Imperfect Symmetry: A Deep Dive Into Control / KotH Maps in OWL

Examining patterns across the different control maps and teams reveals some interesting results. For the sake of simplicity, none of the below analyses consider team composition and combine results across stages. I also use KotH and Control interchangeably to describe the same thing specifically to trigger anyone who decides to read my work.

Tl;Dr — There is statistical evidence that would suggest that some rounds of some control maps have a higher chance of appearing first than others, overall capturing the point first nets you a fifteen percentage point increase in chance of winning, different maps have different value associated with capturing the point first, and some teams are better than others at capitalizing on the first capture.

Unlike all other game types control creates a situation in which both teams have equal resources at the start of the round. The sides are symmetrical, there is no spawn advantage, and the objective is stationary. There are only two possible advantages a team can have on a Control map — Control of the point and Ultimate Advantage. Ultimate Advantage is a pretty ubiquitous concept in Overwatch, so I will instead choose to focus on point control.

Without doing a deep dive, any one of you could probably guess that the team that is in control of the point has an advantage, but how do you quantify that? Does the map matter, does the team matter? These are questions I aim to answer below, and the results I think are fairly interesting.

Let’s start with a simple first inquiry — is the order in which the Control rounds appear really random? Each Control map has three separate rounds, for example Nepal has Village, Shrine, and Sanctum. You would expect that each of these three rounds would have a 33% chance of appearing first, but that is not necessarily the case. Time to lay out some numbers.

Ilios has been played 74 times in the OWL, and each round has appeared first between 29% and 36% of the time. The range is similar for Oasis (played 74 times) which has a range of 31% to 35% — both of which fall within an expected deviation away from 33%. However, when you look at Lijiang Tower and Nepal, that parity goes away. Shrine has appeared as the first round 40.2% of the 67 times the map has been played in OWL, but this deviation (from an expected value of 33%) is not significant. That changes on Lijiang Tower though, where Garden has a 48% of appearing first which is a statistically significant difference (P = 0.012) compared to the expected population proportion of 33%. I want to be careful here about what the takeaway is from this finding. Statistical significance implies an arbitrary degree of certainty that an observed value is different than an expected value (in the one-sample test), and does not prove beyond any doubt that there are non-random factors in which round appears first on a control map.

The expected value for each round should be 33%

Addressing the impact of this inequality of first rounds is a bit tough. Firstly, its fair to point out that what really matters is whether a map-round appears in the first two rounds or not as those rounds are guaranteed to be played no matter what. And if you use those terms to examine the discrepancy, the statistical significance goes away. But Overwatch is a game of momentum, losing round one could impact your performance in round two. The last thing I’ll say is this — the Gladiators win on Lijiang Garden 25% more than their average Control round and the Shock lose 23% more than their average on that map, so take away from that what you will.

Moving on to the heart of the article, what does capturing the first point actually give a team in terms of an advantage. Across all maps and teams, the team that captures the point first goes on to win the round 65% of the time. However, as you can see below this percentage varies fairly heavily depending on which map/section you are playing.