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Team Fortress 2 Stats Confirm Every Suspicion
Valve has released another round of stats, this one concerning all that Team Fortress 2 playing we've been doing. They have things broken out along a couple of different metrics, including lifespan, kills, assists, captures, and even just damage dealt. As Rock, Paper, Shotgun's commentary notes, the stats confirm every suspicion you've had about your fellow players. "Yes, there are more rushy-bastard Scouts than any other class. Yes, campy-bastard Snipers earn the most points. Yes, hitpointy-bastard Heavies get the most kills. Yes, hidey-bastard Engineers live longest. And so on. What's slightly odder is the breakdown of which side wins most frequently on each map. BLU has the edge in every killing field except Dustbowl and Gravelpit. Why? How? I thought we were all the same! Damn you for not being neater, demographics." We previously discussed Valve's stats release on Half-Life 2: Episode 2 .
It doesn't surprise me that Blue wins more consistently than red. Red stands out more on most maps, thus giving the blue opponents a slight edge in spotting the enemy. You definitely see this same thing at play in Halo, and I would suspect it may be even more prevalent there due to the brightness of the colors.
I think it is hilarious that the most deaths in 2Fort are right at the spawn points.
in regards to the bit about scouts, snipers, heavies, engies, etc...it's almost as if each class has certain strengths and weaknesses put in there intentionally! I know it sounds crazy, but maybe, just *maybe*, there's more of a difference to each class than the character model! WOW!
As far as the RvB thing goes, it's obvious. BLU is best. Also, maybe the red jackets of those Red Bread losers wear makes them stand out more? Just a thought, but I bet a bright red jacket against a concrete wall is an easier target to lock in on than a blue jacket against the same wall.
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
The sniper get more points an hour then the Heavy which gets more kills per hour... As snipers are less likely to defend or capture I am curious as to why that is the case. Perhaps it is killing turrets...
Poor medics die fast... Not in my games!!!! NO ONE SHOOTS THEM THE NOOBS!!!!!!
Rocket launcher does the most damage but the not allot of kills for the soldier... Perhaps this is both the soldier and the turret for the engineer? As I do not see turret stats for weapon damage.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
The fact that heavies have the most kills could be misleading. How many of those kills were while the heavy was being healed simultaneously by a medic? A heavy does have real killing power, but because he is so slow he is easily killed by pretty much anyone outside of his rain o'bullets. Also, I usually see a good spy or soldier consistently at the top of the leader boards when I play. This could just be an artifact of the server that I frequent though.
The reason is obvious: the game designers are part of the great liberal conspiracy. Sure, right now it's just "blue always wins," but the next thing you know Hillary's in the White House and we're all paying 95% tax rates for substandard health care and rising up against the proletariat.
I'm a TFC vet planning to get TF2 soon. Any advice on servers to play, settings to use, or noob behavior to avoid? (Besides the obvious "Always shoot the medic first".) I bet I'll miss my grenades.
Good point about the jackets, but on most levels (well, on 2fort, but that's all my friends seem to play) each side stands out on the opposing side's base and blends in in their own base. The Red Base has barn-style decorations and The Blue Base has bluer walls and more shadowed areas.
Personally I want to see the current stats put up against the next batch of stats. How many more people will be playing Blue now that it is revealed to be the team that wins most often and how will this affect their winning streak?
Slashdot headlines are getting worse and worse, if not for the sake of sensationalism. So, Team Fortress 2 confirms:
- Elvis is alive
- Area 51 experiments
- JFK's *real* assassins
- The existence of the Illuminati
- Pharmaceutical conspiracies
- Chupacabras
- ECHELON-style monitoring
Sorry, Team Fortress Developers, Deus Ex beat you to the punch 5 years ago!
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
I'm surprised the demoman isn't in there for most points, or kills. When I finally got around to trying this class (after 2-3 weeks playing scouts and soldiers primarily) I racked up more points/kills in 30 minutes than I did with any other class in the previous weeks. All I did was sticky-bomb high-traffic areas and blow people up when they walked by... came to point where someone bothered to note how little skill I had (and I didn't argue, it felt cheap and I got bored with it after an hour or so).
According to the stats, Red successfully defends Dustbowl some 71% of the time. While I expect the defenders to win slightly more than the attackers, this percentage indicates that's something wrong with the map balance. Dustbowl is also ranked fourth based on time played (ahead of Well and Granary). This might not have anything to do with Red's skewed win/loss ratio, but it's worth pointing out.
(I've been playing Dustbowl since 2000 and it's the only reason I give a damn about TF, in case you're wondering.)
A mediocre Red team still has a decent chance of winning; a mediocre Blu team doesn't. Furthermore, a good player can still have fun on Red even if his teammates are idiots. Not so on Blu, where the entire team must work together to gain ground. Try advancing through the "death corridor" on stage 3 as your four offense engies refuse to switch to a more useful class or move their gear up. (As a side note, I've noticed that as more Blu players switch to engineer, the odds of Blu losing increase exponentially.)
To be sure, I've played some fantastic rounds on team Blu, but I often find myself server hopping to avoid wasting my time as an attacker doomed to defeat (hey, I don't have much gaming time these days and I'm not going to squander it getting raped.)
This trend is the reverse of what I saw in TFC: Blue would win the majority of matches thanks to skilled players pipe/nade jumping the flag into the cap, bypassing the entire defending team. In TF2, one player can't jump across half the map and save the day. In other words, there's a greater emphasis on teamwork.
One of my suggestions: redesign the first capture point on stage 3. Maybe narrow the bunker to give Blu a wider area to navigate and reduce the potency of Red demos. Any other Dbowl players think the map needs tweaking to even the odds, or is this simply due to offense requiring more coordinated teamwork, something in scarce supply on pub servers?
It's not that Blue has the edge on most maps. Their edge is minimal, and probably not significant. It's the seemingly HUGE discrepancy in favor of Red on Dustbowl. Red wins over 70% of the rounds?!?
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Disclaimer: I'm relying on "big numbers" to make these "statistics" relatively accurate. I've done no actual analysis beyond looking at the numbers.
You can get some insight into the numbers behind the very non-numerical TF2 by inferring from these statistics.
If you look at the "average distance" stats, you notice immediately that the fireaxe appears to have a longer range than other melee weapons--and it appears to be a fairly significant extension, making the axe's averagekilling range nearly as long as that of the flamethrower itself. If we take the engineer's shotgun as representative of the average distance for any non-sniper non-melee individual battle (because it's the engineer's primary weapon, meaning it sees a lot of use, and probably the most generic weapon in TF2), we notice that flamethrowers tend to be lethal at close ranges (closer than that of the shotguns, at least), but the axe is lethal at comparably close ranges. It's an interesting result, since I (at least) wouldn't have assumed any of the melee weapons had longer or shorter ranges.
In the same graph, we can see that either syringe gun tracking is bugged, or that medics have a _very_ hard time aiming with their syringe gun--its average kill distance is just about the same as that of the melee weapons. The remarkable consistency of the melee weapons' ranges, now that I think about it, make me wonder if that's not the center-point-to-center-point distance between two players, and most melee kills are at absolutely point-blank range. When you compare the SMG and the syringe gun, it's easy to believe that people have a much harder time using the syringe gun because it has an arcing projectile, despite having a larger clip than the SMG and also doing slightly more damage-per-hit.
Looking at the critical damages table, it seems that--as this Soldier suspected--the RL gets more criticals than other weapons--except, surprisingly, the GL. Just as surprisingly, it's not as big of a differential as this Soldier suspected. I had the perception that the RL was consistently getting noticably more criticals than most other weapons, but it appears that's not really the case.
As we see from the same graph, the melee weapons all get far more criticals than other weapons. This probably accounts for some melee weapons being so high on the damage-per-hit graph. The highest melee weapons on the latter graph are the ones that inherently do more damage and also get more criticals, since the damage-per-hit graph doesn't appear to be corrected for criticals. It's interesting to note that it doesn't appear that the bonesaw and the bottle are much different in damage-per-hit, even though I feel there's wide perception that the bottle is useless and the bonesaw is the 'best' melee weapon. Offhand, I think the bonesaw swings faster than the bottle, but I don't remember the difference being too great.
Of course, since the SDK has been released I think it's perfectly possible for someone to go gather the coded data for each weapon. Still, it's interesting to dig a little into these statistics and see what ends up happening out in the field.
Am I the only one here that read "BLU" and their first thought was "Blue Mage" from FFXI?
Make an update to the game such that friendlies always appear each player as blue, hostiles as red. I don't play the game, so don't know if there's more to team appearance than different colors. America's Army, the player ALWAYS sees their skin and same team members' skins as US Army (or allied indigenous forces), and the enemy as the hostile skin. There's still offense and defense for a given map, but the scenario is written, depending on which team you spaawn as, that you're always US Army, and the other team is a hostile-to-US force. Should be a feasible fix to the visibility disparity. What's interesting is how they handle weapons. AS I recall, if I'm playing as a basic rifleman, I have a M-16 or M4 rifle. An opponent sees me as a hostile (different skin) with an AK-47. Same in reverse. Now, if my oppponent kills me, he can take my weapon, which he now carries as an AK-47 - may be more damage, but less accurate in his hands. To him, he's US Army handling an AK-47.
Hydro's not at all symmetrical, so that's understandable. Red's final CP is ridiculously easy to cap, while blue can hold out for a long time in their little basement bunker. Granary and 2fort are so close to 50% to be irrelevant, but I'm very interested about the Well statistic. That map is completely symmetrical, except for a lot of the theming and coloring in each sprawling base.. could there be a psychological effect? Also those kill-density maps are nonsense, there's no way that more snipers get killed on the tower platform in dustbowl stage 1 than blues die taking the upper hallway.
Yah, that was an error that I knew someone would call me on eventually. Just pretend I said "bourgeoisie".
I for one would like to welcome our new Blue overlords...
mmmm Eve-Online rox mmmm
In other FPS games (I haven't played this yet) I always try to be on blue because I honestly have an easier time spotting Red. I usually play UT2K4 and on the average server, red's just easier for me to shoot at.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
You know, the Quake mod.
Totally agree.
Bonus points for playing MegaTF
MegaTF was a blight upon the awesomeness that was stock Q1TF.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Of course the red team die first, it is an established scientific fact that wearing red shirts significantly shortens your life expectancy.
The Blue Door is in the middle; the Red door is on the right side of the screen. When teams are unbalanced, one door is locked. When teams are balanced, the player chooses between the door in the middle of the screen, or the one to the right. The result? A significant number of players pick the middle door more often, leading to a Blue power play.
How to test this hypothesis? Randomize the color of the two doors each time, and see if the advantage evens out.
AhAhhh, the days of getting pwned by LPBs with ISDN.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Or, you could just change wikipedia so the definitions are swapped. Then you would have been right in the first place.
It's because Blue are the aggressors on maps that aren't symmetrical. Attacking is easier than defending so... As far as symmetrical maps go... who knows? Maybe red shirts are easier to pick out from the background.
I just want to know if Valve ever intends on releasing new maps for the 360? I play TF2 so much that I'd be willing to even pay for the new maps!
Look at the stats again. On dustbowl and gravelpit, red, the defenders, wins most of the time.