Something's rotten

...in the state of Isle of Conquest. Before getting to the meat of holiday HPM here in this BG, I gathered data on people's win/played ratios in my battlegroup, both by virtue of asking in the BG for people to whisper me stats (which I later double-checked) and by checking stats on high-ranking arena teams on our cyclone battlegroup. And they all tell the same story, to wit when added together :

Games played : 220
Games won : 81

In other words, alliance has a 37% win ratio here, which is drastically less than all the others. I'm used to losing slightly more (anywhere from 45-49 win, usually) but this is abnormal enough to raise an eyebrow. My initial response is the default one, to claim that alliance sucks, because that's usually as good a fallback reason as any...except I can't see why they would suck so much MORE in this bg than the other ones. It's the same people playing. And it's not like IoC has any "new" concepts -- it's recycled different things from AV, AB, and SotA, all of which alliance does significantly better in. So what gives here?

I do not have an answer, only a shaky theory. The map has rotational symmetry, much like AB, but not translational(?might be the wrong word) symmetry; ie, you can rotate it 180 degrees and it's the same, but if you flip it across the x or y axis, it's not. The docks, which in most of my games uniformly went to the horde, are not symmetrically placed, they're on the west side. Both keeps have a "vulnerable" side because there's a dropoff to the beach that impedes the ability to shoot down siege vehicles. Alliance weak side is on the left (west), horde weak side is on the right (east). So horde controlling the docks, feeds straight into the vulnerable point on the alliance keep, in a way that alliance controlling the hangar fails to do for the vulnerable horde east side. Therefore I postulate that, while maintaining my view that you should not rush one node and instead try to get 2/3, docks may be more important than the others, one to one. Not because alliance derives any additional benefit from holding it, but because it's important to deny it to the horde.

What I'm not sure on is, is this really an "unfair" map design? Or is it, as I suspect, a combination of luck (after the failure of the "blitz hangar" strategy, the new one favored horde so they keep doing it and succes is reinforcing them?) and idiocy (alliance may have a similar advantage in controlling hangar, but they're just not capitalising on it as well as horde are on theirs)?

The only games that I won this weekend were when me and a few other people grabbed hangar and held it, resisting the temptation to jump on the ship and leave the flag defenseless, in order to give our allies a chance to para-jump and try to beat the horde racing from docks to gate to keep to kill. Le shrug.

In any event the data here :

HOLIDAY ISLE OF CONQUEST (Cyclone)
------------------------
Winning HPM : 63.3
Losing HPM : 43.99
Overall HPM : 51.12

Total BG Honor (HPM + mark turnin HPM) : 86.44

How does this compare to the current leaderboard?

Winning HPM : 73% of SotA (current leader for winning)
Losing HPM : 100%. If you're going to lose, best to lose here.
Overall HPM : 81% of SotA.

Total for IoC (HPM + Marks) : 89% of SotA, still the overall holiday lead.

I am hesitant to apply this number only because the win/loss ratio is so different from the other BGs I've looked at. In other words, take a careful look at your battlegroup's track record in IoC before taking this at face value!

In other news, me and my frost mage partner Kitykat managed to push our 2s rating to 800, thus netting my first ever rating-restricted piece of gear (gloves, and aren't they delicious!)