As you can see in the first graph there is a correlation between the age of a scene and that scene’s median placement in the tournament. Chicago, Portland, and New York City are the three oldest scenes and two out of those three are also at the higher end of the median placement distribution. The youngest scenes, Austin and Minneapolis, had on the other hand the two of the lowest median placements.

Next to the city acronyms in the first graph I’ve also put the number of teams that the corresponding scene sent in parenthesis. You can see that this number also grows as you move along both axes.

In the second graph I’ve presented these data more clearly. You can see what you might have assumed from the first graph: the greater presence a scene had at Bumble Bash (which I believe likely correlates with the size of that scene), the higher the median placement of its teams (which I believe correlate to the general strength of that scene).

Laying this all out there were two things that I found interesting:

First, Charlotte and Kansas City are over-performing relative to their age and size respectively. In other words, the cities seem like they’re actually stronger than you would assume based on how long they’ve been active and how many teams they sent to the national tournament.

Kansas City is slightly outperforming its age and its size. Looking just at its age the median placement of its teams is slightly better than you might expect. And while it’s in the middle of the age distribution it is a little lower that the mid-point on the presence distribution. Even though it was one of the sixth largest scenes in terms of presence it managed to achieve the third highest median placement, behind Chicago and New York.

Then you have Charlotte which is in the middle in terms of placement, but is a little lower than the center of the distribution of teams present and even lower in the age distribution. I interpret this as meaning that the city is outperforming for its size and definitely outperforming for its age.

Along with those observations, the second thing I was struck by is that while Portland was in the middle of the distribution on both presence and median placement, which you would expect to correlate, it was second oldest scene. I interpret this to mean that relative to its size PDX as a scene is doing fine strength-wise, but that it is not as strong or as large as you would expect from a scene of its age.

(EDIT: An earlier version of this piece made a mistake in the placement of one of the San Francisco teams. When that was corrected it turned out that SF was right on trend in terms of age and their median placement. I’ve edited this piece throughout, though most of the results remain the same. Apologies to the San Francisco team and take this as a warning about how small the sample size is we’re working with here!)

I was very curious about the case of Portland so I decided to investigate further and made a third graph to make things a little clearer for myself:

In this graph I have put the distribution of possible placements at the bottom. I have then listed, in chronological order of founding from top to bottom the scenes that attended Bumble Bash. Along the lines extending from the city names I’ve placed dots that mark the placement of the individual teams that represented that scene. Where teams had the same placement I just put dots on top of each other.

What we can see in this graph is that the teams from most scenes tend to clump in the placement distribution. Both teams from Columbus are on the same half of the distribution. The majority of New York and Chicago’s teams are pretty evenly spread across the upper half of the placement spots. Two of Kansas City’s teams are in the upper half as well. The third KC team, which was formed at the last minute is at the very bottom. However, due to the circumstances I think this still shows that KC is strong for its age.

Looking at this individual team data also turns what would be a worrisome outcome for Portland into much better news. It has teams in the upper half of the distribution, but also in the lower half. PDX has a team that placed second in the tournament (and I can tell you showed enough talent that it definitely could have taken first place) and 9th place team, with its other teams placed behind the half way mark.

My interpretation is that Portland has a lot of talent in their respective scenes, that talent wasn’t evenly distributed across the teams present at Bumble Bash.

Interestingly, this was also the case for San Francisco. SF has a huge gulf between its two best teams and its two other teams in terms of placement.

For San Francisco they have about half their talent in the upper end of the distribution. That leaves the opportunity for the talent in the two strongest teams to be widely spread among the weaker teams, potentially boosting their performance over time as the lower performing players learn, in person, from the higher performing ones. Second, remember that San Francisco is in the middle of the age distribution. This means that they have two teams that are strongly out-performing relative to expectation in regards to their time playing the game. For comparison, look at Chicago and New York, both of which are old scenes that have their teams pretty evenly distributed across the upper half of the range of placements.

Portland has a similar story.

I’m of the opinion that as you get higher in the placement distribution of a tournament, it takes more and more skill to reach each successive rung of the ladder. So the gap in skill between the teams in 1st place and 5th place is actually much greater than the gap in skill between the teams in 22nd and 30th place.

What this means for Portland is that, potentially, the gap in terms of strength between their team at the very top of the placement distribution (called Excuses) and their team in 18th place (called Stinger Scouts) is much bigger than the the gap between SF’s 9th place team (called Golden Hate Warriors) and their 22nd placing teams.

What produced this dynamic? My understanding, which is based a lot on conversations with people in both of these scenes and with players familiar with their inner workings, is the large gap between upper and lower placement that you see in both these scenes is a result of their having their most veteran players concentrated in fewer teams.

Let me put it this way, if Portland had only sent their highest placing team they would be totally in line in terms of the correlation between skill and age that we see in other teams (though, obviously, this would mean that the relationship between their age and size would be even further off). Again, if we just look at the higher placing San Francisco teams the most interesting thing we see is that SF flips from under-performing relative to their age to significantly over-performing relative to how long the scene has been around!

Far be it for me to suggest to any scene about what’s best for them. Every scene is different and has different dynamics. But looking at the relationship between the median placement of the different scenes and the actual placement of individual teams the advice that I’m going to be taking to my home scene (New York) is to spend the year before the next Bumble Bash making sure that talent is well distributed so as to skill up the entire scene.