ELO 1300-1399 Chinese Winrate: What's Up?

The sample size is large enough at the time of me looking at the data: 337 matches in the 1300-1399 bracket. the winrate is 51.3% overall.

You go one bracket down, it’s 43.9%. One bracket up to >1400, it’s 39.6%
1200s is not by any means bad. They are well above average. 1300s are pretty solid players and are no chump change. They constitute top ~7% (?) of total multiplayer count.

What does this bracket specifically tell us about Chinese and balance process? I would think, 1300s is perhaps where players stop making fatal macro mistakes and start developing 6th game sense, learning the different timing push times. So, Chinese players of this bracket are able to succeed where lower levels cannot, being able to fully utilize the boom mechanic and defend well at the same time. But higher than that, players learn to brutally punish players going for macro builds.

What does this also say about balance team? The 1300-1399 bracket is where winrates are the most even (not even enough, but better than others). This leads me to think that most balance play testers are at that level, not >1600 level.

Linked below.

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I checked the same bracket 1300-1399 of both older patch versions and you can see Chinese has gained winrate compared to previous patches.

However, if you check >1400 for previous versions you will notice Chinese used to have much higher winrate. The winrate for >1400 in the current patch is at 39,6% which is simply terrible.

Therefore I conclude the following: Since the winrate of players >1400 is so low in the current patch, Chinese players are heavily dropping in rank despite not playing worse. Its just the fact that Chinese got destroyed in this balance patch. So now you have players whose skill should put them in >1400, however due to the fact that Chinese was nerfed they still lose games. Which means you end up with a lot of high skill players in the 1300 to 1399 skill bracket, where they have higher winrate due to being better players than their opponents. If they advance to higher ranks they will simply drop back down again.

Fun fact: In the highest rank >1600 Chinese has the worst winrate of only 38,4%. This indicates that players who are able to get the most out of their civilisations are able to destroy Chinese easily. Or another thing you could decude is: Despite being great players, at the highest rank Chinese is not viable at all in this current patch. Surely these players are trying really hard to make Chinese work. If it was a high skill high reward civ, the winrate should be higher, but its not. Its the lowest.

Either way this patch completely destroyed Chinese and the nerfs received are so severe they should have been given to Mongols. But Mongols continue to dominate the ladder as they keep evading nerfs.

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I think you are right on the spot, my good sir. It’s a very clever observation.

Said observation helps us understand that balancing a game is hecking difficult, and always depend on the players’ knowledge, either by brackets or in general, what is meta, and so on. That’s the main reason why the classic RTS games are always developing, with new strategies and other things. Some moves that would be considered cheese years ago are staple now. It won’t be different in AoE4, and it hurts my eyes when people try to say “hurr durr this civ is weak buff it, that civ is OP, nerf it”. As if things can be reduced to that simplicity.

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Sadly however this is the case. As in the current patch. Chinese got nerfed the hardest by the siege nerfs. Not just this patch, the previous Springald patch also hit them very hard because Clocktower springalds were way too strong. And while Springalds did deserve a nerf for everyone, Chinese got not better in other areas. The Nest of Bees has been bugged since stress test and no bugfixes have happened to make it superiour than a Mangonel, as all unique units should be according to the devs themselves. Chinese making their powerful siege unit is exactly the same as English massing Longbows in age 2 or French building their unique Knights. But Chinese got punished the 2nd time in a row due to unit changes across everyone - but without compensation in other arease where they are lacking.

Landmarks, Dynasties, unique upgrades. All of this is lacking until Age 4. You either go Song boom in Age 2 or you don’t. Zhuge Nu don’t do well against armor, so building too many of them in Age 2 is a big risk. Age 3 for Chinese got serverely weakened 2 patches in a row now. The Clocktower, the only strong Landmark has been nerfed to the ground. Meanwhile other civs which rely on their Landmarks received no changes.

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I understand your point. But I was talking about people just reducing everything to a unit being too weak or OP, without putting things into context.

And on your argument about the general nerfs that hit Chinese the hardest, it seems to me that what Chinese are good at is diversity. They can get a little bit of everything, and the mixing and matching of that, paired with game knowledge and economy and macro skills allow the player to put out mostly optimal army comps, eco booms and timing attacks than other civs can. I understand that the landmarks have to be weak, otherwise the civ would just have a lot of everything, instead of a little of it. You see, as they had one strong landmark, the mentioned Clocktower, it was enough of a balance issue in the Chinese civ context.

Back to the general nerfs, considering the civ is good in diversity, we have now, in this patch, two problems: the main one is the meta transition, and the second, derived from the first, is what players try to invent in order to get a game advantage. The meta is trying to pull away from siege 100% of the time, and although we still see a lot of mass siege around, we are going in the right direction. This complicated things for Chinese, again and also, due to their only “good” landmark becoming a standart Chinese level landmark. The meta is changing, and in this context, the main civ strength has fallen apart. And, as the meta shifts, players are trying to build new strategies, not only military ones. Economy strategies are intrinsically tied to military, specially on transitions. If you want to go from mass archers into mass knights as you move into age 3, you have to adjust half of your economy, which might include building farms, production buildings, putting vills into gold, more into wood, and in the case of Chinese it includes retasking the Officials, too. Skilled players have a hard time putting everything in the right place, specially because there’s a lot happening in high level games, and low skill players… well… probably don’t know about these stuff. Anyway, my point is that we have “old patch” eco-military strategies, like the number of villagers into each resource for a said army composition and unit output, and as the new compositions are just coming out of the oven, people have to measure the economy and other efforts all over again. For Chinese, it’s even worse due to the civ’s complexity and diversity. Just remembering the cost of each UU can be a headache for most players.

In summary, one could say the civ were just exploiting the OP stuff in the game (siege) with it’s only imbalanced landmark (for the civs landmark phylosophy), and people learned to play the civ in that way because it was effective. I honestly believe we have some really hard lessons to learn before truly learning to exploit China’s potential. Due to that, balancing the civ, amidst this “colective learning process” will be, at the very least, a challenge.

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Means that Chinese are still playable unlike some ppl crying in this forum

Not true. Before I got average win rate, and now I lost 70% of the time.

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Playable does not mean competitive. Of course you can play them. But you’re going to have to accept that you will lose the majority of your games if you play against equally skilled players. The matchmaking system will then try to put you up against weaker players to make sure you still get that 50% winrate. But in tournaments there is no such thing as putting Chinese up against weaker players. We have already seen what happens there. Almost no one is picking Chinese since the civ is not deemed competitive in this patch. And those who do have low winrate. See the recent tournament.

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