Gaming News Super Mega Baseball 2 Pennant Race and Stats Update

The new Pennant Race mode in Super Mega Baseball 2 is one of the new Online features Metalhead Software has been really excited about sharing with fans. This new mode is jam packed with tons of data and statistics for the team over at Metalhead Software to improve this mode through patch iterations with the first of these patches being just released.

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Here's the breakdown on these stats if you want to learn more...

Hey everyone!

We want to give you a bit of an update as to how the Pennant Race game mode is coming along and share some stats with everyone. This is a brand new, heavily data-driven online mode designed for competitive play, and we’re getting a lot of questions about how it works, so let’s have a look!

A few numbers up front:
  • Over 150,000 Pennant Race matches have been played to date, so we have a meaningful dataset to look at now.
  • We tend to peak at about 3,500 concurrent users playing online multiplayer in the evening (typically prime time on the East coast), with about 1/3 of those playing Pennant Race and 2/3 playing arranged or co-op games.
  • The average time to find a match during the day in North America is about 45 seconds, though your experience will vary with the time of day you play, your physical location, and the platform you're playing on.
== MATCHMAKING AND EGO ==

So, let’s look at Pennant Race specifically. First let’s talk about skill estimation, Ego and matching. Pennant Race’s matching system tries to do roughly the following:
  1. A skill value is determined for you based on your performance over time.
  2. The Ego you play at in Pennant Race mode is determined by that skill value.
  3. The matcher aims to find you a game against opponents that are as close in skill (and therefore Ego) as possible within a reasonable amount of time.
  4. If there are no opponents available in your skill range when you’re looking for a game (which is most common outside peak hours), the search window widens over time, and you will be matched against an opponent of a differing skill (and Ego). This aims to create a competitive game instead of one that would most likely end in a mercy ruling.
Let’s look at some data in this graph.

This graph shows the percentage of matches that are generated at various Ego differences.

You can see that 75% of all matches are played within 2 Ego levels, and 95% are within 5 Ego levels. A small percentage of matches are up to 8 Ego levels apart, and anything beyond that is very rare. You’ll of course get the closest matches when playing at the busiest times of day in the most active regions (US East is the most active region).

One thing we’ve learned is that people aren’t necessarily aware that Pennant Race is determining their Ego or what that Ego is (it is quite small in the UI), so we’ll be making this much more prominent in future updates.

== TEAM USAGE IN PENNANT RACE ==

Another thing we see discussed frequently are the teams used in Pennant Race. This chart shows current team usage trends.

There are some clear favorites, though these favorites do not necessarily reflect the data we see on which teams are the most successful at generating wins. Hint: The most successful team is not among the most popular choices.

== RATING ==

Your Rating in Pennant Race is derived from a complex set of variables based on an algorithm that we are continually tuning over time now that we have a large influx of real-world data. We can acknowledge that this system isn’t always effectively driving the best (highest Ego) players up to the top of the ratings.

Some notes on our short term plans to improve this:

  • In an upcoming Pennant Race reset (mostly likely May 19th or 26th), we will also update the rating algorithm.
  • Your ratings may change quite dramatically (up for some, down for others), but it will reflect your raw skill much more accurately.
== PLANS GOING FORWARD ==

We are scouring all of the forums and social media, listening to what you are telling us, and we plan to add additional features over the coming weeks and months. Some of those improvements have already been noted here. Others will be determined as we move forward based on your feedback. We are avoiding too many details at this stage as ideas may change (and we are a small team, meaning it will take time to pull these things together).

The first of these improvements are detailed here in the patch notes for the first cross-platform update.

We are blown away and thankful for the interest you’ve shown in the game so far and we’ll do our best to try and make this game as awesome for you as we can!
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King Javo

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