A Look Back at NPL Phase 2

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Now that NPL Phase 2 is over, let’s take a look back. How well did each team do throughout the phase?

To be honest, I forgot that it would be over after 40 matches, and now I have to entertain myself until Stockholm. Luckily, I’ve taken on yet another question that I thought was simple and turned out not to be – stay tuned for next week.

First, here’s how each team performed based on their circle favor in the final week of NPL Phase 2.

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FINAL PHASE 2 “LUCK” PLOT

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Figure 1: Total points per match for each NPL team based on circle favor, as of Phase 2, Week 5. Teams that are above the black line performed better than expected, and teams below the line, worse. The gray lines represent one half standard deviation from the mean in points per match. The dotted trace represents the change in performance from Week 4 to Week 5.

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A breakdown by kill points and placement points can be found here.

Ghost, Tempo, and C9 all made a huge push towards the end – C9 improved despite losing a bit of circle favor, although the difference in circle favor between those three teams is fairly minute.

Rumblers and P1E fell off slightly, even though they were fighting for top spots, as did Endemic, who did well last week. Rumblers and Spacestation continued to outperform their luck by the highest margin of all teams.

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“LUCK” PLOTS OVER TIME

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To see each team’s progression over Phase 2 relative to their luck and relative to other teams, I created an animation of each week’s plots to show trends over time.

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Figure 2: Animation of change in average points per match for each NPL team based on circle favor over the course of Phase 2. Teams that are above the black line performed better than expected, and teams below the line, worse. The gray lines represent one half standard deviation from the mean in points per match.

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If you follow the path of one team you’re interested in, you can see their whole record throughout the phase. Ghost seems to have continuously improved, while Wildcard went from average to below average. eUnited started strong and regressed to the mean, and Simplicity did the opposite, starting weak and coming closer to expected performance.

All the observations tended towards the centre over time, but there was still a surprising spread in average circle favor at the end of week 5. One way to confirm the influence of skill or playstyle on this measure of “luck” would be to see how this spread shrinks over many more matches. If the spread in circle favor basically trends to 0 (all teams clustered at the mean), then it truly is all luck, but if it stays spread out, then it’s strongly affected by differences in how teams are playing.

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TRENDS IN THE STANDINGS

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I was interested in plotting trends in team performance over Phase 2, so I made an interactive tool to look at each team’s results over time.

Hover over the lines in the plotly visualization below to see details for each team in each match. 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. Zoom out with the controls in the upper right to see Smokin’ Aces (then Denial) start the phase off with a bang.

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Figure 3: Interactive plot of team performance over the course of NPL 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). I’ve used the cumulative average of points per match so the results gradually smooth out as more data informs this average.

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

At the top of the standings, Tempo outperformed C9 for most of the phase, but the two teams came much closer near the end, crossing over multiple times. Ghost’s upward climb can be seen in this graph too. Rumblers crossed over with Tempo multiple times as well, dropping off just in the last week. Spacestation moved up in the standings pretty dramatically from the first half of the phase to the second.

In the lower end of the standings, Excelerate had an impressive continous climb, while Wildcard dipped down slowly.

The end results are grouped in four distinct clusters, and are very close overall, especially at the top.

Were the results much closer this phase than last? What did the points spread look like last phase in comparison? Next week, I’ll be looking into parity, which is a bit more complicated to analyze for this game than I first thought.

I’ve had a great time sharing my work with all of you over the past two months. Thanks for all the support.

The data I recorded and used is here, and 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 Phase 2. Excelerate, Spacestation, and Ghost continually rose in the standings. Rumblers and Spacestation continued to outperform their luck by the highest margin of all teams, even though they both dropped off at the end.