API WTF?

I don't know what an API Hook is, I'm just going to get that out there first thing. Today I'd like to talk a little bit about using our battleground scoreboard, as limited as it currently is, to pull out useful data when you're running a premade, or a fairly consistent rated-BG group. This is a thinking post, with the following caveats :

1) Right now, this is too much effort for too little reward, because it's nearly impossible to get a consistent group together, and the PUGs you're likely to be running with are not going to care about performance to the same level that you would hope out of a more dedicated cataclysm approach.

2) You currently have to gather this data YOURSELF, which is irritating. I'm not exactly sure what an API Hook is, like I said, but from the context of cynwise's post I'm going to assume that it means "addons can access the data from the scoreboard and manipulate/report it in various ways". So we can all dream and pray that that will happen someday, but in the meantime you have no tools but your vid-capping software of choice, and manual entry of the final scoreboard into a spreadsheet program like excel to manipulate them yourself.

Ok, those caveats out of the way, and being on hiatus and therefore unable to pick up a scoreboard screenshot myself, I have elected (with gracious permission) to analyse this WSG game that Cynwise participated in :



I have input that data into excel, and made the following spreadsheet:

Overall Competence

The most important thing here, obviously, is who won; hopefully you don't need a spreadsheet to tell you that much. But we are also looking for data on how efficiently you won -- I remember running a premade and having somebody quit after the first game (a win in EOTS, that we 4-capped) because we struggled a little at first and to him it was not enough that we win, we had to win smashingly and efficiently. It's an extreme example but people do expect that you will win solidly and efficiently -- if they wanted to grind out a 27-minute WSG that they won because they capped the last flag, they'd just risk it and queue normally. There are a number of stats that you can pull out from the data you're given that can help you analyse this:

Total HKs / Total KBs : You receive an honorable kill credit if you are within range of somebody dying, regardless of whether you contributed anything or not; hence there are going to be a lot more HKs than KBs. HKs are awarded to whoever is in range, even though it's all for the same kill, and that's the key to understanding this stat. HKs/KBs gives you a measure of group cohesiveness, as compared to the opponents' -- how well did your team move in a group, versus how many people wandered off alone? In this example, Cynwise's winning ally team had a "cohesiveness factor" of 6.40 compared to a Horde CF of 6.24. Statistically, a slight difference, but on a battlefield it's usually not a hugely disparate difference -- your victory (or loss) is the sum of a number of incremental factors, and here I would say that the Alliance was slightly better than Horde in this game at keeping together and moving as a group.

HKs Average : What you want here is to get an average of the HKs on your team, and find the standard deviation of it; statistically, assuming a normal distribution, 68% of your team will be within 1 st.dev. of that mean. I would stress here that we are looking at a matter of cohesion here, not strategic placement. This is an individual indicator of how well that person stayed with the group, and passes no mathematical judgment on where that group is on the field (maybe they're all farming in the mid, for example). In this example, the Ally HK average +/- 1 st.dev goes like 36.85 - 48.94. There are two people who come out above that (a warrior and a mage) and one below (pally). The warrior and the mage are good at scenting where the fighting is and being on top of it. The pally *may* have a problem -- the numbers give you a guide to finding potential problems, you still need to use your intelligence to work out if it actually is or not. It could also mean that he was a latecomer to the party and only got the last 5 minutes of the game. One may also note that his HKs scored / deaths comes in at a very low (9th out of 10) 3.4 -- and that stat is independent of time spent in the BG. Gear is also not necessarily a factor here; it contributes to more deaths but it should not stop you from moving to get with a group. So if I were running this as a premade group, I might keep any eye on those warning signs and watch him more closely in future runs. Speaking of that stat --

HKs / Deaths : What does this stat mean? Obviously you have to take into account some considerations when you're comparing to the other team, but presumably everyone on your team suffers from the same limitations regarding surfeit/lack of healers, so it's something of a level playing field. It's also not unfairly balanced against aggressive players -- people defending a quiet node will get less HKs, but also correspondingly less deaths. In this game the ally average for this ratio was about 5.18, with a standard deviation of 2.06. I take an average/stdev of 9 here, because they had a mage with them in this game with a ratio of 49 HKs to only 2 deaths, which does tend to have a large skewing effect. So if we can all just acknowledge his greatness, and then calculate without it, we'll be better off ;-). I would like to observe here that being on the bottom of this list DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE A BAD PLAYER, necessarily. As Cynwise reminds, it's about individual excellence *in a team setting*, and the #10 worst performer in this category, a shaman, also capped a flag and returned one. I would venture to guess, with little knowledge to go on, that this person knew the objectives of the game and was one of those people (like me on occasion, *blush*) who goes repeatedly running off to Return The Flag! without checking to see if they have backup before so doing. So they've got the basis for solidness, but maybe their patience / part-of-the-group mentality needs a little work.

Healer Tools

A point near and dear to my heart, obviously, is the performance of your team's healers. Cynwise used this example, I presume from the name of the file, to demonstrate that it is not heals which win a BG, and that is true to some extent. Notwithstanding that, here are some useful stats that you can pull out of the scoreboard --

Healing Done / Opposing Damage Done : This stat is a measure of your healers' effectiveness at gauging (and getting to) hot spots on the field. Alliance here managed to heal 25% of the damage done, whereas horde managed to heal 50% of alliance damage done. Considering that the alliance *had no healers*, 25% is a fairly respectable number. Looking quickly at the other two scoreboards mentioned in that post of Cynwise's :

Game 1 (twink WSG, Alliance victory) : Alliance with 4 heals covered 60.12% of the damage; Horde with 4 heals covered 54.98%

Game 2 (80 EOTS, tie) : Unfortunately I can only see part of the scoreboard but alliance with 0/11 heals covered 18.6% of the damage shown, horde with 0/8 heals covered 11.96%. Horde's low here b/c a greater percentage of their people are not shown -- and alliance is high similarly. Now with no way of knowing what those invisible people are, I'm going to take a stab in the dark here and say that with no healers, self- /off-spec- / bandage- healing ~15% of the damage maybe would be appropriate with no heals.

So the 25% is quite standoutish! I would bet that there were a few people who were willing to heal even though that wasn't their primary job description, once they realised that their team had a significant lack. Another of those incremental factors.

Deaths / healer . Again, paucity of data prevents me from doing a detailed analysis of this but I would venture to say that a higher number here means either a) your healers were overtaxed and you needed more, or b) they weren't getting very good coverage (all 4 of your premade healers somehow ended up together at BS, for example). In our star example, the alliance number is undefined, horde had 67 deaths / 2 healers = 33.5 deaths per healer. One more piece of data I shall try to start tracking in cataclysm, I suppose :-).

A Last General Stat

Look at the number of objectives attacked (successfully or not) divided by the time of the BG -- this provides a rough measure (very rough) of how much activity there was. For example here,

Alliance : 2 flag caps, horde returned 6 times = picked up the flag 8 times in 27 minutes; there was *some* kind of activity around the horde flag every 3.375 minutes, in other words.

Horde : 1 flag cap, alliance returned 4 times = 5 flag events in 27 minutes, some kind of activity every 5.4 minutes.

See the difference? We can parse that out a little further actually, and make a general supposition that alliance was more aggressive on offense (they managed to at least pick up the flag, 3 more times than horde did) but that horde had a slightly stronger defense (they returned the flag 6/8 times which indicates a perhaps higher percentage of suicide 1-2 man grabs out of the EFR for alliance). But the alliance controlled the flow of that match -- they did more action, and horde was doing too much re-acting.

Welp, that's my story! Look forward in cataclysm to in-depth vid-capping / excruciating analysis of games such as this one; If raiders can spend hours poring over WoL to dissect success and failure in raids, there's no reason PvPers can't hold themselves to the same standard!

So what would you look for? What do various combinations of those stats suggest to you? I know I for one would love to see some kind of assist column for if you were within X yards of a flag capped, node assaulted / defended...but for the meanwhile we're stuck with what we've got!

And if cynwise shows up in the comments to tell me that my read of that game is 100% off-base then...I guess disregard everything I just wrote :-)

A Lovely Weekend of AB

I think I had the most amazing PVP weekend ever. First I found a (temporary, normal is out of town) 2s partner and we've smashed our way almost to 1400 with relative ease. I suppose there is something to be said for running with an Accepted Comp rather than the I'm Challenging Myself comp...tree/dk has some amazing synergy, for sure.

I also compiled holiday numbers for AB...I lost most of them, until one of my networked pvp buddies invited me along on some premades he was in. Full premades, not the partials I usually run. We roflstomped AB all weekend, I think we ended up something like 30-0, made a chat channel so we could all reunite next weekend. AND we did the Resilient Victory come-from-500-points behind no less than three separate times, just for fun. The first time was a little off, and by the time we started getting points it was more like 650-0. But 4-1 bases still works for that. The second one was a thing of textbook execution, we all hovered around ST without tagging it while horde went up 4-0. Split into groups and fanned out at 350-0. LM, GM, and Farm all got tagged within 5-10 seconds of each other, and suddenly we were up 4-1 and rolled from there. I'm sure Horde was like... WTF just happened? OTOH, when they saw 15 alliance all huddled around the ST flag with campfires and nobody touching the flag, somebody intelligent probably looked at the roster and saw 14 people from draenor and figured it out.

The interesting thing was that the HPM on the premade wins was comparable to my non-premade wins. The real value in a premade is not that you get better winning HPM, it's your overall. B/c if you get a good one, like I got, then your winning HPM = your overall.

AB Holiday HPM (Cyclone BG, 54% win)
Winning HPM : 241.39
Losing HPM : 87.86
Overall : 171.28

So instead of 171...you get to say 241 is your overall. That's 70 extra HPM, or over the course of an hour running a good premade, 4200 more honor. Or looked at another way, a premade makes 140% of the honor (in AB) that running solo gets. Or looked at yet a third way, regular it takes you 5.84 minutes to get 1000 honor. A premade will get you that in 4.15 minutes. You can spend 71% of the time you would have spent soloing to get the same amount of honor.

I'm not sure why the losing HPM is so bad here, except to say that the average points accrued in a loss for my data is 786.86 -- there are not a lot of close games in AB. It's an interesting comparison to EOTS, where I've noted previously that the average points in a loss is about 650 (669 on nonholiday, 624 on regular). So at least they're closer than EOTS, but I would venture to suggest that this is due to the general rule of 2-3 games in AB (you lose controlling 40% of the resources) vs. the general rule of EOTS of having 1-3 games (you control 25% of the resources, and maybe the flag a few times).

However, EoTS rewards you more frequently, on the holiday at least -- you gain your bonus honor every 160 points in EOTS(H), but only every 200 in AB(H). So you need more points to get the bonus tickover, and maybe that's why it's so bad?

More Updates

I do not, regrettably, have good IOC numbers for the holiday, having once again gone streaky (2-5), and on top of that, not finishing my requisite 10 games. I'll tell you, informally, that it went :

IOC HOLIDAY HONOR
Winning : 315.84
Losing : 120.64
Overall : 194.06 (54% of AV, #3 overall behind EOTS, 57%)

It's actually a really good winning HPM...but since Alliance has tactical problems winning this battleground on my battlegroup, that counts for less than you might expect. Tragedy all around, I know. Please remember that this data, and the winning data in particular, IS ASTERISKED

---

However, I AM in a position to remove the asterisk from SOTA, having ground out some wins to record on the last holiday. Previously I had the winning HPM at 190.68; I have now revised that to say 262.84. That also changes the overall HPM from 141.11 to 170.76. Let that be a lesson that when I put an asterisk on something, it's for a reason :)

AV : Fail At Failing

The title reflects the trouble I had with AV over the holiday in trying to lose, where unfortunately my side was not in the mood. Consequently, going 9-1 makes my AV potentially skewed in the same way that Strand was in the opposite direction (2-8). I apologise...I tried to lose, I even asked them to (whimsically) at the beginning of games...no dice. So :

AV Holiday Honor (Cyclone BG, 57% win)
Winning HPM : 530.83
Losing HPM : 123.2
Overall HPM : 357.37

In comparison with the other holiday BGs I have posted,

AV : 100%
EOTS : 57%
SOTA : 39%
WSG : 39%

I have also updated the holiday chart link on the right, if you would like to compare to the old data.

In other news, does anyone know what the deal is with how many people you can queue for a BG? I was certain it was five. Then I went into one and queued 6 people all night long, and so revised my understanding to "as many as you want, the 'join as party' is misleading"...and then when I deliberately recruited for 6 the other night, it told me my party was too big to queue for it. What gives?

Holiday EOTS Paint By Numbers

WARNING : If you don't like numbers this post is not for you!

I gathered data for EOTS(H) over the weekend...it's up on the Updated Holiday HPM post I have linked on the right, along with SOTA & WSG. The nutshell:

Winning HPM : 283.92
Losing HPM : 126.32
Overall HPM : 204.76

EOTS : 100%
SOTA : 69%*
WSG : 68%

Interestingly, the old WSG data is about 69% of the old EOTS data, so that stuff seems intact. What this says to me is reinforcement of the asterisk I put next to the Strand data when I put it up (short version : my data was skewed toward the losses and so win data was likely not as accurate as it could be), so people out there who liked SOTA and were sad that it was apparently sucking as bad as WSG, have hope, the situation may change.

What I would like to do with this data today is draw some comparisons with regular EOTS (which I also have data for) to make some general conclusions about holiday/nonholiday experience. To recap :

Regular EOTS
Winning HPM : 247.08 ( -37 )
Losing HPM : 111.89 ( -14 )
Overall HPM : 179.18 ( -25 )

Unsurprisingly...holiday gives you better than regular. You may take your dunce cap and sit in the corner now. Here's where the interesting numbers come in though, and I think it shows fairly conclusively that when a BG is on holiday, it attracts better players. Yes, most of us already knew that, and no, it's not just the fact that I was fighting at BET yesterday with one arena master on my side, against two arena masters on the horde side (yes, they killed me badly), that makes me wonder that. It's just that, much like the assumption that WSG sucks for HPM, which everyone implicitly knows to be true, it's nice to have hard numerical data to back that up.

Points in Favor of the "Smarter People" Argument

Point A : Time Investment

A regular EOTS match lasts an average of 13.71 minutes. On a holiday it lasts 13.9 minutes. The games are fought closer and so they tend to last longer. Why? Because it's harder to roflstomp a good team than a bad team.

Point B : Smart Targeting

I don't mean to sound like a self-absorbed prick here but taking me as a healer and extrapolating to generally cover all people who heal -- on a regular game, I die 2.65 times. On a holiday, 2.67. It's close enough that I guess you could call it statistically insignificant (.7%). I choose to look at it as saying that maybe it shows that people are ever-so-slightly better about targeting and killing healers on the holidays.

Point C : The Map

On a holiday, games that devolved into 2v2+flag games were more common. This correlates Point A; games are more evenly matched, and abandoning a 3-tower strategy to go for 2+flag usually follows upon the heels of recognising that the opposition is too tough to grab a third.

Statistically : On holiday, I recorded 10 games, and two of them were flat-out 2v2 matches, with another 2-3 that started out that way but eventually gave way to a 3-tower game. On regular, I recorded 20 games, and two of them were flat-out 2v2 games, with one unrecorded that you could give the benefit of the doubt to if you wanted and pretend it was a 2v2. But the gist is: it's basically twice as likely to get trapped into a 2v2 on holiday as it is otherwise.

People are also slightly smarter about fighting you for that flag cap in that situation -- on a holiday, a flag cap took 2.31 minutes on average, as opposed to 2.28 on regular. There's also correspondingly less flag caps in total -- 7.19 caps on average (both sides put together) for regular EOTS, 7 for holiday.

Point D : Dropouts

Four of my 20 regular EOTS games were joined in progress...none of my holiday ones were. That could be a fluke, and why I put this point last b/c I think it's the most nebulous, but it could indicate that people are more likely to play it out on holiday than otherwise.

Point E : Point Differential

The average point value for losing a game of EotS (both Horde and Alliance together) was 670 for nonholiday losses, versus 624 for holiday losses. You could make the point that therefore people are more skilled on regular b/c they manage to get more points even when they're losing, but I would argue differently. I think it means that the teams that win have it more "together" on a holiday than otherwise -- to allow the losing teams more points on a nonholiday to me speaks to sloppier play.

I think also what it might come down to is those 2v2 games -- smarter players, recognising that they're in a 2+flag situation, will be better about controlling mid before they cap (hence the longer time between caps on a holiday, also), and therefore keeping the losing team's point totals smaller.

How can we test that? By looking at the differential between flag caps (how many times the winning side caps, versus the losing side) on those 2v2 games. Using the 5 games (2 certain, 3 sort-of) from the holiday, the average differential between winning side / losing side caps is 4.8. Using the 3 regular EOTS games...the average differential is 3. I don't think I'm going too far here to say that there's a direct correlation between that number and how effective your control of midfield is -- the smaller the differential is, the worse your midfield control is, and the higher it is, the better you were at monopolising it.

Conclusion : If you want to play a game with smarter people, go to the holiday weekend BG. Ron Burgundy imitation: It's SCIENCE.

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 :-)

This just in : WSG still sucks

Despite the temptation it provides me to slit my wrists, I bravely ventured into WSG over the weekend to gather data for you, my lovely readers. (Lies. I did it b/c my mind would explode if there was a gap in my spreadsheet. But I like you guys too). There's not enough data for a table as yet but :

WSG Holiday Notes :
Winning HPM : 205.65
Losing HPM : 92.41
Overall (on Cyclone BG, with a 43% win ratio) : 140.74

Average Bonus Honor in a game (from capping the flag, 248 points, clearing the map, 496 points, and winning, 372 points) : 1079.2

There is a maximum of 13 "kills" of objectives in WSG(H) -- 4 for finishing, 3 for winning, 6 for 3 flag caps. If you correlate from the above, 1079.2 / 124, on an average map you are scoring 8.7 of these Objective Points, as I'm labelling them for comparison. I've come up with a whole slew of new things I'm tracking with the introduction of 3.3.3, just to try to come up with reasons why the honor in some bgs is so much better than others.

By way of comparison :

EOTS (Random, non-holiday) Notes:
Winning HPM : 247.08
Losing HPM : 111.89
Overall (Cyclone, 49% win) : 178.02
Average Bonus Honor in a game from objectives (only points) : 674.65
Average OP : 5.44

This is assuming that you queued for a random, and got EOTS. If you queue specifically for EOTS, thus forgoing the bonus 1862/621 honor, you end up with rather more unpleasant numbers, to wit:

Winning HPM : 116.87
Losing HPM : 64.78
Overall : 90.26

So what makes the difference? Why does WSG have a worse HPM than EOTS? At first I thought, well...maybe it's b/c you kill more people in EOTS? But you don't, I have an eots kill average of 27.81, and in WSG, 35.5. In WSG(H), those tend to be worth 25.08 honor apiece, versus 20.71 in EOTS...and that's considering that EOTS gives you a buff when you kill someone near a tower. So I kill *more*, and they're WORTH more, in WSG. So that's not it. I think the answer here is in time committed -- my average EOTS game is 13.71 minutes, whereas WSG stretches out into 22.7, which is roughly 50% more. I would venture to guess that your honor gained in WSG on holiday is better...but it takes you too long to get it. A similar argument could be made for the blitz versus the Standard Win in AV -- you get a crapton more honor doing it the latter way, but at too much of a cost in time to stand up to a blitz solely on HPM grounds. There are other excellent arguments against the blitz -- Cynwise has some over on his site but I can't seem to find it atm...will ETA when I do -- but you can't beat it for return on your investment.

ETA: On a whim, went into the spreadsheet and the above appears to be true. WSG(H) gives you 3127.66 honor, on average, while EOTS(R) is 2481.73.

I rather suspect that the formula here is going to boil down to taking a given holiday weekend, and comparing it to the table which I shall in the future get together ;-), and saying, if 4 or more of the Random Battlegrounds are better honor, skip the holiday and queue for random, playing your odds. If three are better, it's a 50/50 shot so do the holiday if you enjoy that BG, or skip it if you don't. And if only 1 or 2 are better, hit the holiday BG.

The tree rests.

What's in an honorable kill?

Pending me not being lazy and turning on the floating combat text that tells you what an honorable kill is worth, I am resorting to old-fashioned math. The gods at Blizzard have told us that in 3.3.3 our honor from killing someone (and, associated thereto, the battleground objectives which have a straight conversion) is being doubled. From what to what, though? Traditional wisdom says, 20.9 honor per kill. I have my doubts about that though, having run some figures, and that just leaves me more confused. Though I will say that 20.9 x 3 = 62.7 = 63, which is the honor I see from burning towers in AV so maybe that's not a TOTAL bunch of hogwash.

BUT. Questions remain. In WSG, you gain honor three ways : killing people, capping flags, and winning. Now, I have more than three winning games of WSG recorded, and because I'm anal like that I recorded the caps in those games, so ostensibly you should be able to set up a system of equations that reduces you out to solving what each of those things is worth. Three lines, in 3-dimensional space, which should converge at a perfect (x,y,z) point. But they don't. And if you add more lines (=games), it gets worse.

So, ok, let's take something simpler. Arathi Basin gives you honor in only two ways, at least according to the general info site : killing people, and the amount of points you have at the end converts directly into your bonus honor. Linearly, I would assume, but that may be in error. So you can set up a two-dimensional system of equations, theoretically.

(HKs)*(value of HK=x) + (End Resource Count)*(Value of One Resource = Y) = Total honor gained in match

So I did that for all 18 non-holiday AB games that I have written down. A picture is worth a thousand words; here's the result :



Notice how those lines DO NOT CONVERGE ON A SINGLE GLORIOUS POINT. Moreover, even if you wanted to draw a really big Dot Of Best Fit...the x-value -- an honorable kill, remember -- there hovers somewhere (roughly) between 9 and 12...NOT 20.9, the standard accepted answer. Y is in the 0.3-0.5 region but that's not really relevant to my point here.

I'm not being given correct information here and as an engineer I am extremely distressed by this. Seriously, I was in bed trying to go to sleep with my wife and this idea SO UNNERVED me that I had to come down to my computer, play with graphs and desperately attempt to fit some sense into it, and then write a blog post about how annoyed I was when the data would not be forced. Note to the public at large : if you ever want to explode an engineer's brain, feed him bad data and watch the fireworks.

*sigh*

*tries to go back to bed*

HPM Chart (non-holiday)

ETA 4/2/10 : With the drastic revamp of 3.3.3 the below data is wildly outdated! I will be making a new chart soon, but the relative values of one to the other, I expect, will remain reasonably similar. Keep that in mind :-)

Holiday Battleground	Winning HPM	Losing HPM	Overall HPM (inc. marks)	Overall Percentages
Arathi Basin	55.83	37.32	78.88	90%
Eye of the Storm	71.81	34.12	87.6	100%
Strand of the Ancients	77.05	29.98	86.6	99%
Warsong Gulch	47.8	22.73	58.16	66%

I'm not going to go into the big long math list on this again, as you can find it elsewhere on blog if you so chose, and also because at some vague point in the future I plan to make a comprehensive "Here's the Math Behind Everything" general post, but I will be putting a link back to this chart on the sidebar so as I update it it will be available for easy reference.

Little suggests itself from these numbers for now due to the missing of the two 40-man beasts, IOC & AV. If I had to venture a guess based on the holiday proportions I would say AV is probably Still the Place To Go, and IOC fairly middling -- there's a fairly consistent clumping in the middle, with AV a high-end outlier and WSG a very disappointingly low-end one. But hell, nobody who has any sense actually needed concrete math to tell them that.

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.

Redheaded Warsong Stepchild

Meanwhile, to nobody's great surprise, WSG bottoms the list of Holiday places to visit :

Winning : 54.9
Losing : 28.87
Overall : 41.33
Mark Honor : 22.49

TOTAL BG HONOR : 63.83

This is a terrible number, consider that on a NON-holiday I could go to AB and pull out numbers in the mid-80s, and that's comparable across other non-holiday BGs (with the exception, of course, of WSG, which on a non-holiday is pulling about 60 at the moment). WSG is NOT the place to go, not even close.

For a better idea, look at the updated holiday chart -- WSG is pulling less than half of what AV does on a holiday. That ain't right, yo.

This got me thinking, what can blizzard do to increase honor in this BG to a comparable level? There's two things, I think -- they could increase honor for flag caps, or they could give us honor for returning flags. I've started tracking how many returns go in on a BG and it's coming to about 3.5 a game. On a holiday weekend, capping the flag gives you 124 honor; if you were awarded similar honor for returning a flag, there'd be an extra...what...434 honor every game, divided over the 21.6 minute average, giving about an extra 20.09 HPM for the BG. Then the total HPM chart (holiday) would read more like:

AB: 79.19
WSG: 83.92
IOC: 86.44
EOTS: 88.56
SOTA: 97.59
AV: 146.42

which is a much closer grouping (the beast that is AV excepted, of course) and I think more in line with what Blizzard is probably aiming for; I doubt it was their intention to make any one BG wildly better, or worse, than the others. NOTE TO BLIZ: PLEASE DON'T NERF AV BECAUSE I SAID THAT.

But let's not put too much faith in blizzard...this is the company that in attempting to make WSG shorter, made it longer. But this isn't the time to reopen that complaint, I suppose :-).

AV : The Smell of Win

Like wow, is Alterac Valley my friend on holiday weekend. I've done 12 games so far, and will update tomorrow with more b/c with numbers like this I'm certainly not stopping. I went 7-5, not quite a good representation as our battlegroup runs 48% win, and the numbers came out :

Winning HPM : 100.17 / 132.86*
Losing HPM : 95.41
Overall HPM : 97.69 / 113.36*
Mark Honor : 33.06

TOTAL BG HONOR, AV-HOLIDAY : 130.75 / 146.42*

A word of explanation is in order. The first number, in the places above where two are listed, is an unadjusted number using my standard mathematics elucidated elsewhere. However, two of my seven wins were turtles, which SHAFTED the honor per minute rate (down to around 40, even when we won). However, those were the only two games overall that went that way. Because I have a comparatively small sample size here (as yet) I modified my winning numbers by multiplying the non-turtle wins by 80% and the turtle ones by 20% to reduce the, IMO, overly prejudicial impact those numbers were having. Outstandingly noticeable out of this run, five out of my seven wins (the non-turtle ones) and two of the losses (!) gave in excess of 120 HPM, which is a ridiculously lovely number when you consider that other BGs on holiday you're happy to get 85.

My theory is that the way in which holidays give you extra honor is based on attaining different BG objectives (capping a flag in WSG is the easy example here), and b/c AV is so big that it has so many different objectives, there's lots of room to rack up tons of bonus honor. OTOH, to take one win that I did that was a scant 50 seconds from Stormpike Perfection, one of the turtle wins, we only did about 90 hpm despite keeping all our towers and burning all of theirs, keeping balinda, etc. So maybe I'm just full of crap.

I'll post a chart tomorrow after I update my sheet for the end of the holiday, but these quick percentage numbers should convey the magnitude of awesomeness that AV on holiday is :

Total numbers, bg + marks:

AV : 100%
SOTA : 67%
EOTS : 60%
IOC : 59%
AB : 54%

Only Warsong Gulch left and I can make a comprehensive post on holiday weekends...next weekend FTW, especially since my Sox just got swept out of the ALDS and aren't going to be starting the ALCS then :-\.

AB holiday HPM / arena

Ihra pushed his rating to a 900 today, scoring some very pretty pants. Resilience over 800, pvp spellpower over 2k, and my partner got her 100 ranked arena match achievement on the same one. So a nice nexus of win all around :-).

Calculated out AB Holiday hpm over the weekend, came up with interesting numbers --

Winning HPM : 59.48
Losing HPM : 42.97

Overall : 51.68 (53% win ratio)

I'll repost the updated holiday chart tomorrow, because I'm tired, but for the moment suffice to make this observation on NON-holiday hpm :

Winning : 57.9
Losing : 37.32

Overall : 48.18

So the HPM is only a tiny bit better on holiday weekends than otherwise. Why is that? The answer *seems* to be, time investment. Now, it IS true that the database is in its infancy, so to speak, but the non-holiday AB takes 14 minutes on average, and the holiday is 19.5. My theory : that on the holiday you see a higher percentage of smart / serious PvPers in the BG so the matches tend to be more strategic and therefore longer? The average honor on holiday/non-holiday for a match is 1064 / 695, respectively, so you ARE getting a lot more honor on the weekend for a game...but your games are also taking, what, 33% longer? So the gain is not very big, at least for this particular BG. *shrug*.

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!)

SotA Holiday HPM

I don't generally care much for strand of the ancients...but as it WAS the holiday weekend, and I didn't want to have to wait 6 weeks to gather the data to post here, I intrepidly charged forward and did my ten games for stats. They went 7-3, which was better than average - horde has a slight winning edge here (51-49) as just about everywhere on my battlegroup. In any event the numbers I come up with for the holiday are :

SotA Winning HPM, holiday: 86.86
SotA Losing HPM, holiday: 39.84
SotA Overall HPM, holiday, my BG: 62.8

This compares favorably to the other holiday weekend I've picked up so far, Eye of the Storm, which to refresh your memory came out with:

EotS Winning HPM, holiday: 78.22
EotS Losing HPM, holiday: 33.68
EotS Overall HPM, holiday, my BG: 55.41

I'm not sure that you could conclusively say "Strand > EotS" because I know they award holiday honor on a kill-equivalency based on the BG ("capping a flag in WSG on the holiday nets you the equivalent of 4 HKs extra honor") and so the holiday honor may be worth different amounts to those BGs than the regular one is. Still, it's a narrow lead and one that makes me cry b/c I love Eye of the Storm most of all.

The other interesting thing that I found going on here was that I have to hand it to Horde people complaining about how the Alliance always used to go first. I had initially passed that off as QQing, except for maybe a small psychological advantage, but the numbers do not indicate that to be true. I think this is significantly because Strand awards you bonus honor the more gates you have intact at the end of a defensive battle (or, for that matter, destroy in an offensive one), so if you go first and can make a good race to the relic, the next team to go has much less time to destroy gates. By way of comparison, on two of my winning strand battles where we speed-capped the relic (about 3 minutes) our HPM rate was well over 100 (120 and 163). But when I had similarly awesome teams who capped in three minutes, but were forced to go on the defensive first, the HPM dropped significantly. Even though I tended to have a *lot* more honorable kills (because we outclassed the horde so badly), our HPM floated instead around the 75 marker. So kudos to blizzard on implementing a coin-flip over that one; for once the complainers look to have had a legitimate grievance.

All of which means what?

So now there are two battlegrounds to compare, Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. Comparatively, and hoping my table-making skills are up to par :

Battleground	Winning HPM	Losing HPM	Overall HPM
Warsong Gulch	47.8	22.73	34.05
Arathi Basin	57.9	37.32	49.67

Now that is, as previously mentioned, specific to my battlegroup, and further, to resto druids on the alliance side, and we could throw tons and tons of caveats into that if we wanted to. My solution is to reduce this to a percentage; I am the same across all battlegrounds I do, and presumably you are as well. So I think if we put this in ratios that should be serviceable for anybody, at least for winning & losing. Your overall HPM will vary, because different battlegroups have different win/loss percentages. In any event,

Battleground	Winning HPM (%)	Losing HPM (%)	Overall HPM
Warsong Gulch	83	61	69
Arathi Basin	100	100	100

So the current Leader then is Arathi Basin...ie that it is better in Arathi Basin than Warsong Gulch for HPM; I suspected that might be the case, not least because there are more people in AB and therefore more potentials for killing. One might also observe that in overall HPM (which category is specific to my battlegroup, at pains to remind) WSG is about 2/3 of AB. Conveniently, say, the ratio of 10:15, the number of players. I may be leaping to conclusions here, with only two things to judge off of. Just an interesting hypothesis, for now...we'll see if that holds up on further study.

Arathi Basin HPM

I'm about as sick of cut and pasting as you are of reading it, so we're shortcutting this week. For references on the math that I use to come up with these numbers, please see my earlier post, Warsong HPM.

My ten games for AB came out 6-4, which fits since AB is a game that my battlegroup is apparently decently good at, though I am somewhat skeptical of the numbers. I had three five-caps in my six wins, which I suspect may skew the numbers. At any rate I do keep the spreadsheets updated so hopefully over time that will even out any potential irregularities.

The nuts and bolts:

Winning HPM : 57.9
Losing HPM : 37.32
Overall HPM, accounting for my BG's win percentage (54%) : 48.46

Adding the mark turn-in honor (36.91) nets a total honor for AB of 85.37.

Warsong HPM & Observations

Ta-da, time to calculate HPM for Warsong Gulch. Nothing to compare to as yet, since the EotS stuff was for the holiday weekend.

My numbers for WSG from the 10-game sample came out 4-6 which is again a close approximation to my battlegroup's statistics (47/53). Two very interesting observations came out of these ten games. One was that in nine out of ten games, the first flag cap won, which seems to bear out popular wisdom post-time-limiting this battleground. The other interesting thing is that 4 of these 10 matches were decided by the time expiry conditions, which indicates that Blizzard's plan to shorten the BG is actually backfiring. People's tendency to hunker down and turtle (and turtle well) may result in a cap on maximum time, but the *average time* has increased. Before there was a time limit, the average WSG was 17.56 minutes, but with my ten games here sampled the average is 18.6, a full minute longer. I mean I guess it's nice to not have epic hour-long WSG matches anymore, but those were a lot fewer and farther between than people seem to think -- understandably really, given the psychological impact of being locked in a brutal close game for an hour -- since the pre-limiting average time was more or less on par with the other BGs and this was a possible overreaction by Blizzard.

You'll notice some similarity b/c I'm cut-and-pasting and replacing numbers ;-), but he numbers here in straight honor for a non-holiday WSG, came out as:

Losing Honor per Minute (HPM) : 22.73
Winning HPM : 47.8

So as a formula here to apply on your own battlegroup, you could look in your statistics pane on the achievement and come up with

Total WSG HPM (F) = (X/Y)*(47.8) + ((Y-X)/Y)*(22.73)

where
X = "number of WSG wins" and
Y = "Number of WSG games played"

On my server, x = 28 and Y = 59, X/Y = 0.47 like I mentioned above, so that comes out to be

Total WSG HPM = (0.47)*(47.8) + (0.53)*(22.73) = 34.62

------------------------------------------------------------------

To calculate the Mark Turn-in honor,

Average Marks WSG (W) = (X/Y)*3 + ((Y-X)/Y)

In my case,

Average Marks WSG = 3 * 0.47 + 0.53 = 1.95 (b/c we lose very slightly more than we win on my battlegroup).

Every turn-in of marks is going to net you 1489 honor at level 80. Every BG you do is netting you some percentage of that honor, to wit:

Average Turn-in HPM for WSG = (1489*W) / (6*S)

where S = average time of a match. On my battlegroup it's 18.6 minutes, and I suspect you could probably use that as a non-variable b/c it's probably close to the same across all battlegroups unless your W/L percentage is dramatically different from 50/50 for whatever reason.

Again using my battlegroup:

Turn-in HPM (T) = (1489*1.95) / (6*18.6) = 26.01.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

So the total you're getting here is going to be the turn-in HPM plus the HPM you got just for fighting there :

Total HPM = T + F

For me:

Total HPM = 26.01 + 34.62 = 60.63.

The TL;DR version:

The winning coefficient for WSG is 47.8 HPM, and the losing coefficient is 22.73. This should be standard across all battlegroups, by which I mean that if I transferred to a different battlegroup I would have a similar result. Other classes / roles may have varying numbers (rogues for example tend to have easily double my HKs in a BG), so the importance of these numbers are in comparatives rather than absolutes. In other words...YMMV. But I've got the formulas here you can plug in your battlegroup stats to and at least get comparative numbers once I have the other ones up.

Stats & Titles

First of all, RATED BGS AND PVP TITLES. WOOHOO! I always thought it was a bit corny and elitist that those who got titles in vanilla wow could rub it in our faces without us every having a chance to get them. As long as they're still competitive to get (and not, as someone said in the wow.com comments section, "ghostcrawler wants everyone to experience everything so all titles will be super easy") I'm delighted with this change. I'm a little sketchy too over how they're describing the rated BGs but Blizzard generally gets their feet solidly on the ground before they release things so I remain faithful that despite my initial skepticism it will probably be good when it sees release.

Anyway on to my favorite love, calculating stats for BGs. I was just getting my list started when 3.2 came along and messed everything up, stats-wise, for 3/5 of the battlegrounds, necessitating a wipe and restart. My first question I wondered was, it's holiday weekend. Am I better off zerging the holiday BG, which won't get any marks turn-ins, or rotating around like I usually do for the turn-in? After I asked this question, I realised that if I zerged the holiday BG every weekend then every 6th weekend I'd have a massive amount of turn-ins anyway, assuming I was willing to play the long-ball, and then I'd get the best of both worlds. So I reduced my question to, what kind of honor are you looking at, assuming you play intelligently enough to eventually be able to do turnins?

I am here collating the Holiday Weekend for Eye of the Storm, which was this past weekend. I sampled 10 games, which went 5-5 and I guess that's a reasonable approximation based on the server. Each game lasted an average of 14.4 minutes, which is interesting b/c according to my BC spreadsheet (where it was still 2000 points to win) the games lasted 16.45 minutes which means that cutting the points to 75% of their original did not have a similar effect on the game time. I mean yes, some shortening is occurring but it's more like 88% of the time. An interesting side note, anyway.

The numbers here in straight honor, on the holiday weekend, came out as:

Losing Honor per Minute (HPM) : 33.68
Winning HPM : 59.04

So as a formula here to apply on your own battlegroup, you could look in your statistics pane on the achievement and come up with

Total H.EotS HPM (F) = (X/Y)*(59.04) + ((Y-X)/Y)*(33.68)

where
X = "number of EotS wins" and
Y = "Number of EotS games played"

On my server, x = 61 and Y = 125, X/Y = so that comes out to be

Total H.EotS HPM = (0.49)*(59.04) + (0.51)*(33.68) = 55.41

------------------------------------------------------------------

That's your baseline for the holiday. But you do, as I mentioned earlier, also get marks. How many marks you get should probably be close to 2 on average, since you get 3 for a win and 1 for a loss and most BGs I've found split 50-50 despite people's skewed perceptions (including my own). If you wanted to be nitty gritty about it, you would use something like

Average Marks EotS (W) = (X/Y)*3 + ((Y-X)/Y)

In my case,

Average Marks EotS = 3 * 0.49 + 0.51 = 1.98 (b/c we lose very slightly more than we win on my battlegroup).

Every turn-in of marks is going to net you 1489 honor at level 80. Every BG you do is netting you some percentage of that honor, to wit:

Average Turn-in HPM for EotS = (1489*W) / (6*S)

where S = average time of a match. On my battlegroup it is 14.4 minutes, and I suspect you could probably use that as a non-variable b/c it's probably close to the same across all battlegroups unless your W/L percentage is dramatically different from 50/50 for whatever reason.

Again using my battlegroup:

Turn-in HPM (T) = (1489*1.98) / (6*14.4) = 34.05.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

So the total you're getting here on the holiday weekend is going to be the turn-in HPM plus the HPM you got just for fighting there :

Total HPM = T + F

For me:

Total HPM = 34.05 + 55.41 = 89.46.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Someday, it is my dearest wish to take all my data and code a mod for it that will pull the data out of your stats pane and calculate it for you in a pretty in-game window. In the meantime...I'll be doing this for other BGs as well, so stay tuned :-).