Gentleman Jon —In part 2 as the meat of the season gets underway and I try to remember what life was like before red and blue charts dominated my every waking moment, and (in response to some wildly optimistic ideas that I should have some clue as to what I’m talking about rather than just burbling inanely) I’ve introduced some more detailed team play and kills stats to shed a bit more light on what’s going on in the games.
Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory vs Decerto
As you’d expect in a close match it’s statistically tight. It might be expected that WWCF’s edge in medic killing would translate into a decisive advantage, but Decerto’s equally impressive domination of the middle fights restored the balance, highlighting the importance of territorial gains.
Hildreth edged Kaidus for damage and Zoob was competitive with KnOxXx although the WWCF pocket and demo were clearly superior in fragging to their Decerto counterparts. Salt and Sideshow were evenly matched on the flank.
However the story with the scouts is quite different, with Sheepy and Furbo much more efficient killing machines. Zebbosai got big damage for a scout but with the lack of backup on his often isolated suicidal plays the KAD doesn’t match. That kind of damage/kad ratio for an effective scout is often a sign of sniper play boosting the damage output but not the overall kill/assist rate.
The kills and assists charts here (and for matches below) are only for kills that had assists, solo efforts are not shown. Hopefully this reveals something about the nature of the team play.
As expected from the healing stats in combat WWCF pocket KnOxXx strongly with Kaidus being 2nuts’s occasional second choice. Amongst the scouts Zebbosai was clearly more effective in combination with his teammates than smzi.
For Decerto the scout pair ruled the game beating even the KnOxXx/2nuts combo. Bulle spread the heals more evenly amongst his team in combat with only the flank of Sideshow and sheepy rarely hooking up for assists with him.
Overall there seems to be more evenly spread team play with a wider range of middling assists for Decerto whereas apart from working around KnOxXx’s damage there’s less combination play for WWCF, possibly as a result of highly aggressive plays that result in isolated players getting picked off.
Zebbosai equalled or got the edge on everyone he fought with the notable exception of furbo which is where most of his unexpected incursions into Decerto hit a brick wall, although he got in on the medic a lot.
Although he got the edge on damage Kaidus was clearly ahead in the demo head to head battle, really only suffering a big negative to Sheepy, who had a great game. He got a positive kills against almost everyone apart from Zebbosai who merely matched him.
Sideshow had the hardest time for Decerto as you might expect of the roamer although Salt did notably better for WWCF, however Smzi was the player from the Chocolate Factory who had a poor game.
There were rumblings before the season that WWCF would be using ETF2L as PCWs for ESEA and their results in comparison to what might be expected of their lineup may be bearing that out. Watching the game I got the feeling KnOxXx was calling the same kind of aggression he did for Epsilon but instead of the enemy melting away under the scatterguns of Bash and Stefan they’d end up in messy fights that in this case the Decerto scouts cleaned up.
Whether things are tightened up for ESEA or in future ETF2L games and a leaner fighting machine emerges remains to be seen.
Decerto vs Reverto
Following their draw with WWCF, Decerto faced Reverto over Process and Metalworks. In contrast Reverto play a controlled game and don’t give up frags with uncontrolled aggression which gave a different challenge to Decerto.
Reverto dominate all the important metrics, Decerto weren’t given room to breathe anywhere and never got a foothold in the match.
Huhy was a mile (or 1.6 kilometres my euro brethren) ahead of Hildreth on damage and fragging which put Decerto at a big disadvantage, and this time the Decerto scouts found themselves out played by their Reverto counterparts even though Tek was mercing.
The soldiers are well matched with Sideshow getting significantly more damage than Rising, but there was no way to overcome the inferiority elsewhere.
All frags lead to Tek and e-thug who cleaned up everything, with Tek gravitating more towards Stark and e-thug to Huhy. Both scouts also worked well with Rising. Bar pocketed Huhy falling back to Tek when necessary.
Sheepy and furbo were Decerto’s best fragging pair again but well below their previous performance. Sheepy had good combination play with most of his teammates but furbo was patchy, or possibly got no credit thanks to playing around his medic given how the assists system works.
Huhy was personally responsible for much of his demo superiority over Hildreth and was Bulle’s main tormentor, but Tek was the top individual fragger. Now that Aephage is stepping back they will need to make the right long term appointment.
Despite Tek’s individual superiority Sheepy had decent kills, but no one on Decerto consistently got to Bar. Hildreth’s difficulty contributing under pressure from Huhy, e-thug and Stark is obvious.
Reverto are emerging as a playoff contender despite being relatively unheralded, they must have taken confidence from this run of form.
Evokate vs TLR
This game marked the welcome return of the indefatigable frenchies to Prem under the banner of Evokate, saving us from a 7 team league. All hail le baguette!
The match was close in some respects but there’s a clear edge to TLR. Despite enjoying a 30 kill advantage they only had 1k damage extra, but the medic kills and ubers deployed are similarly in TLR’s favour.
Evokate caused a lot of damage but clearly the timing and focus fire wasn’t there.
Kiler piled on the misery putting in another top cleanup performance. Evokate’s soldiers put up good damage outclassing the TLR pair but they didn’t get the follow up from their scouts.
As noted above the damage levels are very similar with TLR only gaining a small edge, but 4 of the top KAD players are from TLR, none of whom are the medic.
T-Mac was the center of Evokate’s play with Flippy also hooking up well with Tek and Plapla. The rest is patchy, and k3’s lack of high assist numbers with any player reflects the difficulty he had staying alive.
Every player on TLR had at least a couple of effective relationships with just the no doubt rusty Traxantic struggling for fragging partnerships. Kiler leads the way for them with Kalho a close second.
Flippy can take some pride as the only player who kept a positive score against Kiler who was the single player most responsible for the TLR medic advantages. Hys didn’t pick up a lot of frags in any particular direction, just playing a traditional support role laying down general damage to everyone on Evokate and laying the foundation for others kills.
Exon in comparison was much patchier, picking up some success but badly losing the demo head to head, and neither of the Evokate scouts could get over 9 frags on any TLR player.
Ultimately it was a solid win for TLR with a good all round performance, but Evokate must have come away believing they can improve.
CauseWeCan vs TSE
CWC went into this match looking to recover from the nightmare start against Epsilon and the Chocolate Factory, and TSE were recovering from the disruption that they feel cost them their first match against Reverto. They ended up facing more of the same against TLR but the game against CWC went off without a hitch.
TSE were ahead in most metrics, although there’s a strong bias towards middles in favour of CWC. The stats don’t reflect how close Process was with the game remaining in the balance until the last few moments, and their superiority on middles is really where that came from with War and Forsak3n unable to contain Slate using the fast rollout. Arriving early to Process middle really does seem to be a double edged sword for demomen.
War managed to edge the top damage from Brego, although he had a significant advantage in heals to do so. The surprise is that droso managed to out damage every other player apart from the demomen, and the TSE scouts as a pair outclassed wltrs and Beavern although they had a little more healing (possibly due to being alive to receive it).
This made up for the soldiers being marginally out damaged by Synp and Slate although Snyyppis had the most heals of any player. However there’s a special mention for KLar who was heroically battling a chipped fingernail.
Byte bucked the trend of the losing medics tending to have to do the most damage, quite happily switching to the crossbow or ubersaw when the opportunity presented itself.
TSE’s best fragging pair was the scouts as you’d expect from the individual performances. Byte’s primary focus in combat was War who was effectively a pocket demo, but droso and fl1p earned more assists for the TSE medic than the soldiers. Both soldiers combined most effectively with droso who had a good game.
War was supported best by fl1p and Forsak3n with droso and KLar relatively rarely clearing up his damage.
For CWC, Beavern was their most prolific fragging partner, with only the medic/demo axis outstripping him. Wlkr is notable for fighting with Brego or almost no one, either going down with his demo or getting out of trouble the moment he senses the ship’s sinking. Snyp got a mountain of heals when hurt, but evidently not during combat.
Beavern managed to kill everyone on TSE more than they killed him, and Brego held his own, but otherwise it’s a bit of a bleak picture for CWC with Forsak3n the TSE player most likely to boost their KAD, although this is the roamer’s traditional role.
TSE’s assists didn’t show as strong a pattern as some teams, and they didn’t find themselves matched up on particular targets either, the team seeming to converge on targets of opportunity though whether this is down to TSE’s or CWC’s style is unclear.
TSE will be pleased to have got through an official without disruption and happy with the result, droso getting in touch with his inner beast and War reliably putting out the damage. CWC will rue the missed opportunity on Process but will gain some belief that they can compete with the middle tier of prem.
Epsilon vs Evokate
For their second game Evokate got to move on to everyone least favourite fixture (unless you’re some kind of masochist), and Epsilon got to vary their diet with some French cuisine for Raymon’s birthday.
Credit to Evokate and k3, they got to keep the ubercharge deployed numbers relatively even despite medic kills being well in favour of Epsilon, but that alone wasn’t enough to hold back the tide.
Stefan took the evening off so Bash could be the cleanup king on this occasion (please note, this does not indicate a strong opinion on play style details, it’s merely a fanciful narration to a graph). The damage output of Mike and Numlocked completely overshadows the game, Tek and Exon were thoroughly eclipsed although that’s only to be expected. Mike seems to have almost swallowed Raymon’s medigun in this game.
Although Bash is the pick of the scouts Flippy is neck and neck in damage terms, and it’s similar with Stefan and Plapla. There’s no comparison with kills/assists but there’s not much scope for it when the rest of the team is falling to the Mike/Numlocked damage grinder.
Gear and Bash shared the single strongest relationship for Epsilon, but Bash was also Mike and Stefan’s most productive partner as well, with Mike topping cleanup from Numlocked’s damage (and vice versa). Raymon spread things between Mike and Numlocked fairly evenly in combat. However in these comprehensive wins not too many conclusions can be drawn.
Unsurprisingly Evokate couldn’t get many partnerships going, with the Flippy/T-Mac flank partnership being the best that didn’t involve being pocketed by k3.
Being a short game the raw numbers aren’t large but Bash comes out as the best individual fragger, controlling Flippy who was Evokate’s main threat. The other Evokate player to make some headway was Tek who disrupted Epsilon’s combo somewhat and got the better of Gear in their head to head. Apart from a couple of exceptions it was Epsilon superiority across the board.
Ultimately there’s not much to tell from this game, Epsilon bolted down their two course meal as quickly as possible (presumably to get to the cake and jelly at Raymon’s party) and Evokate will be happily moving on to games they have more of a chance of getting a result from.
TSE vs Decerto
Going into this match Decerto had had some promising results but also faced disappointment, whereas TSE started with a loss and suffered repeated disruption of their games but had their confidence boosted by a comprehensive victory against CauseWeCan.
Given the way the match went it’s not surprising that TSE ended up with superiority in every metric. There was some sloppiness with their slow start, giving away a cheap round and some bits of confused play here and there (like the entire team defending Badlands house and leaving the choke completely unguarded), but once they got ahead they pressed their advantage.
War edged ahead of Hildreth on damage output, but the big difference was between fl1p and Sheepy (who particularly struggled on Metalworks) who found himself overpowered after a run of good matches. Forsak3n was also clearly better than Shifty who subbed in for Sideshow.
War stood head and shoulders above on KAD in a Numlockedesque performance, despite barely getting a whiff of Kritz.
Hildreth and Bulle had their best combined performance and sheepy and furbo still partnered effectively, but as you might expect with Shifty coming in the soldiers couldn’t combine effectively and furbo the pocket scout (going by heals) wasn’t able to connect with the pocket soldier Zoob.
Fl1p and Droso were merciless in cleanup, Byte pocketed War into combat but strangely had significantly more assists with Forsak3n than Klar despite Klar receiving more heals from the medic. Truly Byte’s game doesn’t conform to the usual standards.
War also combined well with Droso and Klar had equal success with fl1p. In contrast to the CauseWeCan game Byte barely touched his scouts in combat this time.
War got through this game barely touched by Decerto while Byte was just as well protected but saw Zoob a little more often than the others. Forsak3n buffed Decerto’s stats yet they couldn’t protect Bulle from his flanking.
Klar got marginally the worst of it from most Decerto players while making space for War with the exception of Shifty who he probably met coming in the other direction but other than that it was pretty bleak reading for Decerto.
In the aftermath it seems Decerto are becoming locked into a battle to avoid the wooden spoon as their early season advantage of their experience playing together fades, while TSE can start to lay claim to being potential playoff contenders as they improve after a rocky start.
CWC vs Evokate
Granary often presents a banana skin to a favourite and commonly hosts surprise results and this match was no exception. Evokate should have felt confident with their hugely experienced soldier pair, but it goes to show you never can tell.
The stats are even enough to suggest a draw, but they won’t tell the story of the match being very much a game of two maps. The sheer scale of the roll on Granary gives CauseWeCan a slight edge in most metrics.
Tek took the team on his back once Evokate finally got going, taking the heavy weapons class full time on Gullywash as Evokate looked for something different with Flippy sniping full time in support coming out as the top damaging ‘scout’.
Brego was the top damager, but Exon managed to stay competitive with him. Slate out damaged his pocket soldier partner for the second time.
Plapla’s overall stats suffer from having a horrible Granary but he was better on Gully.
Snyp was the fulcrum of a Beavern/Snyp/Brego fragging axis for CWC. Walker spread his combat heals fairly evenly with only wltrs left out on his own. Slate had significant fragging partnerships with almost his whole team. Because their map win was such a colossal roll on Granary their assist numbers aren’t very high, and they’re probably atypical as they are mostly mid fights and breaking hastily erected last defences.
Even more than Snyp was a focus for his team, Tek was the centre of almost everything for Evokate, and sucked up massive heals in combat from his medic trying to keep him at 450 health as much as possible. The other relationship of note was Plapla and Exon, defending and clean up his demoman’s damage.
Beavern got the better of both the Evokate scouts, and Brego had a plus score against every opponent. Tek brutalised wltrs (who had mixed fortunes on the flank) and had the number of both of the CWC soldiers, not a bad feat after the first map.
Walker didn’t manage to do his disappearing act quite as often, T-Mac getting to him regularly, although on the other side k3’s match was blighted most by Slate. Slate was the only player particularly picked out by Flippy’s headshot sprees, who distributed the decapitation in the traditionally French egalitarian manner.
CauseWeCan popped their Prem points cherry in emphatic style which can’t all be put down to the Granary effect, but Evokate deserve credit for getting back into things on Gullywash even though they had to resort to what appeared to be somewhat desperate measures, although the strategy was not so desperate with Flippy on sniper.
TLR vs Reverto
Both teams entered this game with a degree of chaos in their lineups, but TLR had made the commitment to Nadir while Reverto were still looking to resolve the scout situation permanently. This promised to be a close tense match between two teams with similar styles.
The stats reflect a close match, but with some interesting wrinkles. Reverto have a small but clear edge on damage, while TLR have a similar edge on frags which hints at better team play or the ability to absorb that damage from medic healing.
Cap counts were even but out of that TLR managed to edge a couple of decisive extra rounds over the two maps, managing to roll points they won together slightly more effectively and of course the decisive back cap on Metalworks. A huge advantage to Reverto in uber drops and middles won was countered by a massive advantage in medic kills for TLR.
Officially mercing gf18 has the best KAD which is a good result on his debut with what may turn out to be his new team. However 4 of the next 5 places in KAD are taken by TLR players.
Huhy had a huge edge on damage over Hys, the KAD seems to show that cleanup was better on Hys’s damage but was it medic assists? Evilmoon certainly did well out of somebody.
The soldier pairs were both evenly matched, with Kiler putting out the most damage of any scout but the Reverto pair had better coordination within their team than the TLR pair. Evilmoon gave much more healing support in combat than Bar, which isn’t surprising given the medic kills stats.
Evilmoon pocketed both Hys and Kalho into the fighting, but they didn’t form a partnership between them. Hys didn’t get a great deal of focused support from anyone clearing up his damage (although Evilmoon’s medic assists are probably blocking some of that out), whereas Kalho and Rake formed a good partnership.
Rake also worked well with Kiler who otherwise mostly took opportunities as they came. The Reverto scouts formed a lethal partnership but Bar wasn’t able to support fighting players in the same way Evilmoon did, although he clearly favoured Huhy when possible.
Stark was generally everywhere except with his medic in the fighting, making space for his demo presumably, even though he received a lot of heals from his medic during quiet periods. Rising and e-thug worked well together on the flank as well.
It seems like TLR worked more around the medic than Reverto did, but then the medic kills were heavily in TLR’s favour so Reverto probably didn’t have a choice.
The demomen steered well clear of direct confrontation, both falling far more commonly to scouts and soldiers than to each other. Hys was well on top of the Reverto pocket soldier and medic, although as the stats show Stark rarely fought with Bar, successfully anyway.
Huhy’s frags in general are a bit low, but he fought often with the Reverto flank and was mostly on top of Rake and Nadir, although Kiler had a clear advantage clearing him up. Kalho outplayed both Reverto soldiers, but Nadir in his first start failed to register a kill against Stark at all, being dominated by the other new boy gf18.
Gf18 notably got well on top of Kiler who was as usual a massive pain in everybody else’s collective ass. It’s no surprise that Reverto are interested in gf18’s permanent services on this showing. Congrats to e-thug on his brilliant Harry Redknapp impersonation in the post match interview. “He’s a ‘triffic player, but I wouldn’t want to poach him, but if he wants a move well, who’s to say? You’ll have to speak to the chairman.”
e-thug discusses gf18′s future
It’ll be interesting to see how things go with Nadir in TLR, Haunter was pressured to produce more damage but Nadir as an inexperienced player will probably be given more time to improve and produce the roamer’s targets of uber forces, medic kills, etc.
Season Player Performance – Intermediate Report
Avert your gaze droso because the anti-team individual name and shame stats are back. War’s reputation may have been boosted by his i49 exposure as the most damaging demo despite being in the worst invite team, but is such exultation of the individual really justification for this callout fest? I won’t keep you waiting around for the answer, it’s yes.
In the name of the individual I’m discarding Kill Assist Death ratio for Kills Death ratio (except for Medic). To hell with focus fire, and team play, steal those kills for personal glory!
Disclaimer: The season is only part of the way through and each team’s opponents aren’t even remotely comparable, but remember kids, it’s just a bit of fun.
Demomen
As expected Numlocked is leaving no room for doubt this season in the damage stakes. War clings to his coat tails posting second best damage and KD whilst getting just as many heals but with tougher opposition to come will he be able to hold on? The midfield is pretty packed with similar damage amounts but KD varies widely, with Huhy and Hys appearing amongst the better death matchers while Brego and Hildreth need to improve – the strength of team is no doubt infecting even the best efforts to individualise the stats. Exon is notably slow on damage dealt, over 100 DPM down on Numlocked.
Pipes vs Stickies
As logs don’t tell us which weapons are doing damage these stats aren’t definitive usage data but they do tell us how demos are getting their kills. Bottles, Pain Train and world not included.
Kaidus and Hys are about average getting about 2.5 ratio of kills with stickybombs to pipes. War and Exon show the greatest preference for pipes although the degrees of success varies greatly.
Numlocked and Huhy show a strong preference for stickies but Hildreth is getting 4 sticky kills for every pipe kill. Just wait for him to run out of stickies then get in his face people, he’s practically defenceless.
Soldiers
Unfair as it may be to lump all the soldiers into one list I’m doing it because some buggers keep switching role and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I weed out who played roamer on which map.
Well how’s this for some meaty subtext to the season? Ex-teammates battling it out neck and neck at the top of the listings, Mike edging KnOxXx for damage and KD. When they meet in the season there will be more than the game on the line, there’ll be personal honour.
Gear’s use of the Black Box, being the only soldier that’s even got a kill with it, doesn’t seem to have hurt him, he’s out damaging every other pocket soldier in the league.
There’s been quite a bit of switching players and much of it is swapping like for like but Sideshow going out for Shifty is a severe blow for Decerto on the stats available.
Scouts
With scouts being the main off-classers I should point out only things achieved when playing scout count here. However because of the complexities involved pause times creep in so anybody playing in a TSE match will probably have slightly suppressed stats.
When it comes to damage Zebbosai’s mixture of suicidal plays and sniping has managed to put him in between the Epsilon pair but his KD is significantly inferior. Tek’s merc appearance as scout puts him in as a best of the rest, but these one offs will be removed for any season end review.
That’ll mean the end of Aephage’s epic KD ratio as well unless he makes a shock return. Beavern and wltrs damage well for CauseWeCan but have poor KD, whereas the TSE pair damage almost as well but have more effective KD ratios, and would probably have marginally better DPM if it weren’t for their pause problems.
Medics
For the purposes of measuring the healers I’ve looked at heals per minute to judge their overall healing effectiveness, ubers per minute to show who builds well and who looks after their charge, and KAD illustrating which medics work well in combat and which ones leg it to safety ASAP. The last metric is of course reliant on having a team that can get kills.
Yet again Epsilon top the charts. Did they really have (statistically) the best medic in TF2 just waiting to step in, or would it be naïve to think his performance is unrelated to his team?
Byte shows that the old dog can still run with the kids, statistically strong in healing and in combat but slipping maybe a little into mediocrity on uber rate. I guess something has to give running 5 other players brains for them.
2nuts, Bar and Evilmoon either benefit from playing with good fraggers or are brave in combat. Walker certainly has a reputation for getting out at the first sign of trouble and he shared the lowest medic KAD with Bulle, but they and k3 also play on teams that have had trouble delivering kills so it would be harsh to ignore that.
Sniping
To qualify for the sniper section required at least 5 minutes of time playing as sniper (some had a lot more) and at least one headshot kill.
Flippy may be mediocre amongst the elite of Prem scouts so far this season, but he’s currently the top dog amongst the snipers. Going full time on Gully he was under pressure to produce and he did getting the most kills per minute and headshots per minute of any sniper.
Tek makes it a 1-2 for the French in kills per minute but he may raise a curled lip from sniper connoisseurs because he clearly did it with far too many body shots. Fl1p makes it 3 out of the top 4 with more of a purists headshot count.
If there’s a player holding the torch for the Swedish super sniper it’s Beavern who breaks into the French dominated sniper elite, Zebbosai falling into mediocrity.
Unlock watch
I thought there’d be something interesting to say about unlocks but beyond Gear no one in Prem is using the Black Box and although a few scouts use the winger it’s not used for its combat abilities rendering it statistically almost non-existent. Pyro unlocks? Just no.
Conclusion
Congratulations if you’ve made it this far, have a candy. Unfortunately there’s no witty denouement waiting for you, just the (possibly empty) promise of some more coverage likely to turn up when I get the chance to commune with Excel in the near future, and when I stop crawling into the corner weeping at the sight of a bar graph. Until next time, stay classy.
Originally published on VanillaTV (vanillatf2.org) on 2013-10-26 by diemasher.
Recovered from the Internet Archive (archived copy) as part of tf2esports.com's preservation of VanillaTV's TF2 coverage. The original site is no longer online. All rights remain with the original author; reposted for historical reference.