Gwent for Geeks: Unofficial Faction Stats
Posted by July 3, 2020 in GwentIntroduction
Hello Friends of Gwent! Soon after “Nations of Gwent 2” i’d like to present to you another stats article. This time we will analyze data more related to the gameplay itself: the popularity and fortune of factions in the last season (Season of the Magic). Maybe you are interested in how the data was collected, so let me start from explaining this stage
Collecting the data
The data was aquired after season finish. It includes all Top2860 players in Gwent Masters Ratings with public profiles. Unfortunately (for the stats), some of the top players keep profiles private, so the information is not complete. Moreover, wins and loses on Pro Ladder could not be decoupled from games on Ranked Ladder if using profile data. Therefore, except for popularity statistics, I restricted myself to players starting the season already on Pro Ladder. This have given the total of 342 players with average skill slightly inflated over the normal level.
Factions Popularity
Which factions were most popular? To answer this question, all the games with different factions for Top2860 were summed up. The share of each faction in the total number of games played is shown on the pie chart below
Nilfgaard was the most popular faction in the Gwent community last season. What is the reason behind? I don’t know. Personally, I don’t like this faction, and would rather like to hear from you about its advantages 😉 The second most popular faction was Skellige, followed by Scoia’tael. Monsters and Northern Realms witnessed mediocre interest, while playing Syndicate was avoided by many players. In the fact, the infamy of Syndicate is the most striking feature of the chart. For each Syndicate game, there are more than two Nilfgaard ones. The nerfs to Luiza and Hidden Cache undermined the trust in this faction for the majority of players. Correctly, or not, we will see soon.
Faction picks
As on the Pro Ladder top 4 faction scores are counted for total MMR, at some point player must decide (pick) what to play. Let’s see how often different factions were picked. Starting from this point, we use 342 players sample, as explained in ‘Collecting the data’ section.
Scoia’tael clearly leads the field, with above 80% pick frequency. Harmony and Elves clearly were viewed as solid options, guaranteeing success. NR, SK and NG are almost on equal footing, picked by around 70% of players. Monsters are slightly below this three, but still above 60%. Syndicate is clearly out of favor, picked by ~40% of players. Let’s see how good players calls were.
Average faction scores
Instead of taking all the faction scores, for each player we include only the picked factions fMMRs. But fMMR is hidden, right? Yeah, correct. We use special, homebrew mathematical function to estimate its value. We use only the results visible in the profile data! The accuracy is good enough, but it has to be noted, that fMMR refers to final value, rather than peak achievements.
Scoia’tael was clearly the best pick in the Season of the Magic, with average fMMR higher by ~20 points than the rest. Bad opinion of Syndicate was rather undeserved – it achieved results comparable to NR and SK, while doing even better than NG and MO.
Scores distribution
We can also see the scores of picked factions in a more detailed, but probably less clear way.
Closure
Thanks for reading my article, hope you enjoyed the presented statistics and discovered something new! I plan one more article about stats, but this time it would be a kind of critical overview. See you soon!
Written by lerio2
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Writing in-depth Gwent articles is fun, but time consuming. If you like ‘Alphabet’ or ‘Gwent for Geeks’ cycle or other articles, and fancy to support my efforts – here is the way to go: https://www.patreon.com/lerio2
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