High Scores and Stats

Beta 7 Stat Summary
(As usual, leaderboards were reset with the new release. The full archived Beta 7 leaderboards can be found here, with score sheets for all runs accessible at the bottom.)

Time to look at non-anonymous player data! Like Beta 6 this was an especially long cycle, spanning months of Beta 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.2LE as I also took time out to do some other dev things, so we now have 6,145 score sheets to go through... Well, technically we're only looking at 5,208 (87.3%) of those since the rest scored below the 500-point threshold, a similar ratio to what we've seen before.

606 unique named players are included this time, a 14.6% increase compared to Beta 6. That's 11.6 qualified runs per player, a 27.4% increase.

The Beta 7 win rate was actually significantly lower at 6.6% (down from 8.2%), primarily because speedrunning was a big thing in the last release, but not so much this time. For Beta 6 I graphed the wins by turn count and found that about half of all wins were speed runs, so technically excluding those our win rate has actually increased somewhat. There were 344 wins in all by

Valguris (126), MTF (17), Zyalin (15), lsend (14), GJ (12), PlasticHeart (11), kiedra (10), Raine (10), Pimski (9), Tone (8), wilk (8), Decinym (6), Terminus (6), whitenitro0 (5), badjay (4), Main.Cuck (4), Malth (4), cptwinky (3), GridBugBear (3), JackNine (3), Kyzrati (3), Mhorre (3), octapi (3), Omewes (3), Puzzlebark (3), tiniclx (3), UlyssesB (3), Ape (2), IceBox (2), JakeThyCamel (2), MojoPoop (2), Owlsley (2), PhenomPhear (2), Rumbl3 (2), Aeon2927, Alexbot, Amphouse, bugsniper, ConfusingDalek, Cowmind, FIRE_C4T, GOR, Heavyrisk, Howard, JC, Joel, joke_LA, McSi, moonshine, NoNeedToExplain, physalin, Quelan, RNGesus, Sherlockkat, slh, Some Random Guy, SpiritFryer, SSMR, TBExtent, tournTrione, zidji, Zinc, zxc.

Once again Valguris racks up an insane number of wins xD

And of special note, Pimski earned Cogmind's second highest ever score (241,581!) using so-called "Garrison looping," repeatedly traveling through garrisons and destroying their contents, returning to the main floor. There was only one place in the world where this was possible, and it also involved the most challenging garrisons, but through a combination of speed and guided weaponry, Pimski managed to take out 44 of them xD. As of Beta 8 some of the mechanics involved there have changed so that it's no longer possible, but we're already seeing more regular runs creep up towards 200k regardless... That said, it may never be possible to break the 123 Regions Visited record set by that run.

Last time I graphed wins by turn count, and now that everyone seems to have speedrunning out of their system I thought it'd be interesting to take a look at win distribution by real time:

Most of Valguris' runs tend to fall in the 0.5~1.0-hour range, hence the extra high surge there, otherwise it's a fairly even distribution overall. I split out his runs in the graph to give a better representation :P

PlasticHeart has also provided us with what he calls "mutation distribution," graphing what kinds of long-term benefits different winners are using:

As you can see the graph excludes speed runs since they tend to distort data. There's a fairly even distribution here as well, although it's interesting to see that nearly 40% of wins do so with no mutations at all. Of course, getting any of these requires deviating from the main path, sometimes fairly far away, so they aren't the kind of thing you'll just "happen across." The new FarCom introduced for Beta 8 will no doubt be popular. (The current "mutation" data for Beta 8 scores is also available here, by the way, although there's not yet a way to tell whether anyone's immediately lost FarCom and therefore didn't really take advantage of it.)

The big new thing for Beta 7 was RIF, or robot hacking, so that's definitely something to explore here.

Obtaining this ability requires entering a Garrison, which isn't too bad if you're prepared, but a lot of people were probably avoiding them before, so I imagine there was a distinct lack of experience... The data bears that out, with 3.6% of losses inside a Garrison, compared to 2.3% in Beta 6.

422 runs (8.1%) acquired RIF, two-thirds of them inside the -8 Garrison, although a fair but smaller number did it in -7, and relatively few later than that. RIF keeps getting improvements, some in the Beta 7 updates, more in Beta 8, and likely yet more in Beta 9, so the style is definitely coming into its own.

The average RIF run hacked only 9 bots, but the highest number hacked was 124 (by Joel). Players tended to hack combat robots a bit more than non-combat bots. The only hacks that went completely unused so far are tweak_propulsion, likely because it's pretty situational and there are generally better options, and report_prototypes, report_schematics, and report_analyses, probably because their results are both uncontrollable and can be achieved through other means anyway, thus Relay Couplers are too valuable to spend on them.

Among RIF runs, only an average 3.27 Relay Couplers were attached, although Joel attached 43 in a single run. And wow, apparently I took the second spot in this category with 41 attached (and the third spot with 24 xD). I did rather like RIF, and streamed a couple runs with it, and plan to do some more, having really barely scratched the surface so far when it comes to robot hacking... 131 (31%!) of RIF users never attached a single Relay Coupler, probably because they were still learning, or unprepared for that Garrison ;)

I've compiled a chart of hacks by the number of times they were used, excluding anything with fewer than 10 uses total:

Hacks that can target both combat and non-combat bots are not marked, but some of those are especially popular as well, such as overload_power, a great hack for making a mess. parse_system is popular of course, but it only provides meta information and plot stuff so isn't as meaningful here. That was something which could always be done even before RIF.

formatsys_high is by far the top hack, the good old assimilation hack which is expensive but if you've got the coupler power might as well use it! overwrite_iff is the cheaper temporary version, useful for weakening enemy groups when a newly formatted ally would end up just dying anyway.

I'd like to compare this data to what we get from Beta 8 to see if there are any shifts as players learn more about the different hacks, and perhaps take advantage of RIF more often as it's both been buffed and works well with FarCom.

I was curious about gunslinging stats since Beta 7 made that guaranteed, plus more players might want to take advantage of it as a result. Sure enough, the average amount of gunslinging doubled in Beta 7, increasing from an average 1.68 secondary targets to 3.03. (I did a gunslinging run myself.) kiedra led the pack with a whopping 104 secondary targets in a single run. By comparison my own gunslinger run only had 29, but that's still pretty high ;)

Melee secondary attacks were also buffed, and while they weren't recorded in Beta 6 so we can't compare, according to Beta 7 data there were an average of only 0.51 per run. That's fairly low, but then most people prefer taking on targets one-on-one with their melee builds. That said, PhenomPhear had a run with 32 (!) secondary melee attacks. To be clear, this is attacking more than one robot with a single melee volley.

Comparable data that we do have for Beta 6 includes follow-up attacks, i.e. hitting a single target with more than one melee weapon. There was a definite surge there, where the average run went from 0.90 follow-up attacks to 2.00. The averages in all these are rather low since many don't use this mechanic at all, but it's extremely effective. Back in Beta 6 the follow-up record in a single run was 284, but that was topped in Beta 7 by GJ with 527! That's quite a beat-down...

Meta stats:

• 89.9% of players use fullscreen (30.9% of those use borderless windowed mode)
• 7.3% use hjkl for movement
• 12.8% prefer ASCII
• 21.8% don't touch the mouse
• 1.5% of players have rebinded at least one command
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (65.9%), followed by Terminus (16.2%), and X11 (7.8%) (10.1% use some other font)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (53.8%), with 28.4% of players using something lower, and 17.8% higher
• 1.5% percent of players are using a render filter, fewer than in Beta 6. Most of those are activating low-contrast mode.
• 72.6% of players are using Tactical HUD mode