Analysis

Skill Floor vs. Skill Ceiling

Difficulty vs. Reward

Spy?

Spy mains had by far the highest regard for a Sniper's skill ceiling.



Engineer mains gave a very high skill ceiling to Solders and a very low skill ceiling to Snipers.



Heavy mains rated their skill ceilings lower than any other class main did.



Overall, it seems that most classes have a similar perception when it comes to skill ceilings.

The graph below represents both the skill required to start playing a class and the potential for improvement at that class. Higher boxes are more difficult to learn and taller boxes have the most potential for improvement. This graph in no way implies that, for instance, a heavy cannot become more skilled than an Engineer.Additionally, there appears to be a correlation between the perceived overall difficulty of a class and the perceived reward for playing that class. Spy was again the most difficult and most rewarding class overall. Soldier was deemed the second most rewarding class, and Sniper was considered the second most difficult class overall.So quite a few people mentioned that these numbers do nothing more than buff any Spy main's ego, citing that Sniper is provably the class with the highest skill ceiling. Several have suggested running the numbers again on only data collected from players with 1,000 hours or more in the game. Here's the skill ceiling graph based on the 183 surveys in which the respondent claimed to have 1,000 or more hours logged playing TF2.Additionally, several have suggested creating graphs on the data with any surveys submitted by Spy mains excluded. To be fair, here is a breakdown of Skill Ceiling responses grouped the main class of the respondent. This result shows that Pyro, Heavy, and Sniper mains all attributed a higher skill ceiling to the Spy than even Spy mains did.A few interesting results from this extra analysis...