Previously: seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8, 9,10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 (plus How large are squadrons?)
As discussed in the Season 24 thread there is a methodology change here to try to mitigate an unreportable bug in how the Last Season squadron leaderboard is put together. More details of the consequences of this will be covered below - you'll notice quite a few changes to some of the numbers which do not imply an actual 2/3 drop in squadron counts since last season! One consequence is that last-minute changes in leaderboard position won't be picked up - the actual winners tomorrow morning may even be different if there's a big last-minute drop in AX, Exploration or Powerplay! - as the reports need to be run slightly before the season actually ends.
On each graph, points are on the Y-axis, and squadron position on the leaderboard is on the X-axis. Both scales are logarithmic. The light grey line (diamond marker) is the numbers for the previous season - with the caveat that they were collected too late and subject to The Bug, the dark grey line (triangle marker) is not last year but the last known numbers not affected by The Bug in season 1, and all stats are PC only. As in previous seasons, the approximate power-law distribution continues - with some slight changes to be discussed later - allowing estimates of total activity to be made without spending too long reading the boards.
(Political is excluded, because there are well-known exploits to allow very high scores, and because it's not clear even without the exploits what it's supposed to be measuring: the in-game description of "large and happy faction" is clearly wrong - possibly this will change if they ever implement BGS happiness properly)
Anti Xeno (245 pages)
Winners: AXI with ~6% of all points. Marauders Vanguard and Lavigny's Legion take the other trophies.
A familiar three names on the AX podium this season, and with there being quite a lot of fighting in HIP 22460 both before and after the Proteus Wave, scores throughout the top 1000 are up on last season slightly, and of course up significantly on the pre-rebalance Season 1 scores, which also had far fewer squadrons taking part overall.
Combat (925 pages)
Winners: Equestrian Naval Fleet with ~1% of all points. Xeno Ally Confederacy and AXI take the other trophies.
Two new names in Gold and Silver - and the awards security staff probably quite pleased that the Silver and Bronze podiums are separated by the Gold one. No surprise that activity is up on season 1 - more squadrons, plus the payout rebalance since then - but you can see the effects of the bug being corrected with 1-100 higher than last time, but the 100-1000 places slightly lower as some of the squadrons that would have been bugged into those places aren't on the graph this time.
CQC (34 pages)
Winners: We Rock You Roll with ~20% of all points. CQC Discord and Tujiu-Tujiu Tpajui-Bajui take the other trophies.
The usual first two, then a new entrant who (see below) were presumably passing the time in deep space to take a break.
This season like Season 24 was affected quite heavily by the crash bug not fixed until Update 13's release about half-way through - and with the removal of inactive squadrons from the board, looks even worse. You can see the effect of the 2-way Odyssey instancing split on the comparison to Season 1 ... next season will start with a 3-way instancing split as Horizons 4 and Odyssey 4 players won't be able to play together either: the recommendation from some of the big groups is to continue to use Horizons 3.8 for CQC as it's the only one of the three servers which everyone has access to.
Is making the instancing split worse better or worse for CQC than having it be almost completely unplayable for half a season? I guess we'll find out in eight weeks!
Exploration (974 pages)
Winners: Tujiu-Tujiu Tpajui-Bajui with ~6% of all points, Stellanebula Project and Canonn take the other trophies.
A new entrant at Gold, followed by two familiar names for the other trophies. As with combat you can see the trail-off being a little more pronounced after the top 100 due to the bug not being present in this season's data - and of course, Season 1 was the height of the Distant Worlds 2 expedition, so hardly a fair comparison.
Powerplay (31 pages)
Winners: Madmen of the Mogonjo with ~12% of all points. Lavigny's Legion and Federal Liberal Command take the other trophies.
Same Gold and Silver as last time, with Winters' main squadron replacing Hudson's for the Bronze. Surprisingly unchanged overall since Season 1 here, despite everything that's happened in the meantime: but then, if you were still in Powerplay by the time 3.3 rolled around, why would you have stopped now?
Trade (821 pages)
Winners: Pilots Booze Network Squadron with ~1% of all points. First Steps and Cerberus Corp take the other trophies.
PBNS getting a Gold to go with their Season 24 Bronze, and First Steps - after seven political trophies - diversify to take the Silver, while Cerberus Corp pick up their first ever trophy.
The overall score - since there wasn't a Tritium Trade CG this season - is back down to more normal levels, and not quite competing with Season 1's Void Opal rush either.
Other comments
So, as discussed last time, the last season leaderboards aren't reliable, because if a squadron does absolutely nothing for an entire season (or several seasons) it carries forwards its previous points scores to the following "last season" leaderboard. There were a few top 10 spots affected because of this - with Plague likely to slot in again at 3rd in AX on the strength of their Season 22 performance, for example - and much more serious effects outside the top 100 where squadrons coming and going is much more common.
The big change of course is in the number of active squadrons - only 974 in exploration, rather than the 2800 (mostly inactive) squadrons visible on the previous leaderboard. This is still a fair bit up on season 1's 609 squadrons - but unlike before we're likely to see this number now drift up and down from season to season rather than always increasing. It hasn't made as much difference to the top-1000-estimated overall activity levels on the generalist boards - at least, not as much as genuine changes in activity did - but it does change the distribution somewhat and has a much more visible effect on the CQC and Powerplay boards.
Next season, of course, will have copied console commanders eligible to join PC squadrons and the effects of the Horizons 4.0 release as we come up towards Update 14. AX is likely to stay strong with the focus of the plot on the Thargoids ... while CQC is likely to continue to be hurt further by the instancing splits.
As discussed in the Season 24 thread there is a methodology change here to try to mitigate an unreportable bug in how the Last Season squadron leaderboard is put together. More details of the consequences of this will be covered below - you'll notice quite a few changes to some of the numbers which do not imply an actual 2/3 drop in squadron counts since last season! One consequence is that last-minute changes in leaderboard position won't be picked up - the actual winners tomorrow morning may even be different if there's a big last-minute drop in AX, Exploration or Powerplay! - as the reports need to be run slightly before the season actually ends.
On each graph, points are on the Y-axis, and squadron position on the leaderboard is on the X-axis. Both scales are logarithmic. The light grey line (diamond marker) is the numbers for the previous season - with the caveat that they were collected too late and subject to The Bug, the dark grey line (triangle marker) is not last year but the last known numbers not affected by The Bug in season 1, and all stats are PC only. As in previous seasons, the approximate power-law distribution continues - with some slight changes to be discussed later - allowing estimates of total activity to be made without spending too long reading the boards.
(Political is excluded, because there are well-known exploits to allow very high scores, and because it's not clear even without the exploits what it's supposed to be measuring: the in-game description of "large and happy faction" is clearly wrong - possibly this will change if they ever implement BGS happiness properly)
Anti Xeno (245 pages)
Winners: AXI with ~6% of all points. Marauders Vanguard and Lavigny's Legion take the other trophies.
A familiar three names on the AX podium this season, and with there being quite a lot of fighting in HIP 22460 both before and after the Proteus Wave, scores throughout the top 1000 are up on last season slightly, and of course up significantly on the pre-rebalance Season 1 scores, which also had far fewer squadrons taking part overall.
Combat (925 pages)
Winners: Equestrian Naval Fleet with ~1% of all points. Xeno Ally Confederacy and AXI take the other trophies.
Two new names in Gold and Silver - and the awards security staff probably quite pleased that the Silver and Bronze podiums are separated by the Gold one. No surprise that activity is up on season 1 - more squadrons, plus the payout rebalance since then - but you can see the effects of the bug being corrected with 1-100 higher than last time, but the 100-1000 places slightly lower as some of the squadrons that would have been bugged into those places aren't on the graph this time.
CQC (34 pages)
Winners: We Rock You Roll with ~20% of all points. CQC Discord and Tujiu-Tujiu Tpajui-Bajui take the other trophies.
The usual first two, then a new entrant who (see below) were presumably passing the time in deep space to take a break.
This season like Season 24 was affected quite heavily by the crash bug not fixed until Update 13's release about half-way through - and with the removal of inactive squadrons from the board, looks even worse. You can see the effect of the 2-way Odyssey instancing split on the comparison to Season 1 ... next season will start with a 3-way instancing split as Horizons 4 and Odyssey 4 players won't be able to play together either: the recommendation from some of the big groups is to continue to use Horizons 3.8 for CQC as it's the only one of the three servers which everyone has access to.
Is making the instancing split worse better or worse for CQC than having it be almost completely unplayable for half a season? I guess we'll find out in eight weeks!
Exploration (974 pages)
Winners: Tujiu-Tujiu Tpajui-Bajui with ~6% of all points, Stellanebula Project and Canonn take the other trophies.
A new entrant at Gold, followed by two familiar names for the other trophies. As with combat you can see the trail-off being a little more pronounced after the top 100 due to the bug not being present in this season's data - and of course, Season 1 was the height of the Distant Worlds 2 expedition, so hardly a fair comparison.
Powerplay (31 pages)
Winners: Madmen of the Mogonjo with ~12% of all points. Lavigny's Legion and Federal Liberal Command take the other trophies.
Same Gold and Silver as last time, with Winters' main squadron replacing Hudson's for the Bronze. Surprisingly unchanged overall since Season 1 here, despite everything that's happened in the meantime: but then, if you were still in Powerplay by the time 3.3 rolled around, why would you have stopped now?
Trade (821 pages)
Winners: Pilots Booze Network Squadron with ~1% of all points. First Steps and Cerberus Corp take the other trophies.
PBNS getting a Gold to go with their Season 24 Bronze, and First Steps - after seven political trophies - diversify to take the Silver, while Cerberus Corp pick up their first ever trophy.
The overall score - since there wasn't a Tritium Trade CG this season - is back down to more normal levels, and not quite competing with Season 1's Void Opal rush either.
Other comments
So, as discussed last time, the last season leaderboards aren't reliable, because if a squadron does absolutely nothing for an entire season (or several seasons) it carries forwards its previous points scores to the following "last season" leaderboard. There were a few top 10 spots affected because of this - with Plague likely to slot in again at 3rd in AX on the strength of their Season 22 performance, for example - and much more serious effects outside the top 100 where squadrons coming and going is much more common.
The big change of course is in the number of active squadrons - only 974 in exploration, rather than the 2800 (mostly inactive) squadrons visible on the previous leaderboard. This is still a fair bit up on season 1's 609 squadrons - but unlike before we're likely to see this number now drift up and down from season to season rather than always increasing. It hasn't made as much difference to the top-1000-estimated overall activity levels on the generalist boards - at least, not as much as genuine changes in activity did - but it does change the distribution somewhat and has a much more visible effect on the CQC and Powerplay boards.
Next season, of course, will have copied console commanders eligible to join PC squadrons and the effects of the Horizons 4.0 release as we come up towards Update 14. AX is likely to stay strong with the focus of the plot on the Thargoids ... while CQC is likely to continue to be hurt further by the instancing splits.
