During Gencon 2022, Bostria released the popularity statistics of the factions and their comparison in relation with their efficiency in the ITS. Popularity Efficiency
First and foremost they are awesome and I hope that maybe the data will encourage CB to bring Tohaa back.
But to play tohaa, you have to have them ( not easy to find second hand), except if you play proxy of course. I would have thought that because of the discontinuation of prod, that the player base would have decreased and that in these stats our popularity would have decreased, a like in the last campaign.
Due to the loose proxy rules and second hand market I don't think you'll see a great decrease in Tohaa just due to the strength of the force and it's different play style.
I'm wondering at the actual value of the data, particularly with 'efficiency'. Don't want to write off lower level players and events, since faction performance at all levels is important. But I hope they factor in more than "global win rate" to determine which armies need help. For popularity on the other hand, simple ITS play rate is probably a pretty good metric to go by. That said, that efficiency chart maps pretty close to my own interpretation of the strongest factions. Though I'm surprised to see no Nomads or Hassassins there. Perhaps its a skill floor issue?
Huh. I would have thought Vanilla Nomads would have been more popular (Rank#10). It is still good but for how much they get discussed, I would think more would be represented in ITS. Efficiency results are not surprising. Vanilla CA being the most popular Faction and having great results tracks.
Nomads are too fair of a faction to get that high, lets all be real. They sell a lot of models because they look good but they just don't give results, hence why they're low. People avoid them if they want to win and begrudging play them if they like them.
When reading the forum one can easily get the impression that Nomads are overpowered just by how much ppl are complaining about them being overly optimised, while Yu Jing is bad and never gets something good. Yet Nomads arent even in the top ten regarding efficiency, but 2 sectorials of Yu Jing are. Is it all smoke and mirrors?
Entirely possible, IIRC the stats scraped by the community in N3 showed that Yu Jing was not a new player friendly faction.
What do these charts actually mean though? What is popularity? Models sold? ITS lists submitted? All lists created on army app? What is efficiency? ITS win rate %? Durgama win rate? Or something else?
From how CB's been doing these before and from what Bostria said and didn't say they are; popularity is either ITS participation or raw number of Army lists saved to their servers, while efficiency is most likely ITS participation divided by ITS win. They're not Durgama numbers at least! Then you've read only a very minority of arguments or you've not bothered to put them in contextualize what they complain about - which is understandable, but you've still got the wrong message as the complaints are very seldom about Nomads as a faction, but rather about very specific parts of Nomads arsenal of tools. Though as Bostria said these simple lists don't say why they end up the way they do and stuff that has nothing to do with faction performance can impact where people place. For example, I think Yu Jing veterans have the capacity to shift both ISS and WBA to temporary highs only off of renewed motivation from Raveneye update, but I could only speculate as to why Hassassins aren't in there since they were far outperforming my expectations when I tried them prior to the update and I couldn't even begin to formulate a theory on why Aleph is on the list let alone in top spot.
I tend to scroll through the big discussion threads from time to time without daring to engage in them (it is a swamp really). When looking at tournament lists it is usually that specific arsenal that hits the table, so it kinda ends up being representative. No need to dive deeper here, I'm not a tournament player and in the end couldn't care less because my local meta is small and all over the place. I just find it interesting, however wrong I may be.
I think the data is good as it points to the fact that players in ITS have a decent chance of running into Nomads and CJC. So people are experiencing playing against them and there are strong feelings about it. But it also shows even more people are running into Vanilla CA, Shas, and Tohaa. And while people generally acknowledge that those factions are very strong, I never hear complaints at a level like against Nomads. I just think it's weird that we get huge threads complaining about Nomads, but we get no dedicated threads complaining about CA, Shas, or Tohaa. In fact, we have one thread complaining that the Avatar nerf was too much and another asking for more CA units to be buffed! I just wish people had some perspective. Why are people ok with CA being very powerful while Nomads "have too many tools?" Why are they considered "unfair?" Does it boil down to a fluff argument that they should be weak? If it a fluff argument, sure, that is fine. But it feels weird that fluff is being justified to make things weaker because in most other cases, it is used to ask for things to be stronger. I don't play Nomads, but I have been watching this same type energy start to be directed to Haqqislam and HB. And that worries me and I want to know how we can stop it from getting spreading. I just want people to play the game and have fun.
@Brokenwolf the issue with Nomads isn't that they're overpowered, only that they're overdesigned. Other factions are mostly kept within their design limitations (though the number of issues increases), Nomads aren't. CJC is the worst offender here, getting units and tweaks that they simply don't need. It doesn't mess up the balance all that much, because core game design is fairly resilient to it and helps keeping the field mostly level. For example it doesn't really matter much that Mobile Brigada, a standard line HI, have ARM 5 for some reason. But this amount of care for a particular sectorial is really tiring, even if it doesn't make Nomads too powerful.
In theory, overdesign can lead to overpowered, if the result is a faction that has all the strengths and abilities of the other factions, and also has Morans. I haven't faced enough Nomads to have an opinion on whether that's happened, but it's a logical consequence if overdesign goes too far. I feel like the complaints about HB were BS15 B2 Pitchers for 17 points, and BS17 B5 wildcard Asawiras. Post-Raveneye, I don't give a lot of credence to the idea that HB is overpowered. Although, we'll see how McMurrough plays out. I haven't heard similar complaints about vanilla Haqq, even though I think it's a quite strong faction and got a very significant boost from Raveneye.
From what I've seen that's just the one guy really annoyed about HB, and all of Yu Jing mildly fuming about the Asawira. Best I can tell, the Nomad complaints are partially a result of broken design boundaries infringing onto other factions' spaces for a long, long time now and the specific issue caused by Morans and Jazz/Interventors zoning half the factions in the game out of Hacking in all-comers lists. CA can do nearly anything, but at least it usually pays through the nose for a given capability and if someone musters up a counter they're on the back foot. I quite dislike how much attention CA get and how broad its design space is too, but unlike with Jazz we can't discuss counters, propose fixes and direct complaints specifically. All we can do is nicely, or not nicely, ask CB to kindly start exercising the faintest shred of restraint. And that doesn't make for fun threads.
The Yu Jing soreness about the Asawira is due to comparison against our own Crane, who manages to be significantly worse in every meaningful capacity, yet still costs 10 points more.
To add to Striopa's excellent point, I'd argue it's also because of the NPE or uninteractivity that can arise from playing against them. GML? Not fun. Pitchers projecting hacking to wherever without any chance to react? Not fun. Rooftop Morans projecting a zone of hacking death? Not fun. Chimera unstoppably crossing the table under smoke to kill your shit? Not fun. Etc etc etc Haqq/Hass lean into that territory too. Ghazi project fuck you zones like Morans and are dirt cheap. Meanwhile every list starts with one or even two Impersonators, a unit type infamous for shitting on newer players and being rough and uninteractive to deal with. Hassassins is the same but adds effective GML/pitcher shenanigans and now (for some crazy reason) McMurrough, who has a similar issue to Chimera in that he ignores many elements of the game. *For what its worth, I don't necessarily agree these are all problems, or that they are problems to the extent that they are sometimes depicted, just that these are all things that do promote uninteractivity and which do seem to cause a lot of complaints.
