GentlemanJon
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#3 TF2's hidden stats part 2 in TF2 General Discussion
KiNGHow well does this correlate with, say, mid and low tier games, given that your model currently only reflects higher level play (presumably Prem and Invite)?

I forgot to mention this doesn't reflect ESEA, they still don't even log overheal so there's less relevance there. Also the post only refers to 6v6.

I'm not sure what mid tier TF2 looks like, my options are between high level datasets that are recorded for the stream stats you see around the leagues and a huge blob of lobby data that has insanely high variations in skill level and coordination.

posted about 7 years ago
#1 TF2's hidden stats part 2 in TF2 General Discussion

Last time I introduced the concept of Net Kills per Minute. This time I'll be using it to inform our understanding of healing and medic performance.

Medics are very difficult to understand or rank in TF2. They're completely at the mercy of their team's death match performance and team fight coordination, if they can't be protected they won't get good healing rates. Although uber drop rates can be a useful indicator, there are times when dropping uber is the right play, and over any large dataset uber rates correspond closely with healing rates.

Healing rates have also fairly recently started to become less reliable because of the rise of the crossbow and the fact that crossbow healing isn't logged. But even so, it seems some patterns can still be discerned.

So how does Net Kills per Minute play into medic healing rates? Taking the concept that medics are subject to their team's performance, and that NKPM is a superior stat for fragging classes, we can look at how healing is related to this.

The relationship between raw team NKPM and healing is actually quite weak, and the obvious reason is that many of the kills are taking place away from the medic by players on the flank. Although the success or failure of these players can affect the medic by allowing flanks, etc, it's the performance of the combo players that receive the bulk of the healing and whose duties specifically include protecting the medic that matters most.

So we can come up with yet another stat, Healing adjusted Net Kills Per Minute (HNKPM). The purpose of this stat, probably against everybody's expectation, is not to judge those players performances by the amount of healing they receive - this isn't a particularly useful exercise. It's to judge their influence on the medic.

The form of HNKPM is the player's NKPM mulitplied by their healing received percentage, so if a player has +1.5 NKPM and they received 40% of the heals, their HNKPM is +1.5 * 0.4, or +0.6. This way we scale down the influence of players that receive little healing in comparison to their combo counterparts. It would be possible to do something that doesn't scale down combo players as well, like multiplying by their healing percentage over team average, but that wouldn't affect the maths and adds an unnecessary complication.

Once we have player HNKPM we can calculate the team value, THNKPM. The comparison between the two team stats in a given match produces something interesting, the expected difference of healing rates between the two teams. The formula:

165 * T1HNKPM - 165 * T2HNKPM

Gives the expected healing rate difference between the two teams. The r squared is around 0.5, which is pretty good considering how arcane the process is to get here.

165 is a constant arrived at from performing a regression of a few hundred top level competitive logs. In this case it represents something to do with the meta game, if crossbow usage went down for example this would start to rise because more medigun healing would be logged increasing the difference. If Medics somehow became much more vulnerable it would go down as there would be less healing overall, and therefore less difference.

But this doesn't tell us anything about an individual medic's healing rate in particular. In fact the link between either team's kill stats and either one of the medic's expected performance is very weak. The reason I would postulate for this is that kill rates don't tell us anything particularly interesting about the type of game and it's effects on the medics.

It seems games where the medics are all-in and risking everything, being put under constant pressure and having their healing rates suppressed aren't indicated by player kill stats. Players will always get kills it seems even when medics are having a fairly easy time of things.

The only stat I could find that could potentially inform one medic of the style of the game is the other medic's healing rate. This may seem a cop out at first, but remember that when your medic dies, a priority is often to kill or force the other medic to neutralise uber advantage. When your team is fully committed and your medic is in danger, so is theirs. And the fact that comparing fragging rates above gives a reasonable prediction of the difference in healing rates, but are of little use when predicting the specific rate of healing tells us that the relationship must work this way.

I also looked at DPM in this area, and performed that same heal adjustments on it. My logic in including it was that DPM is something of a proxy for aggressive play, and a medic on an aggressive team will have plenty of healing to do regardless of success. I found including them somewhat improved the accuracy of the model otherwise I wouldn't have kept it. THDPM is a team's heal adjusted DPM.

Performing a regression on this data we get the following formula:

Expected Team 1 Heals Per Minute = 380 + 145 * T1HNKPM - 255 * T2HNKPM + 85 * T1HDPM + 0.67 * T2HPM

Which can give us an expectation of the medic's performance, and getting a healing rate above or below this level could be considered a better or worse performance.

T2HPM is the other team's healing rate. To work out the expected healing rate for the team 2 just reverse the references. The r squared for this model is 0.6, which probably leaves too much that isn't predicted to be reasonably accounted for by skill differences, but without crossbow healing it would be impossible to become more accurate.

There is also the risk of overfitting - the constants in this model are obviously subject to changes in the metagame but more importantly just biases in the dataset that may not hold more generally. In terms of material available though this is a fairly simple model that reflects what has happened to a reasonable degree. It's possible to get a more accurate formula, but it's incredibly complex and arcane and almost certainly matched too closely to the dataset.

This is probably much too complicated for anyone to actually make use of, but it at least shows what is possible.

posted about 7 years ago
#35 Se7en not going to i61??? in TF2 General Discussion
smziFor real though i do not think se7en will dodge i mean most of their players live next to the lan anyways

Later on in the stream I think the expectation was that 3 or 4 of the 6 players would probably go, so it'll end up being a bit of a mix team or something. Bit like the pre-i46 days really.

posted about 7 years ago
#97 Froyotech will not be going to i61 in TF2 General Discussion

https://clips.twitch.tv/SaltyClearNigiriChocolateRain

RIP?

posted about 7 years ago
#119 TF2 Blog: "Balance Changes" in TF2 General Discussion
rowrowI gotta say Vita-Saw had me concerned at first, but it does have a niche in a medic being caught out in a situation where the rest of the team might die and the medic can at least dive for a player and be rewarded for it, rather than hope to get the 26-50% uber needed to stay alive (and still potentially get chased/juggled and end up dying later). Seems way too niche for competitive play, but it is interesting even outside of "desperado" plays, given you can essentially "store" ubercharge the way the ubersaw gained it. Keep 1-2 organs nabbed after someone like a roamer or scout gets too close, and have a nice little advantage down the road. Good balance of risk reward on both sides of a comp match, though ubersaw will reign supreme for its hype in clutching rounds I feel.

I'm not sure it is that niche, it really depends on whether the play of getting the immediate possible advantage into play has more value than banking the material advantage for later. It seems like the vitasaw matches the usual situation where the medic naturally has to be swinging more than the ubersaw. The vitasaw swings are less likely to be wasted and have no effect, but really only affect play in the event of failure. A risk averse mindset could easily go for the vitasaw to offset successful plays against your medic and mitigate against failed engagements at any stage.

Is the banked charge kept between medigun changes? Desperate last defences from a mid wipe could now start with vacc charges already active. Interesting possibilities. It could also be dependent on the match situation, a team that's well ahead could prefer the vitasaw to make it harder to gain fast round wins against them.

posted about 7 years ago
#55 TF2 Blog: "Balance Changes" in TF2 General Discussion
CapuAfter thinking about it for a bit, the Vita-Saw seems very powerful. In reality, most of the time you get an ubersaw on someone, you don't get to benefit from it, since you die very soon after (exceptions are when you get 100% and use it instantly).

With the new Vita-Saw, you benefit from it every single time. You might even start a round with 60% uber and have it ready by the time you get to mid. And I'm pretty sure the mechanic will work in humilliation time...

If it's unbanned I feel like it could operate as a hedge against the risk of making aggressive moves. If a push starts going badly wrong then you start swinging to mitigate the failure, but it will presumably still only preserve uber already built so immediately post uber it's value is low as there's nothing to keep.

It might work out that it encourages more aggressive play by potentially reducing the penalty for failure.

posted about 7 years ago
#559 Fantasy TF2: Let’s do this! in Projects
lootA bit silly considering somebody who knew what all the upcoming changes were could gain 17000$ in value on their team...

It's Beater's team under my login because he does admin, and he doesn't even know how it works :) Tbh I can't even remember how it works, although I could have a look through the source to remind myself.

posted about 7 years ago
#556 Fantasy TF2: Let’s do this! in Projects
lootwhat happens if price changes put us over budget?

I'd completely forgotten about it, thanks for the reminder. What happens if players go up in value is that your team accrues that value, and you have more money to spend for the rest of the season if you sell them. If players drop in value then when you sell them they will give you back less money to spend during the rest of the season.

I've run the update, changes can be seen here:
http://fantasytf2.com/player/pricechanges/15

posted about 7 years ago
#26 i61 TF2 Tourney Details in TF2 General Discussion
samifaceWe wouldn't have tftv people at the controls anyway since they didn't want to be a part of the event, so that's kind of moot. A lot of our casting talent have left for Overwatch. I personally don't see it as a bad thing taking the burden off of the community to bankroll production.

Coverage is being planned by tftv as it always has been as far as I can tell, although obviously a few people have moved on. People are still stepping up.

posted about 7 years ago
#23 i61 TF2 Tourney Details in TF2 General Discussion
samifaceI can't fathom seeing this as a bad thing- TFTV made it clear they wouldn't be producing this year, so I'm pretty relieved Multiplay picked it up. I also think it's a fairly big deal that they gave us back the stage as it represents that they recognized their mistake in relegating us in the past.

I look forward to sitting in a chair watching grand finals on a stage where they belong, in stead of sitting crowded on the floor in front of TV with no sound.

Nobody is saying it's a bad thing, but a stage final comes with some interesting wrinkles. Being scheduled first thing in the morning so it's on at 3am in NA. Being part of their finals stream so it's not tftv people at the controls (although we managed to get that in one year iirc), those kind of things. Obviously they'll have to be tackled, but sometimes you just get shafted.

posted about 7 years ago
#20 i61 TF2 Tourney Details in TF2 General Discussion
samifaceTF2 must have been downgraded at some point, because TFTV have been producing the event offstage for some time now. That isn't the case this year:

The official stream isn't clear yet. It's not really better having an official Multiplay stream by the way, they usually get about 50-100 concurrent viewers, except the Hearthstone tournament which has had a much bigger prize pool recently so has been much higher profile.

The stage final is an upgrade from the perspective of the event (although we've usually had one and this was only dropped fairly recently), but it's a downgrade for online viewing as Multiplay tend to produce the stage finals themselves and they aren't as well set up for TF2 casting as tftv is.

posted about 7 years ago
#17 i61 TF2 Tourney Details in TF2 General Discussion
samifaceHold up- this makes it sound like we're a headline tournament this year...

http://insomniagamingfestival.com/insomnia/whats-on/tournament-changes-announce/

It's always been like this. The fear was we would be downgraded to a community tournament or less but it seems after all the waiting nothing has changed.

posted about 7 years ago
#551 Fantasy TF2: Let’s do this! in Projects

I'm also thinking of doing a mid season price adjustment based on player popularity. It won't be very big if I do, and will probably be on Saturday, but you might want to wait on making any transfers until then.

posted about 7 years ago
#28 blaze or seagull in TF2 General Discussion
hektikTell us Jon, what do your stats say?

Not much, roamers are a poor position for stat measurements.

In a comparison between the two I think Blaze suffers from having come into the game later, so Seagull is the innovator, a vocal strategist in his team, played demo and pocket as well, and has defined the Roamer position particularly in a play making style. He did it all first.

posted about 7 years ago
#24 blaze or seagull in TF2 General Discussion
Rroyce_999_eat_SOAP_9999_objectively, blaze has better hair

Blonde bangs, punk kid. Need a check on the chubby cheeks

Also paging Nuze

posted about 7 years ago
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