Why Balancing based on statistics is logically flawed.

@"Cal Cohen.3527" said:I went ahead and pulled all of the matches from this season where one team had two duos and the other team had none. In these matches, the team with two duos won 46% of the time.

Say you have a simple PvP game with only two characters, a mage and a fighter.

At low skill levels, fighter absolutely dominates the mage.At medium skill levels, fighter still has an advantage but not very big.At high skill levels, they are about even with a slight advantage to the mage.At pro skill levels, the mage absolutely dominates 100% of the time.

Say whoever is in charge of balance decides to only look at the winrate - finding that it is 50/50 mage vs fighter. With this information, the balance team decides no changes are necessary.Except that's wrong. Very wrong. If mage is dominating when players know how to play, this means that mage is overpowered but also too complex. In this case, the balance team will have successfully killed Esports opportunities in their game by balancing for the winrate instead of balancing based on an actual understanding of what's wrong.

It's like if someone said that "If X + X = Z then Y + Y must also = Z" An obviously incorrect statement, because you have no way of knowing if X and Y are the same number. That's the problem with balancing on statistics. Win rates do not compare apples to apples and should be seen as a minor influence in balance decisions. In the case of Cohens post, it gives insight into why balance updates from anet are usually bad. Duos, of course, do not actually have a 46% win rate -because the only duos that matter are when two pros duo together and dominate. Two drunken friends duoing their PvE builds being thrown into the same data analysis is absolutely silly. X ( bad players ) is not Y ( good players ).

And so here we are, Feb 6, and yet again the balance patch falls short of intended goals and fails to address real issues.

And Rev is just my own personal problem. There was plenty else wrong with this update.-Elusive mind untouched-Holosmith damage still busted-Shatter mes is likely busted now-No meaningful Warrior changes-No meaningful thief changes

As long as the balance team continues to balance based on stats instead of legitimate game knowledge, they will continue to make inept decisions that do nothing for the game.

The use of statistics is not limited to calculating and looking at the sample mean.I'm sure ANet has a lot of data to work with and knows more about their game's balance than we do.

@Airdive.2613 said:

I'm sure ANet has a lot of data to work with and knows more about their game's balance than we do.

No. They don't. If they did they wouldn't be making misguided decisions. The fake patch notes from Reddit were actually better than what really happened, and that says a lot.

I’m going to wait longer than a few hours to determine whether Rev is now nerfed into uselessness.

I've tried the new IO. It's bad. Very bad. It's so bad it's almost like the balance team is getting revenge on Rev players for calling them out. The hilarious thing is it even has an ICD on it so you can't even do certain combos.

I own mages with my rev