I've written and talked about Goyo a fair bit as there was a lot of trepidation and expectation going into S11 about him being available. Now that the first half of S11 is over, it seems like a good time to use S11 stats to try and gauge what his impact has actually been.

I went through the stats for all 3 main regions (NA, EU and Latam) using SiegeGG Pro (contact them to discuss access) to populate my own spreadsheet and make a bunch of different calculations. Hopefully there aren't any major errors on my part, but take these stats with a grain of salt just in case! Here's my google sheet, feel free to see what else you can conclude from it!

A big caveat to all of these #'s is that there are many many other factors that go into a successful defense more than just 1 operator. Unfortunately I can't realistically factor many of those in without a huge amount of manual VOD review (for example, I would have loved to have the time to measure average KPR for Goyo players). Winrate seems like the most solid indicator of compositional impact that can be reliably collected as Goyo's gadget is very team oriented and often works together with 1-2 extra shields, Jager ADS's, Castle barricades, etc.

First, how often was Goyo really played? Out of 887 defensive rounds, Goyo was played 186 rounds, approx. 20.97% of the time. Of those times, the team bringing Goyo won the round approx. 58.06%. The average defense winrate across all 3 regions was 53.38% so Goyo at least performs slightly above. The real stand out strange aspect however, is that TSM had the highest defense winrate at 69.40% and was the only team to never once play Goyo!

Out of all the teams that did bring Goyo, some seemed to benefit more than others as indicated by their round winrate and amount they ran him.

Best Goyo teams

As you can see from the stats, 4 of the top 5 "Goyo teams" were Latam, w/ a strong indicator Goyo should be banned against NIP at invite. This fits w/ Latam having a very aggressive defensive posture overall, which benefits from having the 3 exploding shields and a high RoF gun preferred in the region, the Vector.

To get a bigger overall picture of defensive wins, here's the teams who won more than 50% of their defenses alongside how they played Goyo:

Overall best defensive teams

Some teams such as Vitality likely could have benefited from more Goyo play as they had a 100% winrate the 2 rounds they played him, but overall their defensive winrate is fairly low. Latam as a whole definitely benefits. That being said it's interesting to look at the overall winrate's for Goyo per region.

Despite NA playing Goyo the least, they seemed to do so fairly successfully. EU however really seemed to struggle to hit that sweet spot.

As with many things in R6, Goyo's success often must factor in the map and bomb site choice. Some bomb sites were not only more popular than others, but also more successful. To start with, here's the most popular bomb sites where Goyo was played at least 10 times:

Most popular bomb sites for Goyo

Interesting to note that all 3 of the played Clubhouse bomb sites were popular choices. Popularity however did not always equal success. Here's the bomb sites with greater than 50% success.

Most successful bomb sites for Goyo

Keep in mind however that the 100% winrate sites were all very low sample sizes and that spread across more rounds, things evened out more. So let's look at the overall best sites, where it was played at least 10 times and had a higher than 50% success rate:

Best bomb sites for Goyo overall

The huge standout is of course, Bar on Kafe w/ a whopping 92.86% success rate. Two things factor into that, using a shield to help hold "heaven" (the balcony area on Cocktail side of Bar) and one to help hold "pixel spot" (the entryway to white hallway from Xmas/Piano). While it was too low of a sample (5 rounds) to make this list, Reading on Kafe was also strong at 100% winrate for the above mentioned reasons as you need to defend Bar too.

Strong Goyo shield placements on Kafe

For some placements on the other top bomb sites I suggest my articles here:

SI 2020 qual setups / Forze vs Navi strats / Intz Bar defense / Villa Dining

Just to be thorough, here's the rounds played by map, as well as the 3 sites that never got played:

Goyo play per map

Sites unplayed

Overall I think its safe to conclude that Goyo is a strong addition to defense, but certainly not OP or a guaranteed win. He's definitely a very good pick on certain bomb sites and maps. There is however, one more factor to consider for the second half of S11: Wamai. It won't be an all the time thing, but bringing a composition like Jager, Wamai, Goyo, Mute and Mozzie will be incredibly strong for denying utility and intel to the point where attackers may be very time starved!

Hope you enjoyed a bit more detailed view into how Goyo was used so far. I will definitely be keeping an eye on him during Six Invitational 2020 and beyond. Make sure to let me know what other interesting tidbits you see in the data or if I made some goofs. I'll see you all in Montreal!