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As some of you may know, I recently posted a thread asking for volunteers to give me their ideas on certain issues the community currently disagrees about. After hours and hours of data entry and crunching numbers, I’ve finally ended up with something useful and insightful. If you’d like to view all of the data I have in Excel and Word, here’s a download link to a .zip. Feel free to use it however you want.
MMR ended up being the only meaningful statistic (except for region on a question or two), so I’ve ignored everything else to save myself a lot of pointless work. Here are the demographics of everyone who responded:
N=42
n 0-1600 MMR=2
n 1600-2000 MMR=13
n 2000-2400 MMR=15
n 2400-2600 MMR=8
n 2600-3000 MMR=3
Average MMR=2153.756098
Median MMR=2168
Average Ping=74.292
US Players=32
EU Players=7
UK Players=2
AS Players=1
Pie charts make it easier to visualize:
This is the list of statements with relevant information about the responses to each of them:
What We Agree On
There’s clear consensus on some of those statements, and I think we should discuss those first. 76% (32/42) of the people surveyed believe air speed is in a good spot, and agreement isn’t limited to MMR ranges in particular—the mean and median are only 21.3 and 33 MMR below the mean and median, respectively. However, wanting air speeds reduced strongly correlated with region. Despite making up only 24% (n=10) of the total sample group, players outside of the United States accounted for 75% (6/8) of the votes for decreasing air speed.
74% (31/42) of the respondents think the level restriction on AC should be lowered or removed. A lot of those voters also voted for universal AC, so there’s a clear desire for AC to be more accessible. I’ve wanted this change ever since AC was introduced, and I’m glad to see widespread support for the idea. It also has roughly equal support among all MMRs, with the mean being 19.7 and the median being 32 above the overall average
People definitely don’t want boosting to require more fuel. 90% (38/42) favor leaving it alone, making this an almost unanimous opinion.
88% (37/42) want to see A-Classes keep the same interval between dodging, and a staggering 95% (40/42) desire the same for B-Classes. Frequency of dodges with C-Classes isn’t agreed upon to quite the same extent, but 74% (31/42) is more than enough to say the timer should probably be left as it is now.
76% (33/42) would like a nerf to the Incinerator, though there’s some disagreement on how severe it should be. 25/32 favor a slight one. Nerfing Incin has pretty good support among all MMR ranges, though the median is somewhat high at 82 above the overall median.
Scanner in its current form is almost universally hated. 93% (40/43) of the votes there are either for it to be reworked or removed completely. Interestingly, the median and mean MMRs of the players (n=11) who want it removed are 140.9 and 132 above the overall values respectively, while the median and mean MMRs of players who just want a rework (n=29) are 27.2 and 18 below the respective overall stats.
87% (33/38) of the people who responded don’t mind sustained weapons in their current iteration. I’m not too surprised here.
Bunker is the map with the most support (74%) for a rework, while Bazaar comes in at second with 67%. Almost everyone seems to hate Bunker equally, while players a little above the average MMR tend to find more issues with Bazaar.
There’s very clear support (95%) for MMR to be visible in-game to players in some capacity. Now that Scrimbot and hawken.herokuapp.com exist, hiding MMR does nothing more than slightly inconvenience players.
71% of players would like to see some form of leaderboards implemented. With the new devs saying they want to encourage competitive play in a greater capacity than the old ones did, this seems like an obvious thing to add.
What We Don’t Agree On
Let’s get to the main thing everyone fights over first: Air Compressor. Keep in mind when looking at the chart that a lot of people voted for AC to both be left as is and made universal, so there ended up being 54 votes total. I didn’t intend for people to vote twice here, so it’s harder to draw a conclusion from the data I have.
What we can tell is that people who want it gone completely (n=3) and people who want it nerfed (n=8) are a small but vocal minority. The average MMR for those options is decidedly below the other two as well.
So what does the wider community think? I’m personally for universal AC, as it seems unfair to keep something that drastically alters gameplay behind an HC and XP wall even if that internal isn’t necessarily the best option for the slots it takes.
A majority of people want fuel use in the air to stay the same, but there’s a sizable minority that’d like to see it increase.
To be honest, I was surprised by the MMR distribution here. The mean and median MMRs of people who’d like to see fuel use increase (n=14) are 43.7 and 112 above the respective overall values, while players who’d like it to stay the same (n=26) are only above by 7.3 and 56. Only one person voted for less fuel use.
Opinions on the current ground speeds mostly tend toward leaving them as they are, but the percentage of people who want to do that only hits 48%. Most of the other people would like to see them increased to some extent.
People of all MMRs tend to support the majority view of leaving speeds the same or increasing them. One person wanted a decrease, but I didn't include them on the graph since their MMR was 529 below the average and it made the info a lot harder to interpret.
What should we do to resolve this? I personally voted for increasing them for some mechs in particular, but I’m open to keeping them as they are. Nerfing them would hurt the game pretty badly in my opinion, so I’m glad there’s virtually no support for that.
The Technician has always been a controversial mech, and that shows here.
It’s clear that a lot of people aren’t a fan. 26 people (67%) are in favor of some sort of nerf or for it to be removed completely, while only 13 (33%) want it to stay as it is or be buffed. This subject had one of the most interesting distributions of votes by MMR.
Why is this? I personally think Technician is balanced in high-level play, but in lower-MMR games where people tend to die less quickly when they fuzzy bunny up, does it completely throw off the balance if one team has one when the other doesn’t?
Something else came up here too. Many of the posters in my thread wanted a choice to completely rework Tech, so what are some ideas for doing that?
I’m glad to see so much support for getting rid of the weapon raise delay.
It’s pretty clear that people want it either shortened or gotten rid of entirely. I’d ideally like to see it go, but reducing it would be fine too. The first two responses predictably have a higher average MMR than the third one, but it’s honestly not as large of a gap as I expected.
52% of the respondents voted for Last Eco and Uptown to be changed. What’s surprising is how mean MMR varies with each map, especially Uptown.
My theory is that it’s because high-MMR players tend to hold the central Uptown chokepoints much more effectively, causing fights to become boring very quickly.
Another contentious issue is TTK: lots of people are happy with how it is now, and lots of other people are nostalgic for the longer TTK we used to have. Here’s how it breaks down:
The last option wasn’t really supposed to be grouped with the first two, but I’m including it since people voted as if it was. The data is almost impossible to interpret because of that, since people who would’ve voted for increasing the TTK might have chosen the last option instead.
The MMR differences are odd if that’s the only reason, though.
I suspect it’s a combination of what I said above and people wanting to bring A-Classes in line with the other two. This is a fairly popular idea in high-MMR circles, mostly because of mobility becoming less important as the aim of your enemies gets better.
And that seems to be exactly what happened.
Why I Bothered to Do This
This was partially inspired by one of capnjosh’s posts in a thread of Omega’s about getting something together that shows the directions people want the game to go. I hope it helps the new devs get an idea of the community’s wants in general, plus I was curious myself about actual data.
Good job for getting through all that.
Edited by JeffMagnum, 28 March 2015 - 01:45 AM.
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