Did WSG Dye Its Hair?

...because apparently it is no longer the redheaded stepchild. Picking up SOTA Holiday numbers over the weekend, WSG, though it lags behind, is not nearly the joke-far-outrunner that it used to be. Why? I have no idea; it definitely feels with 3.3.3 as if there may have been a subtle tweak on Blizzard's part to give you an empty plate for most of a WSG match and then SUDDENLY THROW YOU A WHOLE BUNCH AT THE END FOR NO APPARENT REASON. *cough*. Anyway, the numbers here for Strand, with a caveat*:

SOTA HOLIDAY HPM (Cyclone BG, 41% win)
Winning HPM : 190.68 (92.7% of WSG holiday)
Losing HPM : 106.55 (115.3% of WSG holiday)
Overall HPM : 141.11 (101.63% of WSG holiday)
Average Objective Points : 7.24 (WSG gives 8.6)

* My record this weekend was 2-8...bad streak I guess. So while I am pretty confident of the loss numbers, the win numbers are based off two games and may therefore be awry to some degree or another.

Put another way, WSG on holiday gives 98.4% of the HPM of Strand...a difference which for all practical purposes you could probably consider to be nonexistent, given the potential fluctuations in the data.

The breakdown of "bonus honor" seems to be as follows, for the holiday. Remember that 1 OP (OGCMAT wordage) = 1 "bonus honorable kill" (blizz's wordage) = 124 honor (what you actually care about).

* 1 OP for each level you break through (ie one of green or blue. You do not get two points if you break both, which was news to me), to a maximum of 4 (blue/green, red/purple, yellow, relic door).
* 1 OP for capturing the relic
* 1 OP for each level you successfully defend (but unlike offense, both doors must remain up to count)
* 1 OP for the opposition not capturing the relic
* 2 OP for clearing the map
* 3 additional OP for winning the map.

Bizarrely, for each of the gated objectives (not the clear or the win), you also get 37 bonus honor in addition to the standard 124. Why that should be, I'm not sure...there it is though. *shrug*.

What I find interesting here is the potential to judge how well an average Strand team performs. If you subtract out the "congratulations for just sticking it out" honor, a team scores 7.24-2-(.41)*3 = 4.01 objective points in a game. Mathematically, that translates to, say, in a game where you manage to break into the courtyard (3 points), they are going to break down the relic door (you get 1 for them not capping). If you don't knock down the yellow gate (2 points for you)...they may knock it down (you get 2, for the relic and the relic door). If you get stopped after only one wall, your points come from...stopping them after two walls. No matter how well you do, the other team always does slightly better...which in Strand means winning. And I suppose that makes sense given Alliance's losing pattern in this BG, in my battlegroup. That is, of course, an *average*. In reality, you capture the relic sometimes (5 points), they capture it sometimes (you get 0 points), and most times are in the middle.

If you look at a further breakdown here:

Average Offensive OPs (overall): 3.45 -- we get into the courtyard somewhere between knocking the yellow door (3) and the relic door (4).

Offensive OPs when we win : 5. Le duh, to win you must have captured the relic. I include only for completeness ;-).

Offensive OPs when we lose : 2.67. Which is not bad; we still tend to do OK, we get stuck 2/3 of the way past the red/purple doors (2) to the yellow doors (3)

Average Defensive OPs (overall) : 0.56 -- abysmal, really, we keep them somewhere between the relic and the relic door, on average.

Defensive OPs when we win : 1. Frightening. They knock the relic door, but not cap? That's unlikely and what this really translates to is : when we win, it's not because we stop the Horde from capping, it's because we manage to do it faster than they do.

Defensive OPs when we lose : 0.22. But again -- to lose by definition involves losing the relic. The only reason this is not a flat zero is because of the occasional tie, which in terms of HPM counts as a loss.

More on those sorts of things as the spreadsheet develops...I know it doesn't seem it but we are still relatively new into the 3.3.3 madness :-)