Flyby215, on 30 December 2012 - 06:52 PM, said:
Hmmm... Playing devil's advocate here; wouldn't the Stalker stat be slightly skewed because it is the new mech and everyone wants to try it?
Actually there's a couple of macro trends that would need to be kept in mind for any analysis;
1) Holiday season. Should be a shift in the makeup/volume of playerbase, and I'd hypothesize you see more new/casual players in recent data samplings with <250 games played, likely driving a higher % of trial mechs and a relatively lower % of FOTM mechs
2) Recent macro game changes driving FOTM trends. Not just the Stalker release, but the addition of ECM (rise of Raven/Cicada/Commando variants as folks work to elite previously 'poor' chassis), the tail of the Cataphract release, the PPC projectile tweaks, TAG changes, etc. (edit: As pointed out below, also the $8.9M cbills given out last patch)
3) Player base growth. This went to open beta in mid-Oct (I didn't learn about it till just after the founders program closed!). I'd hypothesize your population is ramping up gradually, with a higher relative % of newbs than the last 10 weeks.
4) Timezone. Is the european meta different than the east coast american meta and the west coast american meta? Is there a korean playerbase? Etc.
5) Playerbase goals. While the data you can get is interesting, I'd caution about reading into it too deeply in absence of any competitive ranking system - some people play the same mech for 1000 matches, some people build troll builds, and right now a win or loss is immaterial in terms of your ranking so there's less incentive to optimize.
Anyhoo. Its a point in time set of observations, neat to read regardless. We could figure out a sampling that you could actually derive some legit statistical data from, but you'd need to keep all of the above in mind before drawing any conclusions.
Edited by Gaeb, 30 December 2012 - 07:15 PM.