Some Red Eclipse PvP Data

Back in my State Of My Game post I mentioned that I haven't been too happy with my PvP experience lately. The thing is, I don't particularly like people who whine that their faction always loses. "If all your games are losses, maybe the defining factor is you," is usually the first thing that comes to mind. And even if they are not bad players, it's still very easy to get a distorted view of your win-loss ratio. I seem to recall reading somewhere that our brains find bad things happening to us two or three times as memorable as good things, so even if you actually win half your matches or more it can still feel like you're doing badly.

About three weeks ago I decided that I wanted to know for sure whether I was doing any worse in warzones now than I used to,  so I started to keep a log of all my max-level warzone matches: which character I played on, which warzone I got, and whether the outcome was an easy win, a hard win, a fair loss (where my team still put up a bit of a fight) or a bad loss (where we got completely steamrolled). I recorded the results of exactly one hundred games - because it's a good number and makes it easy to work out percentages. (Plus, you know, big PvP changes coming with tomorrow's patch, so I had to stop at some point if I wanted to get this post out before then.) A couple of these games were actually same faction matches, but they were so rare and unexpected that I forgot to remove them from my count as an exception that messes with my comparisons to the Empire. Oh well. I also didn't keep track of when exactly I played every time, but it's worth noting that my play time varied a lot over the past few weeks, so I played on pretty much every day of the week at some point or another, as well as during every time of the day, except for the middle of the night and early morning.

I played three different characters over the course of those three weeks, though all of them are healers: my Commando main, who is almost in full Conqueror gear, my Sage alt, who's in a mix of Partisan and Arkanian/Underworld, and my Scoundrel, who should have had the advantage of being way overpowered as a class right now, but personally I found that this was cancelled out by the fact that she's got absolutely terrible gear. With very few exceptions, I also queued up alone for the vast majority of these games, to make sure that I would only have myself to blame for the outcome (well, myself and the pugs of course).

In terms of which warzones I got, I'm happy to say that the randomiser works fine. I certainly had days where I kept getting the same maps over and over, but over the course of three whole weeks things actually evened out quite well. The warzone that popped most often for me was Novare Coast with 28 matches, and the one I got the least was Ancient Hypergates (thank god), which I only had to endure 11 times. Everything else was somewhere in-between.

So, how did it go then? Well, I'm sad to say that I was not wrong about losing a lot, as my overall win percentage was only a measly 35 percent. In terms of whether the games felt like fair fights or complete steamrolls, things were pretty even, meaning that trying to get my PvP daily done as a Republic player, on average, I'd win one game (fifty-fifty chance of it being an easy win or one we had to fight for), then experience one loss where we still put up a bit of a fight, and then get completely stomped into the ground in the third match (not necessarily in that order). Doesn't sound too bad when you put it like that - but reality tends to be less kind unfortunately. My worst losing streak was ten in a row, with seven of them feeling like we didn't even stand a chance. Not fun.

What other things did I observe? Well, looking at the split between characters, I was somewhat surprised to see my Sage end up with the best win-loss ratio - in fact she outright defies the average as she even won two more games than she lost. Mind you, I played fewer games with her than with the other characters (only 26), so I might have just been lucky, but it still surprised me. I expected either my Commando to come out on top due to having the best gear, or my Scoundrel due to the class being OP. In practice however, my Scoundrel ended up having a terrible time, losing five times(!) as many games as she won. I suspect that it's because of her poor gear and me not playing her as much as the other two and thus being less familiar with the tool kit, meaning that I made less of a useful contribution in each game.

In terms of the split between the warzones, it was interesting to see that while we did lose the majority of our games in all of them, the odds did vary depending on which map popped up. On Novare Coast for example we did so well that we almost won half our matches. On the other hand we did so badly in Huttball that chances of a Republic win in the Pit were less than one in three there. I guess we're not completely useless when it comes to the actual fighting, but as a faction we're clearly lacking when it comes to co-ordination.

Do these numbers prove anything? Not really. You've got to question how much of a difference a single player can make anyway - maybe I'm just really terrible and dragging everyone down with me! I suppose I could play a hundred max-level games on some of my Imperial characters and see whether those actually go any better. However, it wouldn't really be a fair comparison as none of my Imps currently have any PvP gear (or even high level PvE gear). Maybe something for a future project...

We will see how things pan out with the introduction of arenas tomorrow and whether they cause Republic side PvP to be invigorated or not. If nothing else, keeping a record of my wins and losses has been an entertaining distraction that made even the bad losses a little bit easier to bear for a while, knowing that, if nothing else, I was at least getting some interesting data out of the whole ordeal.