whereas Wei and Wu have 0.3% and 0.2%, respectively. Because of that, we can safely assume that the majority of players is here for the campaigns, NOT for ranked gameplay at all (after all, just about 1-5% of players have ever played a ranked match), and so moving the 3K civs out of the ranked (and tournaments, more importantly) into their own chronicles like tab, will have no negative impact for the absolute majority of players, and will instead have a positive impact for those who actually care about the spirit of the game.
Nobody is going “Oh I’m buying this DLC to strictly use the Shu in multiplayer”. They are literally the worst one, and likely would be the worst civ in the entire game if the Gurjaras hadn’t been dunked on repeatedly (or hell, perhaps the Shu are worse than that).
If you’re going for multiplayer, it’s the Khitans and Jurchens who are going to be the strongest.
The new achievements appear to be bugged: I’ve won games with some of the 5 new civs, but I don’t have the victory achievement for any of them. So those percentages are not going to be accurate.
In other words, those numbers are wrong.
Also, for some preliminary data (all 1v1s as of May 13):
And balance is likely to get improved soon enough. I’d say that I expect Shu to get some buffs, but it looks like their win rate is actually fairly good. Guess their intended gameplay of full archers is surprisingly effective. I do think that their War chariots and traction trebs are likely to receive buffs, but the civ itself might not need them.
The Khitans are really strong, even without bloodlines, that training time is really strong, also the Jian Swordsman is a really strong unit, not a lot of counters beside militia line, in my experience not even Knights work
I have all of those achievements. Besides, which site is that? Your screenshot literally proves my point. Khitans are played more than twice as much than Wu, whereas the top 10 civs are sorted by win rate, NOT play rate. I can’t seem to find all the data, as well as for Jurchens. And the reason 3k civs are played as much, is because they are new, and mostly by the people who don’t care which civs are in the game.
Wu and Shu are both played more than the Romans (another DLC civ that was added to ranked by popular demand). They definitely are enjoying a play rate boost due to being new, but being new is also a point against using the achievements as data. A person who only plays a few games a week won’t have had enough time to play/win with all 5 civs.
Point in case, I still haven’t played with all 5 civs, and I actually lost the first game I played Khitans with (I’ve won with them since, but did not get the Khitan victory achievement, so I am still not included in your 0.1% data point, even though I should be).
The fact that some people have gotten the achievement is not firm evidence that the achievement is bug-free - only that it’s possible to get.
Wu are n4 pick out of the top10 civ winrates and Shu are n7. One would expect them to take the first 3 slots, given they are new. And the reason Wu and Shu are picked so high anyway, is because they are NEW civs, and are picked mostly by people who don’t care about the historicity or the spirit of the game.
Also, given how many people apparently boycotted the DLC, Khitans have an insane pick rate anyway. If a civ (Shu) has a third of the picks in ranked matches compared to Khitans, but has 5 times more achievement attain rate, it literally proves my point as much as it gets - most people care about campaigns by far, and out of those who do not, still prefer the medieval civs by FAR.
I think I’ll add one last thing. Numbers don’t always mean what you think they mean. It is possible to lie with accurate data. There are issues with the all of the data currently available. For example, we can only see the playrates for the top 10 civs (and strong civs are more likely to be played), and switching the Elo range (or even to team games) and looking at confidence intervals (which are based on number of games played) can only do so much to mitigate that. But As aoestats says, “please take the stats on this page with a grain of salt”.
I think that these arguments (especially the highlighted one) are more akin to denial of reality. When I do my research, I interpret numbers with great caution and an attempt to understand them, instead of trying to deny them or misunderstand them. Armenians and Georgians had the lowest winrates when they got released, but both had 2+% pickrate. These pickrates then dropped drastically. Shu have the 9th highest winrate, are a new civ, and are at a pitiful 1.67% (even though there are currently 50 civs, so with perfect distribution, all would be at 2%). Khitans carry it heavily, and the winrate definitely helps. But I really want to see the real numbers when the data get released, including Jurchen pickrate.
Check out a reply I made here, with more research and thorough numbers:
To be fair, it might be because there are five new civs (instead of two, like when Mountain Royals released). So everyone who bought the DLC will have their picks spread out over five civs instead.
I think it will just be a shitstorm because there are still some percentage of people that buys DLC solely for more civs to play in ranked and will request a refund.
It wont affect all players, but nonetheless most issues does not affect all players anyway.
I hope it was done before release, but feels like its too late now
As I’ve said elsewhere, the devs were wrong to sell the option to ruin many players’ aoe2 experience by forcing them to encounter (fake civs) Wei Shu Wu. Removing Wei Shu Wu from ranked for these players is equivalent to ordering the return of an item that they bought that turns out to be stolen, which you do lose money if you’re the buyer of the stolen item. But they can request a refund so it’s a better situation than that.
yeah, I would love to be able to do that too, It’s annoying to see 3K and can’t do anything about it. It’s like they deliberately made the g ame broken for a bunch of people without consense.
Numbers don’t lie but your interpretation of it could. Its possible ranked and skirmish against ai players are preferring three kingdom civs since those civs have the new knight replacement cav unit, hero and siege. I’m not saying that’s how it is but that’s another way these civs can have higher percentage of people with that achievement.
