PUBG Global Championship and New Circle Impact Plots

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Who outplayed their circle favor in the group stage of the PUBG Global Championship?

Turns out grad school takes up a lot of your time – who knew! I’m finally back with a redesigned way to visualize the impact of circle RNG on competitive PUBG.

It’s taken me a long time to redevelop my process, but I’ve figured out how to create these plots using only data from the PUBG API, without recording data by hand, so now making them should take way less time.

I have the data to look at recent phases and tournaments like the Nations Cup, and make some other types of visualizations, but since the Global Championship is happening right now, I thought I’d put this work out first.

Some quick notes for people who may not have seen my work before:

Circle favor or “luck” only explains about 10-15% of how a team performs in a match (depending on how I measure it); my goal here isn’t to single out certain teams for being fed, it’s to provide an accessible visualization of who is successfully playing better or worse than their circle favor alone would predict .

It’s not always advantageous in all situations to be in the center compared to playing edge! But overall, teams earn ~2 more points in a match for each circle that they are in , roughly speaking.

I tested which circles have a significant effect on the outcome of a match and only use those in this analysis – for example, being in or out of the first circle has no effect on a team’s points in a match.

There’s also an element of skill to what I’m calling “circle favor.” Sometimes a circle landing on a team is just purely due to luck, but often it’s skilled positioning and managing to consistently be in a good spot for the next phase.

Here’s how each team performed in the group stage of the PUBG Global Championship based on how close they were to the center of each new circle.

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PUBG GLOBAL CHAMPIONSHIP CIRCLE FAVOR

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Total points per match for each PUBG Global Championship team based on circle favor. Eliminated teams are in gray.

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How does this work?

This plot shows the relationship between each team’s average points per match in the group stage of the PUBG Global Championship and their players’ average distance from the center of each new circle at the moment that each new circle appeared.

These distances from the center of each new circle are scaled by the radius of the circle, as each circle is a different size and there are two different map sizes in play.* The distance values on the x-axis are reversed, so teams that happened to be closer to the new circle center are on the right hand side, and teams that were farther away are on the left – this is just for ease of interpretation and to provide continuity from my previous plots.

This analysis is different from my old method; I used to use a simple binary metric of whether a team was inside or outside of each circle and plot the proportion of circles they were in compared to their average performance.

Every team above the black line is playing better than we would expect if we knew only their circle favor, and teams below the line are not quite living up to that predicted performance.

The gray lines parallel to the black line represent two standard deviations from the mean in points per match – teams closer to those lines are performing much better or much worse than teams closer to the central black line. Eliminated teams are shown in gray.

4AM and AFF really stand out as outplaying the hand they were dealt, especially AFF, who have had the fifth-worst circle favor. Entus Ace and Team SoloMid are also killing it and making the most of their positioning – of the teams with similar luck, they’re really capitalizing on their situation. Entus Ace is the biggest surprise of this tournament so far, imo, so I’m excited to see how they do in the semifinals.

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What about the eliminated teams?

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Total points per match for each PUBG Global Championship team based on circle favor. Eliminated teams are highlighted.

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The teams that have been eliminated weren’t particularly lucky or unlucky, as far as I can tell. They didn’t tend to have unusually good or bad circle positions on average, except CrowCrowd, who really got a raw deal.

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

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tl;dr Circle favor at the PUBG Global Championship during the group stage, with a new way of measuring circle favor as the average distance from the center of each new circle.

So far, 4AM and AFF really stand out as outplaying the hand they were dealt, especially AFF, who have had the fifth-worst circle favor. Entus Ace and Team SoloMid are making the most of their positioning – can they keep it up?

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*Except for “circle 9,” the final point, which is only 16 cm or so in diameter on the map. For this circle, I used the radius of circle 8 as the scale factor so that the scaled distances wouldn’t be enormous and disproportionately raise the average distance of teams who survived to circle 9.

I also have to note that, for whatever reason, the Sanhok match on day 1 of the group stage didn’t make its way into the permanently stored API tournament data, so if something particularly extreme happened to your favorite team in that match, you’re free to say that these plots aren’t representative of their luck or performance ;)