(I was on the fence about whether the last spot should go to Paladin or Ranger, but when I saw Measure’s answer I decided to let hipsterism be the deciding factor.)
Key Insights:
There seems to be a rock-paper-scissors thing going on here: Earthy fighters have an advantage over Watery fighters, Watery fighters have an advantage over Flamey fighters, and Flamey fighters—kinda, sorta, unreliably—have an advantage over Earthy fighters. (And the Nightmare has an advantage over everyone.)
This is relevant because 3⁄5 of the opposing team is Earthy fighters, including Greenery Giant, who has strength that rivals the Nightmare, and whose presence on a team predicts a ~60% chance of victory.
Teams which are slanted too heavily towards a given element have an extremely low win rate. I can’t tell to what extent this is because losing the rock-paper-scissors game hurts you more than winning it helps, and to what extent balance is inherently valuable, so I’m playing it safe and not building an entire team of firestarters (also, there are only two Flamey fighters with non-terrible win/loss ratios).
Tangential insights:
I infer from the format of the alternative list that—absent an extremely tricky fakeout—position doesn’t matter: A+B+C+D+E is equivalent to E+D+C+B+A.
Different fighters are used with very different frequencies, but this sampling bias doesn’t seem to affect my analysis much.
Eyeballing the correlation matrix, it looks like teams are thrown together randomly; no pairs that always show up together, etc. This makes things much simpler, since I can be confident that (for example) GG’s apparent power isn’t just because people keep using him alongside NN (or vice versa).
There’s a random element here. Existence proof: A+B+C+S+V vs A+E+I+T+V happened twice with different outcomes. Given this, I’d want to push Cloud Lightning Gaming to have the match be best-of-five, to decrease randomness’ relevance to the outcome.
I appreciate the omission of letters that would let us (accidentally or otherwise) spell out common swearwords.
Thank you for making this.
Regular team:
Nullifying Nightmare, Blaze Boy, Greenery Giant, Tidehollow Tyrant, and . . . yeah, okay, Phoenix Paladin.
(I was on the fence about whether the last spot should go to Paladin or Ranger, but when I saw Measure’s answer I decided to let hipsterism be the deciding factor.)
Key Insights:
There seems to be a rock-paper-scissors thing going on here: Earthy fighters have an advantage over Watery fighters, Watery fighters have an advantage over Flamey fighters, and Flamey fighters—kinda, sorta, unreliably—have an advantage over Earthy fighters. (And the Nightmare has an advantage over everyone.)
This is relevant because 3⁄5 of the opposing team is Earthy fighters, including Greenery Giant, who has strength that rivals the Nightmare, and whose presence on a team predicts a ~60% chance of victory.
Teams which are slanted too heavily towards a given element have an extremely low win rate. I can’t tell to what extent this is because losing the rock-paper-scissors game hurts you more than winning it helps, and to what extent balance is inherently valuable, so I’m playing it safe and not building an entire team of firestarters (also, there are only two Flamey fighters with non-terrible win/loss ratios).
Tangential insights:
I infer from the format of the alternative list that—absent an extremely tricky fakeout—position doesn’t matter: A+B+C+D+E is equivalent to E+D+C+B+A.
Different fighters are used with very different frequencies, but this sampling bias doesn’t seem to affect my analysis much.
Eyeballing the correlation matrix, it looks like teams are thrown together randomly; no pairs that always show up together, etc. This makes things much simpler, since I can be confident that (for example) GG’s apparent power isn’t just because people keep using him alongside NN (or vice versa).
There’s a random element here. Existence proof: A+B+C+S+V vs A+E+I+T+V happened twice with different outcomes. Given this, I’d want to push Cloud Lightning Gaming to have the match be best-of-five, to decrease randomness’ relevance to the outcome.
I appreciate the omission of letters that would let us (accidentally or otherwise) spell out common swearwords.
PVP team:
DM’d
Your team is called Cloud Liquid Gaming. Cloud Lightning Gaming is actually their opponent.
. . . I feel oddly proud to have continued the tradition of D&D players getting in-universe names wrong.