each class of ship is high.
It appears that weaker teams really do not want to see battleships, also targeting the common Logistics Cruisers for good measure. The high battleship ban rate can be explained with the Armageddon Navy Issue being a popular ban during feeders. Interestingly, while Top 12 to Top 8 teams invested a considerable amount of bans into Logistics Frigates, the Top 6 teams paid them almost no attention. The Top 4 teams have not even banned a single Logistics Frigate throughout their entire tournament run, from first round all the way to the finals. Their focus seems to have been on Cruisers, mainly those ships with EWAR bonuses.
We can gather the same info about ships played by different teams.
Lower tier teams seem to dislike battleships not only when playing against them, but also playing them themselves. It’s also possible that the pool of battleships those teams felt comfortable with is small, so the high battleship ban rate and low battleship play rate would correlate. Logistics Frigates seem to be popular with higher tier teams, but keep in mind that they usually come in pairs, so a higher play rate compared to their Cruiser counterparts was to be expected. Top tier teams’ ship classes used are spread out quite evenly in general. Again, partitioning ships into classes this way only holds limited information. A Pontifex is not a Confessor, you get the idea.
Late Game Winners and Early Sacrifices
Many ships have been destroyed during the tournament, but some explode more than others. The next graph shows the survival rate of the popular ships. The average survival rate across all 270 ships is 36.15%, indicated by the red line.
There aren’t many surprises here, except that the Dominix reigns supreme again, but keep in mind that it has not been played all that often and that those who did play it extensively are the tournament winners. Good ship or just good pilots flying it, I’ll let you decide that.
An interesting info about ships is the number of survival to win mismatches, that is “how often did this ship win, but explode in the process and how often did it lose despite surviving the match”. This can tell us which ships are making great sacrifices (high mismatch rate) and which ships’ survival is crucial to the success of a comp (low mismatch rate).
Burst and Purifier come in at no real surprise, as they are quite soft targets. Seeing the Ashimmu so high up surprised me a little, but with its average survival rate of 35.29% it seems to be very good at sacrificing itself for a win. On the other side of the spectrum we see the ships for which survival is detrimental to the success of their comps. Having a low mismatch rate means that if that ship explodes the match is usually lost and if it lives the match is won. Golem, Armageddon, Astarte, Nighthawk, Absolution are all very important ships in their own respective comps. One interesting observation is that the Logistics Frigates are on opposite ends of the spectrum, with the Kirin and Scalpel having a relative low value. My humble advise is, the higher up the ship your flying is on this list, the more you need to make out of your time in the early game. If your ship is quite far down on the list, survival is key on the other hand. Those ships seem to win the late game.
Teams
Alright. After learning a little about the ships flown let’s finally have a look at the teams that did compete in the tournament.
Points Distribution and Deviation
The average points spend per fielded ship was 19.98 points. Very exciting statistic I know. All it tells us is that teams tend to bring as many points as they can to the grid, but extracting the obvious out of a data set is a good way to confirm we can trust our data and methods. Even though no team has brought heavily underpointed comps, there are a few who decided they didn’t really need the full 200 point allowance all the time, with the team of Solyaris Chtonium bringing the lowest amount of points on average by quite a margin.
The teams that did not get past Feeders are generally the ones with the highest point drafted on average, with many of them reaching the maximum of 20. Those teams however are also the ones with the fewest matches played.
A way more interesting statistic about the points and how teams spent them is their standard deviation per team though, that is the expected divergence of the points used by a team, or simply: Higher deviation = more top-heavy comps.
The winner here is Watch This mainly due to their triple Golem tinker comp. Other high deviation teams are Of Essence and Plug N Play, both of which used triple battleship cores regularly. Another honorable mention might be Odin’s Call as the team with the highest deviation who made it decently far into the tournament. Kingslayer spam for the win. With quite a distance Rusty Hyenas Clan have brought the most balanced comps, spreading their available points evenly across all ships. Note the values for the Top 4 teams, marked in yellow.
Aggression and Control
This year’s most aggressive team has been Paper Numbers who destroyed a whopping 168.33 points on average per match. That’s not even a single Loki worth of points left. Unfortunately there are two teams who have not managed to score even a single point in any of their matches, those are Ushra’Khan and the Minmatar Fleet Alliance. What’s up with Minmatar Factional Warfare?
The same stat can be turned around sort of. We’ll now have a look at the teams that on average have lost the least amounts of points and this category has a very clear winner. Genshin Impact Alliance has managed to retain an impressive 191 (!) points on average per game. In fact in the six matches they’ve played, they only lost two ships. Not two ships per game, but two ships in total! Congratulations on that achievement and also congrats to Ragequit Cancel Sub who were the team responsible for those two losses and therefore the only team that could break Genshin’s defenses.
Some, especially in the Feeders, warped to the grid like lambs to the slaughter though. For ten teams not a single pilot survived their matches, ever.
Matches
I want to conclude this post with a few highlights about the 133 matches played. The average point difference between winner and loser of a match was 139.84 points. On average the red team scored 123.97 points while the blue team only took out 99.8 points. One factor for this discrepancy probably are The Tuskers Co who on their road to win the tournament played all of their 13 matches on the red side and are quite the bloody team (see above).
There have been many close games this tournament, and the five closest (by points) were:
- White Squall. vs. Genshin Impact Alliance (Upper Bracket Round of 32)
- Ragequit Cancel Sub vs. Genshin Impact Alliance (Lower Bracket Round of 16)
- Goonswarm Federation vs. Pandemic Horde (Lower Bracket Round of 32)
- Of Essence vs. Rote Kapelle (Upper Bracket Round of 32)
- Goonswarm Federation vs. Test Alliance Please Ignore (Feeders Day 1)
The five bloodiest matches with the most points destroyed were:
- Ronin Reloaded vs. White Squall. (Feeders Day 3)
- Barcode vs. Ragequit Cancel Sub (Lower Bracket Top 6)
- Odin’s Call vs. Boundary Experts (Feeders Day 2)
- Sedition. vs. Ragequit Cancel Sub (Feeders Day 1)
- Barcode vs. Evasive Maneuvering. (Upper Bracket Top 24)
I hope you enjoyed this short excursion into the world of AT data.
Fly safe o7,
Arwen Estalia, Paper Numbers Spreadsheet Person
Disclaimer
I’ve collected the data and compiled the statistics to the best of my ability, but provide them without any kind of warranty. These stats are unofficial and may be incorrect or inaccurate. None of this is asscociated with or has been approved by CCP.
