And the OP Faction is *drum roll* ....

Hmm, it appears that for the most part. The NC is the worst, TR is the best, and the VS is somewhere in between. No surprise there. Its been that way for a long time, and will stay that way. But overall, things are pretty balanced, they have been. With the exception of one or two items, tops, everything is pretty equal.

You can't just compare raw avg ignoring battle rank. NC has the highest population so they might have very different battle rankings compared to the other 2.. comparing a level 1 BR with a level 50 BR and just clumping all them together gives u a skewed stat depending upon the number of vets to newbies ratio.. It would be more meaningful to compare BR > 30 to get a real metric of combat power. Newbie vs newbie are going to be equally in-effective in whatever weapon / class, however vet vs vet, u get a real sense of what weapon / class is more powerful per faction.

The prowler is fine. Just give a slight bump to the magrider, and a little more of a bump to the vanguard.

It's not the NCs fault that your faction sucks and people like the appeal of Freedom from Oppression.

Depending on the distance, an upgraded prowler with the vulcan will win a head on fight with an upgraded enforcer vanguard due to the vulcan disabling the shield with one bullet and the prowler's superior DPS. At longer ranges the vanguard wins though.

On the other hand, any upgraded vanguard that gets the first shot will probably win its fight. And an enforcer AP vanguard can instant kill any other tank from the rear with simultaneous shots. With HEAT rounds the enemy tank will be on fire.

What's the link to that spreadsheet again? I lost the link.

TR scores highest on all infantry classes and MBT, just barely 2nd in ESF scoring because Scythe is the best ESF for newbie pilots

I see the lower population factions getting more XP per hour.....
I mean, they are statistically more likely to have someone to shoot at, it makes sense.

I find it interesting how as soon as NC gets the population advantage, everyone goes crazy. When the TR had it, VS were silent, and of course TR were happy. NC accepted it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AmUavphHXmIxdFhHUzJfN1VYalRnWS0xMnBUdTJpM1E&gid=23

Let's see.
No variances or standard deviations are given and to make matters worse no ranges are given either. However, we can still make some estimates.
If we assume the lowest score per hour to be 0 sph, then the range can be estimated:
R ≈ 4μ - 2m (following from equation 5)
μ is the mean, m is the median.
Furthermore, since we can assume the distributions to be normal distributions due to the central limit theorem, the standard deviation is s ≈ R/4 = μ - ½m. where n is the number of observations (characters in this case).
From there we can now compare the various statistical data and find any statistical imbalances. We'll be assuming the risk is 10% due to the approximations thus α = 10%/100% = 0.1
First we'll be measuring if the variances are different. The variance comparison requires the F-distributions:
If (s_a)^2/(s_b)^2 > F(ν_a, ν_b, α) then the variances are different, where s_a ≥ s_b and v_a = n_a -1, v_b = n_b - 1 .

After that, we check if the means are different by comparing the difference of mean to a mean of zero i.e. if
μ_x - μ_y ≠ 0 . This requires the t-distribution.
If the variances aren't different then the mean error is:
d = √(1/n_x + 1/n_y)√([(n_x - 1)(s_x)^2 + (n_y - 1)(s_y)^2]/[n_x + n_y - 2])
DoF: ν = n_x + n_y - 2

If they are:
d = √((s_x)^2/n_x + (s_y)^2/n_y)
DoF: ν = ((s_x)^2/n_x + (s_y)^2/n_y)^2/[{(s_x)^2/n_x}^2/{n_x +1} + {(s_y)^2/n_y}^2/{n_y +1}] - 2

Then if |μ_x - μ_y|/d > t(ν, α/2), then the means are different.

This is the result, calculated in Matlab and represented as "Difference between means, statistically different variances, statistically different means":

Code:

NC - TR
        987          1          1
       -485          1          1
       -514          1          1
       -529          1          1
       -374          1          1
       -267          1          1
      -1172          1          1
       -547          1          1
 
 
VS - NC
      -1033          1          1
        105          1          1
        257          1          1
         92          1          0
       -179          1          1
        -79          0          1
        625          1          1
        757          1          1
 
TR - VS
         46          1          0
        380          1          1
        257          1          1
        437          1          1
        553          1          1
        346          1          1
        547          1          1
       -210          1          0

Or in other words:

Code:

MAX:              NC > TR = VS
Engineer:         TR > VS > NC
Medic:            TR > VS > NC
Light Assault:    TR > VS = NC
Heavy Assault:    TR > NC > VS
Infiltrator:      TR > NC > VS
MBT:              TR > VS > NC
ESF:              VS = TR > NC

Statistically speaking, anyways...

I play TR (NC for 9 years and forced to play TR because morons join the team with the highest pop), and from what I see, has lower pops on my server (Briggs, consistently and often significantly lower) and still keeps up with kills.

Hmmmm....

****...

you just won forumside.

When did TR have population advantage?

THIS....However since most TR don't want a Vanguard that can go up against them in equal terms they always say things are balanced.

So people are basing your opinion on what is OP on numbers estimated from a fundamentally flawed XP system?

Ok... I'll bite...
-MAX
-NC MAX is meant to be used differently than the VS and TR MAXes, and apparently this gives it more XP per hour. It was nerfed not because of this, but because it was extremely easy to lock down biolabs and other buildings with it. Still, I don't see any problem here, other than the fact that OHK is annoying.

-Engineer:
-An engineer gets most of his XP repairing... so this would mean that the NC repair tool is UP? Or maybe the TR and the VS take more damage than the NC? Which would make sense, since NC generally do more damage...

-Medic:
-Again, same as engineer. A higher SPH medic would mean that more people on that faction are dying. So that would essentially mean that the faction with the lowest SPH on their medic is more powerful?

-Light Assault:
-I'd assume this is because more people in TR use LAs to take out vehicles, since the Prowler isn't all that good against them. Might be wrong though. Or maybe most of the good NC biolab farmers use MAXes?

-Heavy assault:
- TR get the Striker, which is great at getting XP since you'll get a LOT of assist XP from vehicles.

-Infiltrator:
-More targets to shoot at since NC like to sit around with their Phoenixes.

-MBT
-Prowler is great against infantry, so prowlers will have more kills per hour and score per hour. Magrider is decent against both vehicles and infantry, so magriders will be in between. Vanguard is good anti tank, but there are less tanks than infantry, so they'll have the lowest SPH.

-ESF
-Reaver is just harder to use and harder to lolpod with, so newer people have a harder time with it.

Makes sense?

That may as well be the NC motto for this game...

Oh, it is only the Stock version that is weak....
When you Max out many of the cert investments in the thing...

THEN it is competitive against the default things of the other factions!!

nevermind figured it out.

Personally I think the number' show things are pretty even across the board .. Yes TR dominate in a lot of categories but the differences are that small that they are neither here nor there.
But yes that's just a personal opinion, and people will come to their own conclusion's from the data .. A bit like you have done .

But generally I think it shout's " Hey things are pretty balanced "

It did drop. We just pull even more now to make up for the nerf. Although Im sure most of that NC score is buster maxes, not shotguns.