Where has the season gone? It seems just last week we were gearing up for snakewater, and here we are: week four. This week sees us on beautiful, sunny koth_viaduct, the only non-5-cp map in our rotation (rip Gravelpit). Quite possibly our most interesting map, viaduct turns the tables on the traditional format and heavily emphasises the role of DM and aggression.

Most interestingly, this is a map that has traditionally been a demoman's playground. Medium length spam-lines with good visibility and relative height differences offered the high damage output spam-cannon the perfect opportunity to wreak havoc on the battlefield. But valve recently decided that demomen don't actually get to have fun anymore. As TF2 luminary and honorary professor MustardOverlord observed, demos have been having a rough time lately, not being about to output the damage they are accustomed to. So this week, I feel, will be the week of the scout main. The slippery glass cannons will have the distinct advantage of map surfaces that love to eat rocket splash and easy rotates for buffs. Look for your favorite scout to dominate in their games this week.

I must, again, issue a retraction on the status of No Need For Names and their players. Last week I wrote that TicTack would be taking the starting spot for the team, but it appears that the superstar soldier rocket jumped straight to the bench, tasking the also quite talented Blew with protecting BLACKYMONSTER. As for the team: an easy 8-0 awaits them at the end of this week, lets hope for more of a challenge in the coming weeks, I want to see what the final form of this team can do.

I also talked of We Never Wipe, who went into Metalworks week having lost two extremely important matches after moving their demoman Jaguar to backup for "non-skill related reasons". This move was reversed before the start of matches this last week, allowing them to resume their winning streak. This is a bad omen for the open team as they move into the second half of the season. Will they manage to overcome whatever difficulties were plaguing them or is this another open team doomed to break apart before they even reach playoffs?

Finally, Virgin Police picked up Spadez on scout, a move made back in week 2, but I had missed. This is a good pickup, spadez is a talented scout from Canada who spent a season in Invite with xensity and several in Intermediate, making his return after a 3 season hiatus. Once he gets back into the flow of things, I am positive the move will be a good one for the team.

Ever since the invention of SizzlingStats and Logs.tf, this community has been statistics hungry. And with good reason. It allows us to objectively compare just how big our e-peens are. Most kills, fewest drops, heal percentage breakdown, capture points captured, all numbers that give us insight and bragging rights. This week I want to take a quick peek at the relationship between heals and damage output. The data outlined below was taken after most of the Open matches were completed for Metalworks week and does not contain every single player in the league. Instead only the top 16 teams as ranked by the ESEA page were taken, which didn't include a couple of decent teams that should end up in the top 16 by the end of the seasons. Hovering over the dots indicates who the data represents, clicking on the categories at the bottom of the graph will toggle their showing up on the graph, allowing interested persons to just look at a single class. You will need Javascript enabled to see the graph.

Immediately, a few things jump out at me from this data. First, that most players have gotten around the same number of heals, with a relatively wide separation in amount of damage done. Some of the spread can be accounted for with match length or number of matches played, but the damage and heal numbers themselves aren't nearly the most interesting part.

Instead, lets look at damage per heal, and what that means for a player. Hovering over a dot will show you the player's name, their damage, heal and the ratio of the two. Healing is a limited thing for teams, while there is a very high theoretical limit to the amount of damage that can be applied by a team in a given amount of time, medics are limited to between 24 and 72 point of health healed per second. This means that medics have a choice to make: who gets the heals on their team and what does that mean about the player and their role on the team. A skilled medic will carefully titrate heals to players most likely to do the most work at a given time. A team with a powerhouse, aggressive demoman doing most of the work will naturally and intentionally shift a portion of the heals that way, allowing them to do even more damage and be an even bigger impact. Conversely, a team with dominate scouts who like to initiate and make plays should make sure that the class is always 185 and ready to make a play.

Lets take a quick look at demomen. The average DPH (Damage per Heal) of this class is 4.435, anyone above that is doing better than average at heals utilization, anyone below might want to consider hitting a sticky or two. One interesting data point is Red (27090,4579), the demoman for Seendio. His contribution to his team seems to be minor, but numbers need to be looked at in context if nothing else. Seendio is 6-0 and haven't dropped a single round. Their schedule thus far has been... trivially easy and this week isn't looking any tougher. So in a way, Red has been unable to shine, hopefully a situation that gets changed as the team moves into the second half of the season. But even with a relatively low damage number, he still manages to have a very respectable 5.92 DPH, the highest in the sample.

There is a particular soldier I also want to give a shout-out to. Recently, I praised pocket soldier Trip for his seeming "carry" of his team. I now see the reason why. It appears that Idrae only heals Trip and, although his damage is middle of the road as far as pockets go, he has the most heals in the league by very nearly 5000. Perhaps if some of that 43% of team heals went towards other players, they could have taken their game against Guado Glories.

Ultimately, these numbers are mainly fun to think about and look at, but their predictive value is limited at best. Clearly, doing more damage with your heals is superior, but more importantly is a team who knows how to utilize those heals to do the most work. Explore the players, draw your own conclusions. Next week we will look at a specific match on viaduct and the numerical lessons learned from that.

Unfortunately, for how much fun viaduct can be, we have a lack of decent matches this week. There may be a couple of close games at the lower end of the spectrum, but I am relatively unfamiliar with those teams so I will just write up about the two matches between higher ranked teams in the league. This is also why I spent more time talking about the statistics, since I knew it would be a writeup light in match information.

So far this season, Morin Meets The Eye has had a really easy season. Aside from a small road bump they barely cleared in Mumble Robots, the team has swept through the league, picking up a cool 6-0 record. The only thing preventing them from having a perfect first half is Victorious Secret who had a much harder half, losing to Monkey Madness and bwatbwatbwat.

There is going to be a lot up in air for Morin and his crew for this match. This season, viaduct is really going to come down to who has the more dominant scouting pair, and if Change and SmashySmashy are on their game come Wednesday night, I am not sure how Victorious Secret will be able to deal with it.

On the other side of the field, scouting duo Seagate and TaterTots have been showing scrubs how its done. Tatertot, fresh off helping Not Up to Var into playoffs last season, is third in open for scattergun frags, and it is that DMing power that might just help his team take this victory.

I have been kind of underplaying soldiers in talking about viaduct, and for good reason I feel. Though the height differentials and newly raised train tracks running across the map offer aggressive, jumping soldiers the potential to really wreak havoc on the enemy medic. And on this front, I have to tip my hat to Whoopi Goldberg and Yuri of Victorious Secret. I think they have that competitive edge on dnk and rolling, and their bombs and conversions might just be that extra damage needed. Their scout takedown skills will need to be top notch though, or no one will be doing any damage at all.

Once the final countdown ends and the points are tallied up, I am really not sure who will emerge victorious. But I do know one thing, Victorious Secret needs this win, and badly, if they want to think about a good seed come playoffs time. 6-2 will look a lot better than 5-3 for the team, and this hurdle in Morin Meets The Eye is crucial if they are going to prove they can hang in the top teams. 4-3 Victorious Secret

My headliner for the week, SS Fan Club and Virgin Police promise a close and fun match, with both teams trying to out style each other in the air above the lone point.

On the one hand, SS Fan Club has quite the star studded roster, but their off classing nature, and the relative weakness of Phrakture on medic may leave the team wanting for ubers to play with and heals on their scouts moving into this game. But in terms of other high open teams, everyone on SS Fan Club is just... middle of the pack. Middling in kills, middling in damage, nothing particularly special. Perhaps that will play into the favor of the fanboys, but perhaps they will be just underwhelming enough to put up a round or two, then fold over against the Virgin Police.

When I look at Virgin Police, I see a team that really has potential to make some noise in Open this season. One of only two teams to take a round of No Need For Names, there is a lot of potential in the lineup. King^Rab seems to not be doing too well with the demoman nerf, but it hardly matters as spadez and Technasty run around the map, cleaning up kills. Spadez' stats are underwhelming right now, but I attribute that to only having played in two matches. But his performance against No Need For Names was really solid, holding even with his opponents despite a 5-1 roll. Spadez will need to be on his game, both on scout and during his almost inevitable switch to sniper, but he has competent backup in sam and virulent, a combo which should be able to drive the ubers and make the most of those precious seconds of invulnerability.

As the dust settles around the two teams, I cant help but feel strongly that Virgin Police will emerge victorious here. Though they have the same record, SS Fan Club lost to The Muffin Men, whereas it was No Need for Names that finally stopped the winning streak of The Virgin Police. Those two teams are top of the league, but I feel on a different level entirely. SS Fan Club's loss to The Muffin Men is a deeper blow I feel, and may be predictive of how this match will go for these players. 4-2 Virgin Police