Introduction

September has ended, so it’s time to take a look at how Marvel Crisis Protocol has progressed in the last month by looking at the data from Longshanks. September had 1771 games, a slight increase from the 1721 games played in August. September also saw the release of Baron Strucker and Arnim Zola, bringing us Hydra as an affiliation, while SHIELD received 3 additions to their affiliation with Steve Rogers, the Human Torch, and the Howling Commandos.

Win Rates

Figure 1: Posterior win rate belief for all affiliations.

Cabal continues to improve their win rate by about 3% (MAP 0.58 HDPI: [0.52, 0.63]), likely carried on the strength of Malekith, and Defenders have bounced back by about 10% (MAP 0.47 HDPI: [0.32, 0.63]) into the middle pack of win rates, while Asguard declines by 9% (MAP 0.37 HDPI: [0.48, 0.57]) and we see Hydra enter the mix (MAP 0.41 HDPI: [0.31, 0.52]). SHIELD, last month's winningest affiliation has slipped down 9% (MAP: 0.58 HDPI: [0.51, 0.65]).

Crisis Selection

Figure 2: Crisis selection rates for Secures and Extracts. The grey line represent a uniform selection rate.

Not a whole lot of changes from last month. Infinity formula and Extremis increase slightly, while Terrigen declines even lower. Hammers remain the dominant extract in September, but we’re seeing an increase in the play rate of Montesi Formula, but a decline in Spider Infected.

Points Selection

Figure 3: The distribution of points games were played at during September.

No major moves in points selected. 17 points gains a little in popularity, about 4%, while 20 points drops about 2%, the others stay roughly the same.

Discussion

At this point, I'm a little surprised how volatile the estimated win rate is for some factions, despite not getting any new releases. Before starting this series, I'd have believed that we'd see maybe 5 percentage point increases occasionally from affiliations that didn't see significant releases. Defenders proved that wrong. We also see that even 'bad' affiliations can have their niche. Dark Dimension never seems to make people power rankings for strongest affiliation, but they're most likely winning more than 50% of their games.

While win rates are proving dynamic, sadly crisis selection seems moderately stable. We're getting a nice constant drip of new affiliations and models, the crisis numbers are pretty static. Hammers is by far the dominant extract, probably to the point it's influencing points played at. Hopefully something can shake it up, if that's a card pack removing the need to buy a box you don't want for a crisis card, or a few of new crises.