Hello Community of Elements, are you ready to take on a challenge no elemental has ever attempted, maybe cowardly, maybe fearing what could happen to him while trying to record which decks are in the higher arena?
Well, I'm either brave or foolish enough to want to attempt this. Of course this is going to be done with method, because only fools take on half-impossible fights without a strategy to make it possible.
What are WE going to do?-First of all, notice I used "WE". This cannot be done alone (well, could be, but too time-wasting), so I shall ask you elementals to help me in my, or rather our, journey looking for the Holy Graal.
That said, how should this study be conducted? Let's first start asking ourselves some questions:
[/jokes]
Why is recording the main decks of the higher arena considered impossible?That's one good question. You have most likely heard of metagames. This is what makes finding one definitive deck for farming Gold/Platinum impossible: the decks of the arena CONTINUOUSLY change, meaning that while you're farming with PDial, you may find yourself in a meta full of purifies making it useless.
By experience, most players can tell you that the decks that are posted in Gold and Plat change pretty much at the same time, flowing in the same direction, with the same 4/5 decks of which 4 counter a specific kind of deck, and the other one moves not following the flow, or pretty much going against it, to kill decks the other decks weren't able to kill.
And you're saying it actually is possible? How?From what we said, it looks like this is totally impossible, so, how can this be done?
We said that the decks move along with the flow in a certain way, and this means multiple metagames will have pretty much the same decks, making it possible to track from which deck a metagame is built from.
After finding how the flow moves, we should be able to give a name to a certain meta and define that the 45% is made of this deck, the 20% of this other deck, and so on.
So? How does this work?A player who decides to partecipate in this project only needs to take care of:
1.League, Gold or Platinum, Bronze and Silver aren't worth testing;
2.Decks faced, we'll come back to this later;
3.Day, when you faced those decks.
Let's go deeper into details, shall we?The league and the day are pretty easy to figure out, you just have to write where you played the games and divide them by date.
As for the decks, that's a little harder. As of now, this is the
official spreadsheet. Read the instructions there to get a grasp of it. If you have doubts about something, ask here in this thread to get help from a Staffer.
You named the "Staff" before, what's that?I plan on dividing the persons who partecipate here in two groups: Players and Staffers.
The Player is the one who records the games, the Staffer is the one who puts the records together. Those aren't mutually exclusive, you can be both a Player and a Staffer.
Players need no special knowledge (well, assuming you're playing in gold and platinum actively, you should be able to distinguish the main features of the decks and you can ask here for help anyway), Staffers need to organize data and have some nice knowledge about decks to make assumptions on some cards included in a list although not seen and so on.
Yeah, yeah, tell me more about Staffers, what's their exact role in this?The entire Staff has the role of removing, or at least attempting to remove, bias in the tests due wrong assumptions made by the player. This is why a Player should ask for help for every little thing.
Other than this, the Staffers have to decide by consulting one another when a metagame ends and when a new one starts. Basically, the Staff puts together all of the records obtained in one day and then calculate the percentage of each feature of the decks. When we see the percentage of most features has "drastically" (this is subjective, hence needing at least 3/4 staffers to decide when the change happens) we declare the end of a certain metagame, sum up all of the records and put an "official" percentage of the top features of the Meta to which we'll give a name.
If a Metagame appears again after some time, we should keep calculating the percentage to notice when it shifts back and then sum the records with the older ones. Eventually it should become stable, and then that could be a good average of the decks you'll find in that metagame.
Why should I do all of this work as a Player?First of all, a Player doesn't have to play tons of games a day in order to collect data for it. As long as a many Players are taking this on, it shouldn't be a worry not playing a day or two. Secondly, a Player who takes on this will just have to record the deck he has played against, this means that you can partecipate in other studies while doing this, as long as they work on the Higher Arena. You can then test a deck's stat in Gold, or farm Platinum, or anything else, as long as it is in the Higher Arena.
Ok, I'm ready, I'll be grinding Gold/Plat 'till death and recording all of those data for you!Wait for it. We're actually testing the spreadsheet we'll use for the official part of the project. Try it out and give as much feedback as possible.
If you want to support the project and have some spare space in your signature, you may want to add the following code to it:
[b][url=http://elementscommunity.org/forum/farming-studies-and-statistics/arena's-metagame-monitoring-project-(ammp)/]Join the AMMP, the first Arena's Metagame Monitoring Project![/url][/b]It shows as:
Join the AMMP, the first Arena's Metagame Monitoring Project!This should help with some propaganda, always a good thing.
This project could (and, IMHO, should) get along with
Decks Used Against Arena and
Unupped Platinum Farmer.
Let me know if you have ideas and corrections (also, grammatical corrections).
