Introduction
The growing size of Gwent Pro Ladder is an issue raised quite often recently. Some players argue that too generous system of gaining ranks is responsible for lowering of gameplay level and making ‘Pro Ladder player’ title pretty irrelevant. Others raise that greater number of players leads to shorter queue times and greater variety on every fMMR level.
However, the purpose of this article is rather to answer the question ‘how?’ Pro Ladder expands than to take part in this discussion. While sometimes various assessments of Pro Ladder size at the end of the season are available thanks to the members of the community, the knowledge is definitely incomplete and non-systematic (EDIT: Actually there is very good and systematic article on final pro ladder sizes written by sepro). Does Pro Ladder expand in time linearly, exponentially or maybe in a different, irregular way? Are there some local effects, like increased grind during late season? Could you confidently model Pro Ladder expansion, so that you can predict how it would evolve next season? That’s are all questions a real geek asks and we would try to answer all of them.
We won’t try to be really exact here. The data sources used are Gwent Masters Ratings website (first days after expansion) and positions of ‘legacyprepkekw’ player in time from 10th day of the season up to the end. First Pro Ladder read was done roughly at 22:00 CET on the first day of the season. Days as well as new players are counted with respect to this first call. Let’s start then.
Early season
During first days Pro Ladder seems to expand like a soft exponential. It looks reasonable as at least 15 games have to be played to climb back to Pro. The oscillations visible in the graph are regular and stems from daytimes – it would be discussed in details later on. After roughly 5 days, the 2860 players capacity of Gwent Masters Website gets exhausted and expansion could not be tracked easily.
Late Season
While early season is governed by a soft exponential growth, the late season one seems to be perfect linear. During late Season of the Wolf every day ~637 new players reached Pro Ladder.
Oscillations
To look closer into daytime oscillations, let’s subtract the linear fit from data points and choose a neat, representative slice of time.
Dates are in “Month-Day Hour” format. Every day shortly before midnight a peak is observed. It stems from Europe/CIS dominance in number on Pro Ladder. During CET afternoon Europeans have leisure time and play Gwent, consequently climbing to Pro Ladder. Then around midnight they stop, so that peak is reached. Then less and less players are present on ladder and we go back into valley (around CET noon), behind the general trend. The situation repeats itself in a daily manner.
Modelling Gwent Pro Ladder Expansion
Acquiring the data from one season it is hard to speak of a model, beacuse there is no way to validate it in various circumstances. What we would rather do is finding mathematical expression which would behave as soft exponential in the early season and linearly in the late. Definitely there are various options to choose from, but first one which came to my mind is: Y=(1-exp(-X/T))*aX, where Y is the number of new players, X is the day of the season, T describes how long exponential behaviour lasts, and ‘a‘ determines the slope of late season linear growth.
Equation in the graph stems from non-linear curve fit. Feel free to use it and check how bad it will do following seasons! 😉
Closure
Thanks for reading! Also credits to Wusubi (legacyprepkekw) for yet another efficient climb to pro which made this article possible!
Your feedback is very welcomed! In case of any questions feel free to hit me up on my Discord. If you enjoy Gwent stats i’d recommend you also to follow me on Twitter, where I often post various graphs and analyses.
Written by: lerio2
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