You loot a [barely readable diary]...

On Saturday I did nine PvP battles on my druid, playing as restoration. I wanted to collect data (and transmog!) to try and see if the long-standing rumors that the Alliance are terrible at random battlegrounds actually have any merit; and if I'm truly honest, I was hoping to prove them wrong.

We lost the first four matches, and then went on to lose six of the nine games I played. Maybe it's just me dragging the side down, but I don't think so. I'm a good healer, I defended objectives, I provided support where useful fights were happening and tried not to get drawn into the morass of "fighting in the middle", because that doesn't win matches. It might be satisfying to have a big brawl, but it doesn't secure victories. 

So after the weekend, my overall Alliance PvP stats sit at a 0.3 win-ratio for the BfA pre-season period, which ain't great. That needs to climb to at least 0.4 before I can start thinking these losses aren't statistically unusual; anything lower than that does suggest a Horde superiority. It's a little demoralising to queue in over and over and get beaten (almost) every time. When we won, we won well and usually right from the offset; it was particularly noticeable in a Temple of Kotmogu match where we dominated the scoreboard consistently throughout the match. Maybe it's not a coincidence that that is one of my favourite maps to play. 

I'm not doing a whole lot to compensate for various other variables, like time of day or type of queue. I'm just hitting the queues for random battlegrounds and the current brawl, and playing whatever pops first. While this might not result in the most accurate figures for the Alliance as a whole, it does more accurately reflect the way I'm personally playing, with PvP filling a time gap between doing other things. I'm not even sure that the results would change anything about how I play; I'm not invested enough in PvP to switch factions purely for a better win-ratio, and I'm not banking on PvP to provide me with any useful gear. 

Last night I did two things in World of Warcraft: I installed and tweaked the GW2 UI, and I went and ran some random battlegrounds. Both of them had their ups and downs.

I like the GW2 UI -- when I'm playing GW2. I thought I'd give it a go. What I should be doing is finely tuning an ElvUI setup, but I really can't be bothered. There's so much I don't like about ElvUI's defaults, I feel like I have to tweak every single thing, and then before you know it I haven't actually played any, but my UI has been adjusted by a handful of pixels. It looks like the GW2 UI offers a nice middle group. It helps get things out of the way, looks very nice, and it's nicely modular so I can turn off some of the more egregious stuff. I'll play with it for the next week or so and hang out in their Discord, and see how it goes.

The random battlegrounds are kind of a new thing for me; the last time I did any real amount of PvP was back in Burning Crusade. But I think I'm going to try and do more in Battle for Azeroth, it seems thematically appropriate for the expansion. So I queued up for some battlegrounds, in restoration druid spec. It went badly. I had enough time to run four battles, and we lost all of them. People say there's faction imbalance, that the Alliance are terrible at PvP, and maybe there's something to that, but I'm too much of a scientist at heart to believe that my extremely small sample size of four RBGs is suitable data. Truely, the thing to do is produce a spreadsheet, right? Broken down by season, by battleground, and so on. And then, once it's suitably populated, only then will I be able to say if there's an imbalance.

The other thing to do is re-read this fantastic post by Cynwise, On Faction Imbalance in Random Battleground Populations, and marvel at how well he had this stuff covered, back in 2014, and that it's still a thought floating around today.

Maybe all I'll be able to say is that I'm terrible at PvP. How much influence can one person have on the potential victory or defeat of their group in a random battleground? You'd hope that the law of averages would mean that over a large enough sample, there would be enough clueless idiots on both sides to even things out; but if the rumors of Horde PvP domination hold true that may not be the case.

Let's look at some maths for a moment, because why not. Let's assume -- and this is a big assumption -- that the two factions are supposed to be equal, and so each should win 50% of their battlegrounds. If we assign victory a score of 1, and defeat 0, the sum of all the battlegrounds played should have a standard deviation of (sqrt(n) / 2); thus after 100 battles, the standard deviation would be 5. Any number within 2 standard deviations (10) of what we expect (50) wouldn't look too suspicious. This means that after 100 battles, each side should have a score of between 40 - 60.

Stray too far from there, and some imbalance is suggested. The more battles run, the more accurate the prediction, and there's more complex math that can help ferret out the details, but let's not get into binomial confidence intervals just yet... it is only a game, after all.

Oh, but graphs! I do love a graph. I'm going to enjoy this little project.