Top 100 TWLD Players S12-S21 (Statistically)

[ogron]

Hi! So I've finished aggregating all the TWLD games between the best teams each season. I set the confidence to 30GP, and I also added a new stat I invented called Ceiling, which counts rounds you've gotten 10+ kills, and gives you bonus rating based on how many kills you got in that particular round. There were 1806 games played by all the players listed, so I could actually calculate how rare a score is:

In any given match between two top TWLD squads, the odds of getting 10 or more kills is 38%. The odds of getting 15+ kills is 5%. The odds of getting 19+ kills are 1 in 200. Only 8 players in the past 10 seasons have managed the feat. Adding this new feature to my overall Rating means that even if you've had a few mediocre or poor seasons, it is better factoring in acute greatness and a player's ability to carry games, boosting those players higher than they would ordinarily be.

If watching Welt go 7-3 every game and accumulating a nice plus-minus and great stats annoys you, Ceiling is the stat for you, and penalizes non-carry players accordingly. Lasenza went from 3rd overall to 11th after I implemented this statistic, and you can see the full table of each warbird's 10 to 20 kill games further down in this post.

Without further ado, the compiled list, which tracks the stats of every game played in TWLD between the top teams each season:

And here is the new Ceiling statistic, with cumulative Rating, as well as Per Game Rating, both at the end:

Previously stated in earlier posts:


Only games between these squadrons were calculated:

S12: Thunder, Quake, Heavy, Pirates, Sweet, Dynasty
S13: Thunder, Quicksand, Mad, Epidemic, Fatal
S14: Fierce, Sk8, Pandora, Sweet, Savanger
S15: Fierce, Thunder, Dice, Sweet
S16: Fierce, Thunder, Real, Penetrate
S17: Fierce, Pandora, Cobra, Sweet, Raid
S18: Fierce, Pandora, Value, Wolf
S19: Fierce, Thunder, Cobra, Sweet
S20: Fierce, Burn, Cobra, Potenza
S21: Dice, Thunder, Cobra, Force

The goal of these stats is to exclude stat-padding against lower-tier squads, and see how well players perform against the best squads with good teammates around them.

Stats never tell the whole story, and there are certain intangibles like saving a low energy teammate from a rush or luring that cannot be accounted for, but I think these are a better look at the stats than simply using the raw stats from all games.

Legend:

GP -- Games Played

Conf. -- Confidence in your stats. I set this at 12 GP, as this was the cumulative average. If you've played 7 games, your rating is multiplied by 50%, reducing your score. Anything above 10 games played and you get your full rating.

KPG -- Kills Per Game. These should be pretty accurate as I manually removed most late-game sub-ins.

DPG -- Deaths Per Game

Win % -- Percentage of games won

Alive % -- Percentage of the time the player stayed alive when his team won. This stat is relevant and factored into the rating.

Plus-Minus -- Kills minus Deaths

Ceiling -- Accumulated bonus points from 10 to 20 kill games to properly identify and reward players who carry games and showed acute greatness


Note: Bold denotes active players

[ogron]

S12-S14

Here are the as-of-yet unpublished (until now) S12 to S14 stats:

[ogron]

S15-S18

[ogron]

S19-S21

[Jones]

wow nice work! looks like riverside was the best player from sweet after all, i am glad. (eg. riv's ld stats (vs top teams) from season 15 are putting everyone elses from sweet to shame.)

ps. i used the name 'sacra' one season so if you wanna you could add those stats to 'jones'

[ogron]

Demarcations

So, to me, looking at the stats, there are some clear demarcations:

I would take the top 6 players in their exact order, the spread in rating between all of them (except DEEZ and Apok, but I rate the former higher) is clear and significant. I think these have clearly been, at least from a statistical standpoint, the best 6 players over the course of the past 10 seasons.

7 to 11 you could arrange in any order, then there is another clear demarcation between them and 12 to 19, which you could also arrange in any order.

If you're making a Top 20 warbirds list for this generation of players, you could take those top 19 players, add one from the pool between 20-30, and you'd have a pretty good list.

[ogron]

wow nice work! looks like riverside was the best player from sweet after all, i am glad. (eg. riv's ld stats (vs top teams) from season 15 are putting everyone elses from sweet to shame.)

ps. i used the name 'sacra' one season so if you wanna you could add those stats to 'jones'

thanks!

hmm sacra... i'll look into it. i probably missed a few aliases (although tracked down a bunch!)

hah, i think the most impressive thing from Sweet S15 is that you, Riverside, Dak, and Eric Clapton managed to carry Spaceship to a title -- he is by far the worst player to ever play 10+ real games in TWLD, with an astounding -60!! plus-minus, and a baffling 0 out of 14 rounds hitting 10 kills.

[Jones]

we played atleast one game on fatal (i think) with kdakcialkdja, an svs player who only showed to the game so we had enough where he never used his arrow keys so it wouldn't mess up his 'feel' for his svs game later.

spaceship was a nice fellow, i think vash in season 14 when we had him and Raspi was heavier to carry seeing as we failed against Thunder(sk8) (raspi was great that game if my memory serves me) 2nd or 3rd time in a row. luckily, engi went 16-9 in 3rd round vs thunder in season 15 which should definitely be noted.

although vt's (eric clapton's) stats are perhaps bad on paper, he was arguably the mvp in the finals vs. dice season 15.

Even though I don't pay much attention to stats when I judge a players ability to play. these lists are still pretty damn accurate in showing the top. ie. ease, deez, apok, riv etc. another thing i noted was that the greatest players don't even have any lag advantages so i concluded skill > lag. nice

man i love this game

[ogron]

Even though I don't pay much attention to stats when I judge a players ability to play. these lists are still pretty damn accurate in showing the top. ie. ease, deez, apok, riv etc. another thing i noted was that the greatest players don't even have any lag advantages so i concluded skill > lag. nice

man i love this game

Yeah, I mean I think stats aren't meant to be the end-point -- they are a conversation starter. The stats give you an upper and lower bandwidth -- you can argue that x player should be y spots higher, but grounding it in numbers keeps it in reality. I think without ever looking at a stat I would off-the-bat say Deez Nuts and Ease are the two best warbirds. These stats I posted don't look at single season, they look at multiple seasons.

When you're talking about Eric Clapton, you're talking about a single postseason run, not sustained excellence, which is what these stats look at. I actually forgot to post these, I did the stats for all the playoffs in TWLD 4-5 months ago looking at single-season playoff runs:

Here you can see where people really went off for one season when it mattered most. I think that, because Sweet won S15, people forget how insane Mega was that season -- he did most of his damage in the Semi-Finals, but holy hell did he go postal on Fierce. Dice S15 was the only non-Ease team to ever knock Fierce out of the playoffs.

You can see Riverside went mental as well, and you, Dak, Eric Clapton and Engineers also had good postseasons.

If we had earlier season records, Geisha would be way higher on these lists, too. He absolutely murdered Syndicate in the Finals, dropping 18 on them, and he was a beast S13, too. If you're only considering playoffs S12 to S21, Deez is actually #1 ahead of Ease. He also has a way better head-to-head record against Ease than Apok does, who is like -30 lifetime vs. him. Apok's 3 best playoffs were the 3 he didn't have to face Ease (Fierce DDOS'd him S14, Real S16, Cobra S19).

[ogron]

Updated list including the Playoff stat, which counts your single season best playoff performance into the rating.

Seemed silly to let that good data go to waste, and I think is a reasonable expectation for top warbirds of this generation to have had at least one good playoff run in 10-11 seasons, even if you're not on Fierce and making the finals every year. It does alter the rankings a bit, but not too much.

DEEZ NUTS, for example, has a Playoff score of 71. The formula takes your best 2 out of 3 rounds in the Semis and Finals (except S19-S21, which looks at: Winners Quarters, Winners or Losers Semis, and Finals -- multiplied by 66% to account for the extra match).

So DEEZ's best two rounds in the finals were 18-10 and 11-8, and his best two rounds in the semis were 13-8 and 9-5. You add the kills (51) + plus-minus (+20), and you get 71.

If you went 10-10 in every playoff game, you'd have a Playoffs score of 40, so anything above that is very good.

[Ivf]

Thanks for the stats Claus. I'm kind of impressed to say I was on a shitty laptop for most of the twl games.

Kind of annoying that Hall of fame consists of players who contributed to the game for a couple of seasons and are only in it because they are old players. I honestly think only a couple of those players could match the skill set of the top tier players these days. I think it needs looking at

[Jones]

If we had earlier season records, Geisha would be way higher on these lists, too. He absolutely murdered Syndicate in the Finals, dropping 18 on them, and he was a beast S13, too. If you're only considering playoffs S12 to S21, Deez is actually #1 ahead of Ease. He also has a way better head-to-head record against Ease than Apok does, who is like -30 lifetime vs. him. Apok's 3 best playoffs were the 3 he didn't have to face Ease (Fierce DDOS'd him S14, Real S16, Cobra S19).

deez has been amazing since aleast season 7 on syndicate. although, my experience came from elims mostly he was dominating that arena even back then.

i still have screenshots from the final where foxes went 18-5 vs syndicate in season 9, it was great to watch! Sk8 were totally an underdog, kudos to Ease there aswell for sticking with sk8 instead of making a stacked Syndicate (where most players were on sk8 before, even demonfaze, a split was inevitable). foxes single handedly carried Gantz to twld, even when they went 0-10 he was being dominant, truly one of the best "newer age" wbs in my book.

[ogron]

deez has been amazing since aleast season 7 on syndicate. although, my experience came from elims mostly he was dominating that arena even back then.

i still have screenshots from the final where foxes went 18-5 vs syndicate in season 9, it was great to watch! Sk8 were totally an underdog, kudos to Ease there aswell for sticking with sk8 instead of making a stacked Syndicate (where most players were on sk8 before, even demonfaze, a split was inevitable). foxes single handedly carried Gantz to twld, even when they went 0-10 he was being dominant, truly one of the best "newer age" wbs in my book.

DEEZ's first squad was actually one I was on, a short-lived squad called UoF in January 2003 (he moved over from another zone). He was instantly great, and always a genuinely nice guy. That is probably one of the more underrated aspects of him tbh. He always lost with grace and won with humility.

LOL I played TWLD S8 on Heavy and I remember playing Gantz and Foxes, he was pretty sick even though his team was atrocious, and warbirding was in it's prime full of stacked veterans.

Yeah, I mean Ease has always had a lot of great players around him in jav (and more recently, base), but he's almost always played TWLD at a talent deficit, especially those pre-S10 seasons and the majority of the Fierce era. S20 was probably the only time he had comparable depth to Fierce -- that S17 win will, at least for me, go down as one of the most impressive TWLD feats. Him and Myth carried a bunch of basers + a completely washed up Geisha over a stacked Fierce team that had gone like 400-3 in TWDD, and they came back down 0-1 vs both Sweet (the infamous Riverside taunt after Round 1) and Fierce in the semis and finals.

[Ricko]

I was in UoF in 2003 too! (Union of Friends)