The Templecon 2012 convention was held in Februari 2012, and hosted a number of tournaments that together represent one of the major competitive events in the Warmachine and Hordes season. That makes it a good opportunity to take a snapshot of the competitive environment. Who is playing what, and more importantly, who is winning?
The below numbers were originally posted on the Privateer Press forums, using tournament data from the 7 singles tournaments at Templecon, but they are repeated here as the first in a series of such breakdowns, as more tournament data becomes available. Numbers are fun, but they don’t mean much if you can’t compare them.
Very important disclaimer: These numbers are a limited snapshot of one event. Interesting, but not by themselves representative of the state of Warmachine/Hordes as a whole. Please don’t consider them as anything else.
Attendance
Convention
A grand total of 489 matches were played.
162 players played at least one tournament round.
The maximum amount of games by a single player was 18.
23 people played 10+ games, 4 people played only a single round.
The average player played 6.03 games in 1.49 tournaments.
Tournament breakdown
Blood, Sweat and Tiers: 26 players
Flanks: 45 players
Hardcore: 35 players
Standard Issue: 43 players
Death Race: 63 players
Last Rites: 14 players
Masters: 16 players
ELO ranking
An ELO system is often used in games such as Chess or Go, and creates a player rating that is adjusted by a number of points relative to the skill of their opponent, each game.
If all Templecon players would start out at the same level, after the tournament the ranking would look like the following:
http://www.wmladder.com/ranking/2
It’s pretty interesting to note that Jamie Perkins took the top spot from Will Pagani only in the Masters finals itself.
Faction Popularity
141 people played a single faction throughout the event,
19 people played 2 factions,
2 people played 3 different factions.
That makes for 185 different armies.
The armies were distributes across the factions as follows:
| Faction | # Armies | % Armies |
| Circle Orboros | 22 | 12% |
| Cryx | 28 | 15% |
| Cygnar | 22 | 12% |
| Khador | 23 | 12% |
| Legion of Everblight | 22 | 12% |
| Mercenaries | 15 | 8% |
| Minions | 8 | 4% |
| Protectorate of Menoth | 14 | 8% |
| Retribution of Scyrah | 6 | 3% |
| Skorne | 14 | 8% |
| Trollbloods | 11 | 6% |
A slight preference for Cryx among, followed by a group of evenly represented factions, but Minions and Retribution were underrepresented.
Faction Performance
It is valuable to take a look at how the win percentage is distributed across the the factions. However, as the number of matches is quite limited to make a good estimate, the percentages are represented as a 95% confidence interval.
| Faction | # armies | ± interval |
| Circle Orboros | 50,5% | 9,3% |
| Cryx | 59,5% | 7,9% |
| Cygnar | 47,5% | 9,7% |
| Khador | 48,7% | 9,1% |
| Legion of Everblight | 41,6% | 9,6% |
| Mercenaries | 46,0% | 12,3% |
| Minions | 50,0% | 15,9% |
| Protectorate of Menoth | 47,0% | 12,0% |
| Retribution of Scyrah | 42,9% | 18,3% |
| Skorne | 57,5% | 11,3% |
| Trollbloods | 47,8% | 14,4% |
Top Bracket
Along with the average performance for the entire field of participants, we can contrast the performance of the top players, to examine peak performance. Only players with at least an average number of games were considered (no greater weight is given to competitions like the Masters, this is simply matches played and won, per player).
Looking at the top 25% of players, are any factions better represented than others?
Unequivocally yes, fully a third of the Top 25% was playing Cryx. That means either a lot of the better players attending Templecon elected to bring Cryx, or Cryx provided some kind of edge to get into the top 25%, or a combination of both.
We can take a look at the breakdown of the overachievers to get an idea of which it is:
This graph shows the win percentage of the bottom 75% of players, contrasted with the top 25%. A couple of things can be pointed out.
- First off, the win rate of Cryx players doesn’t seem exceptional compared to the other factions. This could mean that the high proportion is indeed explained merely by a larger number of good players choosing to bring Cryx to Templecon, or that Cryx provides an early boost that does not scale in the higher echelons of competition, or simply that all the other top players brought lists that could deal with Cryx effectively.
- Cygnar seems to struggle a little bit, except in the hands of excellent players. At the top, their win rate is not significantly different from any other faction.
- There were only a few Minion players at Templecon, but they were talented.
Faction Matchups
FInally, we can look at how factions match up against each other. Because the number of games is limited and even then subdivided into 66 more categories, these numbers are not at all representative of the factions, though, only of the specific games played at Templecon. Don’t read more into it than you should.
Read from rows to columns, in percent.
Uncle Maudlin’s advice for Templecon:
Do: Come loaded for Cryx. The upper brackets are teeming with them.
Don’t: Tangle with fast-talking Brits.
To discuss this article, please visit the Muse on Minis forums.