Please tell me this is wrong.

[ChipMHazard]

Well the launchers are a good example of not buffing something simply based on an per hour score.
According to the chart the Striker has the highest score per hour but the least vehicle kills per hour and second least kills per hour. What does this mean? Anyone care to take a guess as to what we can take from that?

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by ChipMHazard

Well the launchers are a good example of not buffing something simply based on an per hour score.
According to the chart the Striker has the highest score per hour but the least vehicle kills per hour and second least kills per hour. What does this mean? Anyone care to take a guess as to what we can take from that?

You get points for damaging aircraft, but a striker 5 shot isn't fatal, so they escape, land, repair, come back, take more damage. Ground vehicles can do this too but they have cover even handier. Phoenix is more likely to get ground kills but highly unlikely to hit anything but dead-hovering aircraft.

Though the points for damage isn't really that high, I'd not have thought it would let the striker be top scoring. But then again, Phoenix has a slow reload.

Lancer, people just don't seem to use it. I don't know why, 2-3 guys firing it as a team, with its near hitscan speed, would be death.

[ChipMHazard]

I agree.
Could it perhaps have something to do with what the Strikers are mainly firing at? Ignoring ground targets in favor of air targets?
Could also simply be, as you pointed out, that aircraft give xp when you damage them. And since it's far easier to hit aircraft with Strikers it would make them more effective at getting xp than actually destroying the targets.
Could also be that since the Striker lacks alpha damage, perhaps drivers/pilots quite often have ample time to exit before dying. Or is it because that Strikers are more often used against aircraft, which are easier to escape with, than ground targets, which cannot escape as easily?
Strikers probably also grant more assist points to a larger amount of people than either the Lancer or Phoenix because of how it works.

[Kiten]

I see a lot of Strikers used in groups, or not at all. A group of strikers shooting at the same target can only ever have one of them scoring a kill, so I'd like to present that as a theory.

When it's not a group of Strikers, it works just like the Lancer: it gives out lots of Kill Assists, or deals enough damage to Aircraft to make the pilot flee and try to repair; but rarely gives off the kill of the pilot himself.

Some of those statistics will also be skewed towards times when stuff was or was not working; so the Phoenix will have data coming from when it was still oneshotting infantry. Which would explain why the average kill per hour is so much higher, even though it definitely is the easiest of the three launchers to get kills with.

As for the Lancer, well, it *is* the perfect kill stealer of all the launchers available to the game. And if I encounter a Lancer user, he is either alone or working with no more than one person- I've yet to see a Lancer squad on my server. I wish I did, though...

[Haro]

There are some pretty interesting tidbits in there. I agree with chewy that there are multiple factors involved in this, but I think there's a strong enough trend in the stats to necessitate an NC buff. But how, and why? Here's my theory.

If we look at classes by individual servers, we see the vast majority of NC classes are doing worse than the equivalents of the other empires, often by around 10%. This is a pretty significant and consistent, and even occurs on servers like Connery that have a large NC population. This does not appear to be a fluke. So lets look at weapons.

I don't generally like to look at weapons by results, as this can be misleading, and since this survey also focuses on players with a significant amount of playtime on each weapon, it is a bit self selecting and not completely objective. Also, toooo many numbers, my eyes hurt. But let's look anyway. If we focus on just the basic, most avalailable weapons, the default AR, LMG, Sniper Rifle, and Carbine. These weapons are the most uses, and therefore give us the best idea of the results on an average player.

The bolt driver is the only NC weapon to come out on top in its category, by quite a bit too, in terms of kills/hr, but in terms of score, it's a little closer.

It's the opposite with nearly every other weapon, with the NC always behind on score and kills, often about, you guessed it, 10% behind TR, with VS in the middle, typically closer to TR.

But before we suggest a fix, we should look at how classes perform across the spread of ranks, to get a feel for who these differences are affecting most. Here we see that most classes are very finely balanced at the upper levels, but the NC tends to lag behind in the first 20-30 levels, so it seems if these classes are in experienced hands, they all do equally well roughly, but there would seem to be a skill curve issue. This takes into account intangibles like player skill, but since this trend is widespread, I think we can attribute a large part of the problem to a weapon characteristic. In my opinion, it's the recoil. If you control your shots the right way, limiting your fire and adjusting for recoil, NC weapons can be very deadly. However, this is not easy to do, and in my experience with all three empires, the need to adjust for NC weapons is disproportionately higher than that of other empires.

If the spread of shots from NC weapons were tightened, I believe we could rectify the imbalance in the lower ranks while limiting the affect on the upper levels.

Other things I gleaned from this chart: TRAC-5 probably could use a nerf, default TR and VS sniper rifles could use buffs, the Vanguard definitely needs an AI buff, and WTF jackhammer???

That is all, thanks if you made it down this far.

[NotTheMomma]

It's meaningless to look at score/hour alone. NC is also dead last in XP boosts, for example, which directly affects score/hour.

[AThreatToYou]

I'll say, I've gotten a friend to play recently, and he really had no idea how to handle recoil. Especially the NC's recoil, on the AF-19 [the easiest to control weapon]. As soon as he started focusing on the actual game instead of the gigantic battles, I was able to coax him into:
- Pulling down on the mouse
- Not waiting a full fucking second in-between bursts

I feel as if a "how2recoil" tutorial is probably necessitated for new players, on all factions.
These things need to be told:
- Pull down/back on the mouse. Hard.
- The wait time in-between bursts varies between weapons, but generally, you can use human reaction time to facilitate the burst-wait: Just click again.

[Whiteagle]

Originally Posted by MrMak

Back i the later days of beta it was "Booh hoo NC is worst faction" then after the magrider got nerfed it was "Booh hoo Vanu is worst faction" (dont know about other servers but on Miller they seemsto still be recoverign fro mthat shit fit) then some TR went through the "boo hoo" phase in the form of the "big strike" that never hapended after "the demands were met" (that stuff was hilariously ridicoulus). Now its the NC's turn to cry, next the Vanu then the TR etc.

Hey don't lump us all in with FalconBR... he is a moron after all.

Originally Posted by NotTheMomma

It's meaningless to look at score/hour alone. NC is also dead last in XP boosts, for example, which directly affects score/hour.

Indeed, how large are population bonuses again?

[Chewy]

Did the link go down? All Im getting is a blank page from both the link and my bookmark.

[Assist]

You guys do realize that is based on score/hr right?
For those not understanding, please take a look at Waterson for example. The VS almost always gain more XP per kill than the NC/TR on Waterson due to population.

If anyone thinks the NC need a buff... ugh.

[psijaka]

Originally Posted by Chewy

Did the link go down? All Im getting is a blank page from both the link and my bookmark.

I'm getting a blank page too.

[Assist]

Originally Posted by Chewy

Did the link go down? All Im getting is a blank page from both the link and my bookmark.

Originally Posted by GoogleDocsAuthor

This was my attempt to improve the discussions on the PS2 forums by providing some statistics that were a bit more objective than the usual anecdotes and speculation.

Apparently, the SOE mods prefer their forums to be shitty and calling people on their bullshit is deemed "trolling". So fuck that place, I'll just be shooting dudes from now on.

XOXOXO,
CupBoy

</ragequit>

Seems he got upset.

[Chewy]

Originally Posted by Assist

You guys do realize that is based on score/hr right?
For those not understanding, please take a look at Waterson for example. The VS almost always gain more XP per kill than the NC/TR on Waterson due to population.

If anyone thinks the NC need a buff... ugh.

Then why is it the same in servers where NC are under populated and should be getting the extra XP? Granted low pop XP boost messes with the score an hour stats but there should be some give and take across multiple servers where each server has it's own pop imbalance. To have the same story for every server is beyond odd and in my opinion needs to be looked into to see why.

I, or someone that knows how to pull stats from google docs, needs to get another page or 2. The one I posted doesn't work for me anymore.


edit-
Assist I need a link to where you got that.

Edit 2-
Never mind I found it
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...UdTJpM1E&gid=4

WTH is going on here?

[ChipMHazard]

Well... Uhm.. Uh, I guess that's the end of the discussion then. Never had the information source rage quit on me before... So, yeah... Awkward...

I guess people can still discuss the broader concept of stats and their impact on balancing, or something along those lines.

[Chewy]

Yeah, with this happening Im kinda SOL with trying to get help with a stats page when the entire database doesn't exist anymore.

I still have this site
ps2-stats.com
But it isn't anywhere as good and has a lot of missing information. Kinda good for infantry and MAX weapons but crap for vehicle weapons for not saying what faction owns what NS vehicle weapon.

So, yeah. Im kinda boned here with this topic.