Blood Bowl 3 Arena Stats analysis

 This is an analysis of the data available for the Arena mode on Blood Bowl 3 to look out how teams are performing season on season, compared to others in their tier, and also the popularity of the different teams and tiers. Norsca is the full season data and Lustria data is that available to the end of March. I will look to update this at some point when more data becomes availab.e

Tier Win Percentages

Let’s start by looking at the tiers overall. In the Norsca arena, tier 1 teams had the highest win rate overall at 52.4%. in the Lustria arena, this has dropped now to 50.0%, with tier 2 benefiting from this and increasing their win rates overall from 51.2% to 53.8% and taking the top place within the tiers. Both tiers 3 and 4 have improved slightly.

If you look at the win percentages broken down, you can see that all tier 1 teams have had their win rates drop between the two seasons, with the exception of Amazons who obviously weren’t available in the Norsca Arena.  Nearly all tier 2 teams have improved their win rates (with the exception of Necromantic and Underworld), the same for Tier 3 (with the exceptions of Black Orcs and OWA). Tier 4 is too small a sample size to have any significance at the moment.

One thing to consider is that Overtime was removed between seasons, so draws are more common. This could favour lower armoured teams that are lower tiered that have potentially lost significant numbers of players and would struggle with an extra half of Blood Bowl. Skaven, Norse, Elven Union and Wood Elf are all majority AV8+ teams that fall into this category and we can see that all of them have had their win rates increase by over 2.5%.

Another factor is that the lower tiers got slightly more generous packages for the Lustria season. The below table shows what each tier got between the seasons.

Tier	Norsca	Lustria
1	1150k, 6 primary	1150k, 6 primary
2	1160k, 7 primary	1170k, 7 primary & 1 secondary
3	1170k, 7 primary, 1 secondary	1200k, 8 primary, 2 secondary
4	1180k, 7 primary, 2 secondary	1210k, 8 primary, 3 secondary

This extra bit of incentive to take a lower tier has boosted the win rates such that tier 2 is almost now a de facto tier 1. It could be argued that they are perhaps getting a little too much with an additional 20k spending cash, one more primary skill and a secondary skill on top.

Popularity

To look at the popularity of teams, we can look at the relative number of games played by them each season. Amazons have a 6.2% played rate, and the likelihood is that most other races would drop down slightly as players play with their new shiny toy.

The below table shows that all tier 1 teams had a drop in popularity, but the majority of tiers 2 and 3, and both stunty teams have had an increase in popularity. Whether this universal reduction in tier 1 is related to their win percentages dropping or not is difficult to tell, however it is almost certainly related to the fact that lower tiers have gained more making them more attractive.  

It is probably expected that the Norse played rate would drop off the most as they were the new team in the previous season, so would likely have a higher than average played rate which is more likely to settle down to a constant number in future seasons.

The only team to hit 1% or better increase in the played percentages is Chaos Renegades. It is likely due to the fact that their tier allows 2 secondary skills meaning they can add Block onto two of their Big Guys.

 Performance relative to tier

What I’m interested in looking at regarding the tiering as well is how teams perform compared to others in their tier. This can show whether they are under-tiered or over tiered. It is difficult to look at small variances and see significance, but we can be safe in assuming that anything over 5% is significant and perhaps could be looked at.

In tier 1, Amazons are 5% higher than the tier average. Along with Lizardmen and Shambling Undead, they are the strongest three teams in the tier. This was the case in the Norsca arena as well, with Undead and Lizards being the best of the tier. These three definitely need to be in the highest tier.

My suggestion would be to move dwarfs down a tier. Their win rate is 6.4% lower than the tier average and is actually worse than all of tier 2 bar underworld denizens. If dwarfs drop down then amazons would not be 5% higher than the tier average, as the tier average would increase. At that point, Orcs would be the outlier and perhaps could be considered to drop a tier as well.

Within tier 2, Underworld are 10% lower than the tier average. They could probably drop to tier 3. They are currently the least popular team, although after their dominance previously, I’m not sure too many will be shedding any tears. The team outperforming the tier at present are the Wood Elfs. The addition of a secondary skill perhaps allows them to take a block tree or a player with guard, and both could have significant benefits to the team.

Black orcs are really struggling in tier 3 and potentially could be lumped in with the stunty teams.

One option that could be looked at might be to switch to 5 tiers to spread teams out a little more, meaning the lower of tier 1 and the top of tier 2 grouped together, etc. I would imagine as more teams get added this might become more necessary to keep certain teams being played.