Don't Win More -- Win Better

Just in time for the Arathi Basin holiday weekend, I present you with a pair of graphs which should dazzle and amaze you.



What is this graph, you ask? It's a comparison of the relative investment of your time, versus your effort, mainly. It represents, for the AB Holiday weekend, your honor per minute returned versus two factors (hence the two lines. I have reduced the honor per minute to a percentage of the baseline on my server, so it should hold across battlegroups, not being a numerical value specific to mine.

The blue line on this graph represents the relative HPM return based on how many minutes you can save off the average, off of a baseline 19.5 minutes (which is what it is on my BG and I can't see that number materially changing on others). So if you manage to win (and lose) a minute faster than that, x=1 on this graph and you follow it up to the blue line, and then over, you can see that that's going to net you about a 5% increase in your HPM. Now since time is on the bottom side of your equation (Avg Honor / Avg Time), changes in time go up exponentially - the more time you can cut off, the better you'd be. I only drew this graph out to five minutes but you can see that even at five minutes you're getting a return of say...34% more honor? Cutting off time is a significant improvement on your HPM.

The red line on this graph represents your HPM return based on changing your winning percentage. Simply, x is how much of a win percentage increase you're given, based on my server's percentage which is about 56-44 (leastways when I made up this graph it was). YMMV, here. But the key difference here is that it's a linear function, since the number you're changing is in the numerator of the fraction,

(AvgWinHonor*Win%) (AvgLossHonor*Loss%)
---------------- + ------------------
(Avg. Win Time) (Avg. Lose Time)

For my battlegroup (so this formula is NOT adjusted to be a fit-all), the formula for this line comes to be

TOTAL HPM = 79.1993 + 0.4194x

To modify this for everyone, multiply by 100/79.1993, you'd end up with something like

TOTAL HPM (adjusted) = 100 + 0.5296x

which basically means that for every one percent over your average win ratio, you're getting about an extra half-percent gain in HPM.

How's about a new graph? What would it take to make these roughly equal (at least in the zero-five bracket I graphed in?)



That's what it would take. I've moved my screencap up and rescaled the Y-axis for a better view; the X-axis is the same scale as the previous graph. What I did there was multiply the slope of the HPM/% graph by a factor of TWELVE.

Cutting one minute off your time, at this level, is worth about twelve times as much as increasing your win percentage. Conclusion : Don't win more. Win cleaner / faster.

Your Honor, the tree rests.