A higher % of kobolds who make it to level 25 will win than octopodes, but the kobolds who fail to win from that position mostly die in Zot trying to get the orb. The octopodes who fail to win from that point mostly die in exotic extended game locales like ziggurats.

Controlling for number of runes sought¶

It seems like the variation in ambition across species makes our table of win rates harder to interpret. Let's try to control for this. What's the win rate for each species, in a world where players always go for just 3 runes?

We can calculate this counterfactual as:

P(earning >= 3 runes | species) * P(success | species, trying to win with 3 runes)

The first term we can easily calculate directly from the data. The second term is more tricky: the chance of a given species winning given that they've already earned 3 runes, and given that they don't intend to get any more. It's tricky because it involves a latent variable: the player's intentions. But we can approximate it as:

#(3 rune wins | species) / (#(3 rune wins | species) + #(deaths in Zot, the depths, and the dungeon | species, 3 runes))

The denominator should be a pretty good approximation of the number of 3-rune win attempts by a given species. We can't just count the number of deaths by characters holding 3 runes, because that will include lots of deaths that occurred while trying to get a 4th rune in the slime pits, the abyss, etc. We only want to count deaths that occurred while diving down to Zot to get the orb, or while ascending back up to D:1 with the orb.

(This may slightly undercount, since some 3 rune win attempts may end in the Vaults/Shoals/Swamp/etc. whilst trying to get back up to the dungeon with the third rune, especially if it was "ninja'd". They may also occasionally end in the abyss as a result of being banished on the way to the orb.)

Here's a graph just showing the value of that second term for each species: