A few hours ago I updated July's moveset statistics to include a new piece of data, a measure I call a Pokemon's "Viability Ceiling."
Simply put, a Pokemon's Viability Ceiling corresponds to the highest GXE of any player using that Pokemon.
For the uninitiated, GXE is probably our best and most accurate measure for determining player skill and ranking top players. A player's GXE corresponds to the percentage of matches a player would expect to win on a ladder with no matchmaking. The PS ladder is sorted by Elo mainly because it's the more familiar rating system. Due tothe fact that Elo sucks fundamental differences in how the rating systems are computed, there is no way to directly convert from Elo rating to GXE.
So what this measure tells you is just how far it's possible to get with a team that has that Pokemon on it. If an RU Pokemon has a Viability Celing of 85, that means *someone* made it into the top 40 on the RU ladder using that Pokemon (Yes, I can tell you who. No, I won't tell you who).
Just *how* many top players are secretly using "shit mons" on their teams? If you're interested in finding out and you have the programming acumen, the json files in the "chaos" folder give a little more detail. "Viability Ceiling" is in the json files as an array of four numbers: number of players using the mon (a useful number in its own right!), top GXE, 99th percentile GXE and 95th percentile GXE. So whereas it's one thing to say that a top-10 player on the Doubles OU ladder was using Dragonite, it's another to say that 1% of 2744 Dragonite users are among the top 4.6% (611) DOU players.
My ambition with presenting this analysis is for people to stop blaming failures of certain mons to drop on "garbage players using garbage mons" and instead acknowledge that at least one of two things are happening:
Simply put, a Pokemon's Viability Ceiling corresponds to the highest GXE of any player using that Pokemon.
For the uninitiated, GXE is probably our best and most accurate measure for determining player skill and ranking top players. A player's GXE corresponds to the percentage of matches a player would expect to win on a ladder with no matchmaking. The PS ladder is sorted by Elo mainly because it's the more familiar rating system. Due to
So what this measure tells you is just how far it's possible to get with a team that has that Pokemon on it. If an RU Pokemon has a Viability Celing of 85, that means *someone* made it into the top 40 on the RU ladder using that Pokemon (Yes, I can tell you who. No, I won't tell you who).
Just *how* many top players are secretly using "shit mons" on their teams? If you're interested in finding out and you have the programming acumen, the json files in the "chaos" folder give a little more detail. "Viability Ceiling" is in the json files as an array of four numbers: number of players using the mon (a useful number in its own right!), top GXE, 99th percentile GXE and 95th percentile GXE. So whereas it's one thing to say that a top-10 player on the Doubles OU ladder was using Dragonite, it's another to say that 1% of 2744 Dragonite users are among the top 4.6% (611) DOU players.
My ambition with presenting this analysis is for people to stop blaming failures of certain mons to drop on "garbage players using garbage mons" and instead acknowledge that at least one of two things are happening:
- Either some of these mons are a bit more competitive than the viability rankings would have one believe, or,
- We have some very talented trolls at work on our ladders.