In purely win-rate terms, xenos have a slight bias to winning.
In ‘feely-feely-soul’ terms, marines have a slight bias to winning.
Xenos clearly ‘win’ the majority of games. However, whilst xeno minors may technically be ‘xeno victories’, they don’t feel like them. Xeno minors feel more like marine majors, so in reality marines technically win slightly more if you make “which side gets wiped at round-end?” the criteria, instead of “hijack = xeno victory, no hijack = marine victory”.
Being a lowpop player, obviously xenomorphs have a clear advantage and thus win more often, so to me xenos have more like a 65% victory chance.
People who sit on highpop will be more marine-biased, since marines will actually be well-staffed and thus have more competence in all areas (most noticably, fire support, which is by far one of the biggest marine advantages.)
I think it really depends on how you phrase the question. People interpret “which side has the balance advantage” in different ways.
Iirc you can’t find that stuff publically, he just “got access” to a limited set of data, presumably from staff or someone in the know.
They don’t publish win rates and such so people don’t constantly scream about balance when they see win rates moving in one direction or another 0.0001 picoseconds after each balance merge, apparently.
Marine pop going over 80… man, I’m lucky to even see server pop hit 100.
Xenos are fighting a 1v5 fight on average so of course Xenos are favored BUT they’re also fighting 1v5 they have to be. 120 pop vs 33 (from what I see as control as a command operation) and not to mention of those 33 they’re not all queens or T3s.
Balance is fine in its current stage cause both sides have to give effort to win. Stomps happen when one side stops caring or gets complacent. Low pop is more balanced than it’s ever been as long as the fight lives in both sides.
Yeah lowpop used to be literally a fucking death sentence, marines used to only win when they had all the robust xenomains defect to the USCM. It’s pretty crazy how stark the difference is now compared to back when 70:30 was still a developmental goal.
Marine pop numbers is the total amount of marine players in a round, the data is from all rounds during may 2024.
I kindly asked drathek for the data as a way to train myself in statistics for my coming exams at the time (hey got a 5/6 on it in the end so it helped I guess).
Hell, I mostly wanted to have something to show to shut some people up because they would whine about xenos having 80% win rate or something.
Personally, in the end, the data doesn’t really highlight anything new and unknown, it just mostly confirmed things we already thought.
If I have to pick one fact out of this whole thing, it’s how marines win much more often over xenos during high pop rounds. While there was plenty of discussion concerning the lowered marine win rate on low pop, little was discussed about the opposite side of the coin.
In the end, I still think it’s important to remind ourselves not to overly focus on statistics, I still think CM is best when not purely competitive. Sure we can discuss about ways to maybe make low/high pop more balanced for both sides (something something why were marines even given a tank for high pop) but balance talks shouldn’t consume every discussion about CM, it can quickly become lame and tiring.
Will confirm. Playing Xeno at high pop is just pain now a days. And for some reason marines get the tank back which is an objective buff, while also buffing research to scale with an increase in Xeno numbers (the more xenoes spawn, the more corpses they get), and it doesn’t scale well.
I am absolutely not surprised. The key characteristic of a marine player is bitching and moaning about xenos being overpowered, simply because on a base level, all xeno abilities and actions are much easier to execute.
Marine, however, needs significant finesse to be more useful but a group of good marines will wipe xenos the fuck out.
The poll would be more representative if you had included a “I have >X hours as Xeno/Marine brackets”.
Not really “OP”, OP would be “Significant unfair bias”, a slight bias just means Xenos are slighly better but not really that Over powered.
Which makes sense given Xenos are meant to be smaller in numbers but make up for it in terms of strength against a marine 1 on 1 assuming the player is good.
This is true - however - how many times have you seen a gigafragger turn t3s to mush by himself in optimal fighting conditions? Do you think Marines when played correctly are stronger or weaker than Xenos?
And, to be percise, which faction used to have specific fucking rulings about not metagaming some of their equipment (dialing OBs from a small number of coordinates using an external calculator) that, obviously, no longer apply as mods themselves do not give a shit about those because they are unenforceable (not really true)?
Even shooting caps is completely fine now. You can just kill them with no issues.
Will say, the only reason I voted for marines being heavily favoured, is because the game is litterary being balanced around them having fun, and to xenoes being a fun thing to kill. There are very very few new things gotten by xenoes, and when they do, it usualy gets removed either the same month, season or year.
Both, remember how Xenos had rulings saying “No you can’t build around corpses, no you can’t rush LZ” but then mods got rid of them because of how stupid they were, and Marines still have faction specfic rulings, specfically you can’t make Echo squad out of your meta buddies and give them all HPR’s and Mk1’s and tac shotguns.
either the Xeno was bald, the marine had back up, or was a Spec (which are deliberately meant to be more powerful) How often do you see one marine Wipe out Multiple t3’s who are together? I doubt it’s an often occurrence.
