Season 30 Squadron Results - graphs and analysis

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
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, 25, 27,28, 29 plus How large are squadrons?

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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 measured season (in this case, 27). As in previous seasons, the approximate power-law distribution continues 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 (247 pages)
Winners: United Independent Star Squadron (10% of all points), The Order of Dripnificence, Radius Group
Two new AX winners take the trophies this season, and The Order of Dripnificence return from their Season 26 Bronze. Total activity is a little down on last season, though still significantly up on pre-war levels.

Combat (812 pages)
Winners: We Rock You Roll (1% of all points), Anti-Xeno Initiative, Stellanebula Project.
A near-repeat of Season 26 for the trophy places, though with the Silver and Bronze swapping over, and a slight decrease in total activity here.

CQC (26 pages)
Winners: We Rock You Roll (29% of all points), EG Pilots, Black Swans
A first CQC trophy for EG Pilots, and a first trophy of any sort for Black Swans, as WRYR continue their mostly-unchallenged dominance at the top. While the total number of participating squadrons is slightly down, this leaderboard breaks with the general trend to see a higher total activity than in previous seasons, especially in the top 20 - fixing some of the critical bugs does seem to have helped.

Exploration (850 pages)
Winners: Radius Group (4% of all points), A.C.E. Exploration, Stellanebula Project
With the lack of a payout-multiplying exploration CG this season, totals drop back to their normal levels (though there is also a further drop compared with Season 28, too). A new squadron enters the trophies at Silver, and Radius Group pick up their second trophy of the season and second exploration trophy with a substantial margin over everyone else.

Powerplay (29 pages)
Winners: Madmen of the Mojongo (13% of all points), Lavingy's Legion, Federal Liberal Command
As with many of the other leaderboards, a slight drop in activity and squadron count. This is the seventh time these three squadrons have taken the trophies, the fourth in a row, and the third in this specific order, making this the most consistent set of leaderboard winners.

Trade (686 pages)
Winners: Pilots Booze Network Squadron (3% of all points), Winged Hussars, Brazilian League of Pilots
While this season, unlike Season 29, has seen some trade CGs, they've not been particularly profitable or common, so the trade board also sees a small decline in participation. All three winners are leaderboard regulars - PBNS getting their 7th trade trophy, Winged Hussars their 11th, and the Brazilian League of Pilots their 4th.

Other comments
Update 15 didn't cause the expected increase in AX activity, perhaps because the lack of Invasions has moved a lot of the war onto actions which don't show up on the AX leaderboard itself. Invasion numbers may rise again (they can't get much lower, after all...)

Whether Update 16 comes late in Season 31 or early in Season 32 probably won't make a lot of difference to the Season 31 scores, so unless there's a popular and profitable CG the numbers will probably be fairly similar to this season.
 

Heliaxx

H
Nice sum up! It's awesome such a small squadron as Black Swans was able to score some in the CQC. I've really gotten to quite like the mode, pretty pleasant to just be able to jump in to some quick and dynamic combat from time to time; And even more so if there's noone to break that dynamic at the time.
 

MUSKETEER

MUSKETEER
Quite a season for WRYR...

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Guys wanted to see if it's possible to get 3 gold trophies in one season and yeah, it worked :p
We didn't really need those trophies because we previously got them, it was just our own challenge.
 
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MUSKETEER

MUSKETEER
I loved those pre-nerf piracy days.. NPC was just flying around my ship and dropping low temp diamonds while I was watching youtube and keeping an eye on limpets from time to time. Easy money days :p
 

CJ57

C
Two questions - the first for Ian Doncaster: Is there a ready explanation for the disparity in the number of Squadrons participating in each of the 'core' game activities of Trade, Combat and Exploration? For example, 686 pages of Squadrons participating in Trade but 812 pages of squadrons taking part in Combat. Are there really a thousand squadrons who spend their game time shooting ships and never buy or sell anything in two months? Most odd.
The second for Musketeer. Congratulations on your Triple Gold - for a squadron of only 8 registered members your skills in combat are amazing - but how the hell you find the time to do so much CQC and in-game combat to score so many points is astounding - as are the total points that you score in Political. Truly, unbelievably good.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
CJ57 said:
Two questions - the first for Ian Doncaster: Is there a ready explanation for the disparity in the number of Squadrons participating in each of the 'core' game activities of Trade, Combat and Exploration? For example, 686 pages of Squadrons participating in Trade but 812 pages of squadrons taking part in Combat. Are there really a thousand squadrons who spend their game time shooting ships and never buy or sell anything in two months? Most odd.
Click to expand...
When you get down to the tail end of the distribution like that, it's almost certainly mostly squadrons with one active member (many, probably, one total member) who isn't all that active either.

Exploration is quite hard to avoid picking up a small amount of rank points for almost "accidentally" - especially for occasional players where "visited new system, got proximity scan on the primary star" or "scanned ship in supercruise, discovered new G3 data type" will give a tiny amount of exploration rank. So that's always been the highest one, even if only marginally.

If you extrapolate the rank curve downwards, a "top 7000 Combat squadron" is going to be getting under 10,000 combat points in the course of a season. You get 100 points for an equal-rank kill, more for above-rank kills. So someone with Competent rank logging in once a month, flying to their nearby High RES to help the system authority battle pirates for an hour, and then logging out again, could easily do that. If you're only logging in once a month as it is, playing something with a bit more excitement than A-B hauling makes sense.

There's also the potential for both Odyssey and Aftermath to be changing this a bit - Odyssey activities can give Combat and Exploration, but tend not to give Trade. Pre-Odyssey if you look at the "previously" links (and noting the uncompensated bugs), the Trade leaderboard tended to have equal or higher participation to Combat, with Exploration always slightly higher than both. So some of the Trade/Combat gap may be people logging in to do a bit of on-foot shooting but not really flying the ships much.
Similarly, the Aftermath storyline has introduced a whole bunch of new AX combat activities (and pushed the AX leaderboard to record levels) but much less on the trade side (sampling, yes, but that's not what most casual AX players will be doing) as well as a new reason to spend your game time doing them.
 

MUSKETEER

MUSKETEER
CJ57 said:
The second for Musketeer. Congratulations on your Triple Gold - for a squadron of only 8 registered members your skills in combat are amazing - but how the hell you find the time to do so much CQC and in-game combat to score so many points is astounding - as are the total points that you score in Political. Truly, unbelievably good.
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Thank you. We compete where we can. Combat is relatively neglected by vast majority of CMDRs so small squadrons can get their share if they are combat focused. We know we don't stand a chance to compete in Trade or Exploration because these activities are very popular and we just lack the numbers. Most of our squadron members are Elite V in Combat. And we dominate CQC most of the time simply because we are the most CQC active squadron. Political has nothing to do with having a "happy facion". It's more about doing stuff for that faction (so trying to make it happy) regardless if its current state is happy or not.
 
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