HMW BY THE NUMBERS - 05 June 2025
Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2025 8:04 amI started out with a little side project to catalogue every mission currently in the game, along with all their slots, briefing text, debrief texts if available and so on... Then I started wondering about win rates and whether there was a difference in participation between the factions... then it cascaded...
BEHOLD MY MADNESS
Interesting to see that the 'Cons have a slight edge in overall missions, but it's mostly concentrated on the sheer number of L11 fights happening at the top of the table.
That chart of mission types really brings home two things that I was pretty sure of, but now have data for: the prevalence of just a handful of high-level mission types, and the near-complete absence of low-level players. Just look at the difference between the top handful of missions, that a relatively decent number of players join, and the long tail of less-valuable missions that get ignored or don't get generated at all because the typical player is too high level for the mission page to select them. Anecdotally, the site's really empty during the first half of the day GMT too, though I haven't run a chart on that yet.
But also, for the lower level missions, look at how many are won by default because only one side joins - only a tiny fraction end up in an actual fight. That generally means that no other players of the right level are around at that time, or that the player who generated the mission joins because they have to - so they just get the basic XP for the win - but any others around will pass over it in favour of a more lucrative mission if available. Is it any wonder that the low level game is such a joyless, grindy slog?
As to how many active players we still have: it's 67, total, taking players who've been active recently enough to be in the high score table (90 days). There's a similar high peak and long tail for number of missions per player as there is for mission types, unsurprisingly (and even if I expand the selection to all players since the last Great Mission Purge, it still only gets up to 203 total). Note any low-level players with only a few missions - those would either be players who've very recently started or who joined, tried HMW and didn't stick around.
This one surprised me a little, as I felt anecdotally that there were a lot more low-level Bots than Cons, but that... doesn't really seem to be the case? They must all play at different times from me.
Am I salty that I was 95% through collecting the data for all this when the Unknowns struck and all the legit empty missions got arbitrarily deleted along with the bugged ones? You bet I am.
BEHOLD MY MADNESS
- Start with the types...
- ... wind up analysing the entire history for win/loss stats...
- ... what madness is this?
Interesting to see that the 'Cons have a slight edge in overall missions, but it's mostly concentrated on the sheer number of L11 fights happening at the top of the table.
That chart of mission types really brings home two things that I was pretty sure of, but now have data for: the prevalence of just a handful of high-level mission types, and the near-complete absence of low-level players. Just look at the difference between the top handful of missions, that a relatively decent number of players join, and the long tail of less-valuable missions that get ignored or don't get generated at all because the typical player is too high level for the mission page to select them. Anecdotally, the site's really empty during the first half of the day GMT too, though I haven't run a chart on that yet.
But also, for the lower level missions, look at how many are won by default because only one side joins - only a tiny fraction end up in an actual fight. That generally means that no other players of the right level are around at that time, or that the player who generated the mission joins because they have to - so they just get the basic XP for the win - but any others around will pass over it in favour of a more lucrative mission if available. Is it any wonder that the low level game is such a joyless, grindy slog?
As to how many active players we still have: it's 67, total, taking players who've been active recently enough to be in the high score table (90 days). There's a similar high peak and long tail for number of missions per player as there is for mission types, unsurprisingly (and even if I expand the selection to all players since the last Great Mission Purge, it still only gets up to 203 total). Note any low-level players with only a few missions - those would either be players who've very recently started or who joined, tried HMW and didn't stick around.
- All current players. There aren't many.
This one surprised me a little, as I felt anecdotally that there were a lot more low-level Bots than Cons, but that... doesn't really seem to be the case? They must all play at different times from me.
Am I salty that I was 95% through collecting the data for all this when the Unknowns struck and all the legit empty missions got arbitrarily deleted along with the bugged ones? You bet I am.
