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In Tier 1, The championship teams of Penetrate's Season 12 & 14 campaigns come on top as the most dominant squads in history, alongside Season 18 behemoth's Pandora and Dice, both the strongest iterations of the basing mainstays.
Tier 2 shows that Thunder is without a doubt the best basing squad to never reach a final, as their Season 12 & 15 iterations were some of the best of all-time, and Season 14 Pandora had the misfortune of facing the second best squad in the last 7 years in the Finals, while Respect lost out to Dice's second strongest season. Disoblige's best team didn't even finish second despite being in the Top 10 best teams, as they took part in the strongest TWLB season in history:
In fact, that season was so strong, the S12 Average of all eight teams would fall into Tier 3!! (Every other season falls into Tier 5 or 6.)
Tier 3 sees a plethora of talented squads, including 3 Champions (Dice S15, Dice S16, and Pandora S17), Runner Up Pirates as well as Mainliner from Season 12, Enemy and Revenge from Season 18, which does seem like an anomaly since Revenge from Season 17 was clearly stronger, although they did only lose to the #1 ranked team on the list in the Semi-Finals. We also see S13's Mad, S14's Sk8, and S15's Penetrate.
On we go to Tier 4, where a pair of finalists in Season 17's Revenge and Season 15's Sage, and I think you could make a strong case both those squads belong in Tier 3 -- S15 Sage was a powerhouse and probably slightly better than S15 Dice even though they lost in three rounds (albeit they did have more aggregate time overall.) If I were meddling with the tiers and where I felt squads should be, they definitely would be up a tier, but I'm leaving the judgment entirely to the KP30M, which is is corollary, not causal. We also have Season 17 Penetrate, which narrowly lost out in the SF to eventual champions Pandora, as well as S12 Spastic and S14 Sage.
Tier 5 holds what I would personally agree is the weakest team to ever make a TWLB Final in S16 Penetrate, where they got absolutely demolished by Dice in two swift rounds, never even hitting 10 minutes in the best-of-3 to 15. Here we also find the only iteration of BasingCrew, an overachieving LEGO (that beat the aforementioned Penetrate during the regular season), and mediocre outings from Pandora and Dice.
Tier 6 has the infamous HEIST from S16, originally called 14/f/Cali, which lost out to eventual champs Dice in the semis, with the rest of the tier dominated by squads from Season 13, including Penetrates worst showing, Brainwave, Thunder, and Rapid.
Then we have Tier 7, where Dice Season 12 represented the low point for the winningest squad of all-time, alongside a respectable showing from Freebie in S14, Anti-Scrub in S13, and the imploding, inactive iteration of Sage's Season 17.
Tier 8 sees the last two seasons from Dudgeon, solid outings from Cobra in S17 and Value/Fierce in S18, as well as Spastic and Sweet.
Tier 9 is where we really start to see sub-par squadrons, including Hit and Paladen from Season 15, Real and the 0-7 Fierce from Season 16, and Spastic from Season 17.
Disoblige's final season sits alone in Tier 10, behind my well-captained Paladen a tier higher. An ignominious end for a once great basing squad.
Tier 11 is really scraping the bottom of the barrel, with atrocious entries from S14 Trauma+, S16 Spastic, and S18 Warhable.
Finally, in Tier 12, we have the two worst basing squads in history in Season 13's Techunique and Season 17's Raid. You're an embarrassment to basing.
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On the Methodology:
Statistics are limited to squads from Season 12 onward, so unfortunately the many talented squads from Seasons 6 to 11 aren't included. I'm using KP30M (Kills Per 30 Minutes) to evaluate the dominance of the squads, since spidering is a function of good sharking and quality terr drops. Also, KP30M was the only metric with a strong correlation to success. Spider %, Teks per 30 Minutes, and everything else available on the TWL website had no predictive value.
When using statistics to rank things, it's much more beneficial to stratify them into tiers. Saying #15 is better than #16 has little value and isn't necessarily true, whereas saying a squad in Tier 1 is better than a squad in Tier 2 has far more predictive value and is far more likely to be true. I'm too stupid to figure out how to apply a clustering algorithm called the Gaussian mixture model to separate the tiers, so I did it by eye, so it may not be perfect, but the idea in principle is mathematically sound and proven in Fantasy Football, where a data scientist at the New York Times publishes tiers weekly:
Even though Matt Forte is above Marshawn Lynch, it doesn't matter which player you start as long as they're from the same tier; the minute difference isn't relevant. Starting Jamaal Charles over Eddy Lacy, however, is significant and predictive over a long period of time to be statistically superior.
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