With VCT coming into its second year, statistics are becoming more and more important in order to compare and rank different pro players. However, how accurate are they, and what are we missing out on when we use ACS?
When comparing different players to analyze impact, three statistics tend to pop up: Average Damage per Round (ADR), Kills/Deaths/Assists (KDA), and Average Combat Score. Whether you are comparing Hunter "SicK" Mims to Shahzeb "ShahZaM" Khan or Ayaz "nAts" Akhmetshin to Mehmet Yağız "cNed" İpek, these statistics are key to many arguments. However, as time has gone on, the community has noticed one glaring issue with these statistics, they heavily favor Duelists. Why is that, and what can be done about it?
Value is always an interesting subject when discussing an FPS game with utility. Value is much more of an abstract topic than I think we give it credit. It’s really easy to say “Neon’s utility gives her more value than Yoru,” or “TenZ gives value to his team simply by getting kills.” But what if you tried to define “value”. What does “value” really mean in the context of a team setting?
Let’s make a relatively simple definition, to avoid ambiguity. For the purposes of this article, “value” will refer to the amount of impact a piece of utility/player/agent/kill or some other aspect has on a round. “Value” encompasses both potential output, and actual output, with executes and plays and decision making.
Credit to Riot
Now, this is fine and all, but then we run into our second barrier: “value” and numbers. While it may be easy to compare kills to kills, as one would do with Duelists, it starts to get messy when we add in pieces of utility. How does a kill compare to a smoke that blocks one enemy sightline? What if it blocked two or even three enemies from seeing a teammate? What about a vulnerable and a kill? Does a Viper molly/Astra Gravity Well have less value than getting a kill?
One of my favorite quotes about value comes from FaZe Clan’s Assistant Coach Thomas "Trippy" Schappy, “Everyone talks about the kills and the flashy plays. No one talks about the value that a smokes player, halfway across the map, smoking a choke-point has.” It’s so easy to point to ADR or KDA and see an easy way of ranking something. But it fails to comprehend the intricacies and the power that utility brings to the table.
Screenshot credit to u/seaskyways on reddit
As you can see, ACS does count “non-damaging” assists as points. However, here lies the problem right away: an assist is only worth 25 points. Notice, getting the final kill in a round rewards you a flat rate of 70 points, this means that an assist is worth only, roughly, ⅓ the value of kill (the lowest level of kill). Another way to put it as that a non-damaging assist is equal to only 25 points of damage (since damage done is 1 point)
Assists also don’t scale with the kill, meaning that if a player gets an ace off of your flash, they would get a minimum of 1500 ACS for that round [each kill point stage + 50 for each additional kill + 150 damage to each enemy minimum: 150+130+110+90+70+(50*4)+(150*5) = 1500]. Compare that to the abysmal 125 points the player who assisted would get.
Finally, “non-damaging” assists only cover part of the power utility can bring. It most likely does not count Displacement, which is when enemies move to avoid an ability. Nor does it cover enemies blocked, which is when a sightline that would have caught an ally is blocked by a smoke. And, if you hit an effect (like vulnerable or a stun) which does not result in a kill, unless it did damage, it does not contribute to one’s ACS. Think of all the vulnerables and smokes and stuns in the game. They can easily clear out areas with a simple placement or lineup, and yet, they are not counted in ACS.
Who benefits from ACS the most then? Simple: Agents designed to do damage and make kills happen, which end up being Duelists and Pseudo-Duelists. Pseudo-Duelists are agents that are part of other classes that function like a Duelist, like Skye or Breach. If we look at the top 30 players from Champions (sorted by ACS), 27 of them play a Duelist or Pseudo-Duelist (or both). The same goes for things like KAST% (26 out of Top 30) or ADR (27 out of Top 30). If you value kills more than anything else, then the character designed to get kills will inevitably stand on top.
Does that mean they are giving more value than their lower rated Controller teammates? Absolutely not, but the current metrics fail to reflect the impact that other agents have.
And it’s not like we can make our own calculation either. Riot’s API (the system used to record data for sites like vlr.gg, rib.gg, thespike.gg) doesn’t list things like smokes blocked, or if an enemy moved out of the way of a Breach Aftershock. I asked both @charlieepickles from vlr.gg and @enigma from vlr.gg, and both confirmed to me that these things aren’t recorded.
While it pops up in game, it disappears afterwards. It’s why you can’t see it in the post-game 2D replays, the system just omits the information. It also doesn’t record effects unless the effects directly led to a kill, like Viper Decay or a Killjoy Alarmbot. And so, we only have things that are kill or damage based, thus leaving us in a utility void.
So, we come to a crossroads. Either we have to find another statistic to utilize in order to compare classes or we update ACS. Both options would require us to estimate the impact that players have on a match or get Riot to change its API. Seeing as the latter would take months on end, and this article is due in.. oh… a few days, I will go with the former option.
And thus, SEVR was born. The Seasonal Estimation Value Rating estimates the value that an ability has and how many times it can be used in one round. The idea is that a pro is most likely to get value out of their utility every single time, whether it works or not, so simply looking at what can be bought on a non-eco round is enough to estimate the value utility can have.
Here is the general rule of thumb: the user hits enemies with each non-damage effect an ability can have once. So, a Boombot counts as 1 point as it pings once. But a Breach Aftershock counts as 2 (1 stun and 1 displace). I gave some abilities more value, as I felt they displaced frequently, such as Astra Nova Pulse, or Omen Paranoia. Finally, heals count as 1 point in total. Heals are capable of doing more, but there are many times that heal is not used, or only does so much. So 1 point felt like a nice medium.
It acts as an average, it overestimates (as there are eco rounds, and some utility never outputs anything), but it also underestimates (Sova darts can get more than one ping, smokes can block more than one enemy, etc.). In addition, this ignores all damage done, as not to overlap with the point part of the ACS.
From there, I assigned value to these utility points. This is where the thought experiment went into play. I tested three point levels: 5 points for a successful piece of utility, then 7 (was going to do 7.5, but since all other points are rounded, I rounded it to 7), then 10 points. Every single level I tried was still lower than the 25 points given for non-damaging assists. The results I got were then applied to the ACS they were already given.
The following are the results of my experiment:
5 Point SEVR
7 Point SEVR
10 Point SEVR
As you can see, drastic changes have been made to the rankings. When documenting results, the following notation will be used to describe placement in each iteration: (5/7/10).
The number of Duelists/Pseudo-Duelist dropped slightly, going to 24 of the Top 30 being Duelist/Pseudo-Duelists. However, several low ACS rated players, like Former Fnatic Domagoj "Doma" Fancev or Sentinels Michael "dapr" Gulino jumped in usage. Acend’s Patryk "starxo" Kopczyński in particular made a massive jump, starting from 39th and landing in the (28th/26th/23rd) spot, depending on the utility weight. Others tanked hard, like Former FURIA Esports Alexandre "xand" Zizi, starting 12th in regular ACS then landing in (19th/22nd/30th) place.
Again, keep in mind that these numbers are ALL less than the 25 points given for a non-damaging assist, and the highest point awarded per round was Cypher with 40, which is a little over half the amount of the lowest kill points possible. If we upgrade it to 10, it is still less than half a non-damaging assist, and Cypher hit 80, which is a little over that same minimum kill point amount.
Again, this is purely a thought experiment. Numbers would have to be tweaked, and estimations could always be improved. But I think this is an important exercise to show how poorly the current set of statistics reflects the value that players can have.
In terms of comparing players, ACS (and other metrics) fails to accurately compare agents of different classes. Controllers and Sentinels will naturally have a lower ACS than Duelists and Initiators, yet they can have some of the greatest impact in the game. So, the next question is:
What can we use to accurately compare different players, or will a form of estimation like SEVR be needed until Riot starts noting down pieces of utility?
