A Look Back at PEL Phase 2

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Phase 2 of PUBG Europe League has wrapped up after a tense final weekend. I thought I’d share an overview of how each team performed throughout the phase.

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TRENDS IN THE STANDINGS

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Similarly to how I plotted trends in the standings over NPL Phase 2, I made an interactive tool to look at each team’s results over PEL Phase 2.

I cropped this plotly visualization fairly tightly so there’s more detail visible for the last few weeks, but zoom out with the controls in the upper right to see the chaos at the beginning of the phase, with G2 and CrowCrowd having great matches to start out, and Team Liquid bouncing back from a zero-point match with a 20-point win.

Hover over the colored lines in the plot to see details for how each team’s average points changed with each match. Use the pan tool to move around. Double click on a team name in the legend to isolate that team’s trendline, and single click to add or remove other teams’ trendlines to compare. Double click again or press the home button in the upper right to restore the plot to defaults.

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Figure 1: Interactive plot of team performance over the course of PEL Phase 2.

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“Cumulative average points” refers to a team’s total standings points after a given match divided by the number of matches (average points), incremented over the increasing number of matches as time goes on (cumulatively). If I graphed total points over time, the plot would be this same mess but all in a diagonal line, so essentially I just divided the ongoing points totals by the number of matches to make the plot more horizontal and easier to read.

The relative position of each team is accurate for each day’s results, so you can see how the standings change over time.

It’s clear from this plot that the top teams separated out fairly early on, although Team SoloMid slowly declined starting around the halfway point, making the contest for 5th place more exciting near the end.

Speaking of the end, Pittsburgh Knights had an incredible 75-point performance in the final weekend to just barely take over that 5th place spot.

The top four teams shifted around over the final few matches as well, with Team Liquid and G2 declining slightly from their previous average performance, and Natus Vincere and FaZe Clan criss-crossing several times (zoom in on these four teams at the end to see more detail). FaZe had two good matches in a row right at the end to seal their first-place finish.

NV seemed to have a steady drop in performance from match 73 on, while the other top teams were a bit more consistent.

In the lower half of the standings, CrowCrowd had a chaotic Phase 2, bumping up their average with a few great matches (53, 67). ENCE declined to a low point at match 74 and improved from there, and Vitality turned things around from there as well. Reciprocity continuously improved throughout the phase.

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PARITY UPDATE

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Now that Phase 2 of PEL and PEL-C is are complete, I’ve created an updated visualization of the parity metric I described in my previous post. If you missed it, parity is the level of fairness or competitiveness in a league. High parity means teams are more similar in terms of skill, and have a more equal chance of winning, which makes predicting the results more difficult.

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Figure 2: Parity in competitive PUBG. Inverse Simpson’s indices, with confidence intervals, for each phase of every major international league with a 16-team lobby, showing the effective number of teams in each league. Numbers on the ends of league acronyms refer to the phase.

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PEL Phase 2 had the highest parity of all major international PUBG leagues, followed by PEL Contenders Phase 2, with a very dramatic jump in PEL-C parity from Phase 1.

This isn’t necessarily what I expected to see based on the addition of two different teams to PEL Phase 2, but it’s clear from the first plot that within the two clusters in the standings, teams are fairly close to each other on the whole.

This might have interesting implications for the number of matches in future phases. With the top four teams sitting comfortably at the top of the standings since basically the end of Week 2, was it really necessary to play 72 more matches to see which of those four teams, with near-equal points totals throughout, would happen to put together more good games in a row near the end?

On the other hand, without playing all 96 matches, Pittsburgh Knights wouldn’t have had the opportunity to take over the 5th place spot in the final weekend in such dramatic style. We’ll see what Phase 3 looks like, I guess!

As always, my .Rmd file is here, for those of you who are interested.

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tl;dr Interactive tool to see how teams performed in PEL Phase 2. The top four teams (FaZe Clan, Natus Vincere, Team Liquid, and G2) separated out from the pack early on. A slow decline by Team SoloMid let the race for 5th place be decided in just the final weekend with a great performance by Pittsburgh Knights. Also, PEL Phase 2 and PEL Contenders Phase 2 had the highest parity of all leagues so far.