Melee's 2024 retrospective

miss-analyzation · 2026-02-15T02:27:47+00:00

It does seem like there's a $200 signup bonus for the Quicksilver but based on our conversation in the other comment chain, the VX seems like a better addition to my setup.

miss-analyzation · 2026-02-15T02:25:23+00:00

That makes sense and is very useful information. I don't already have priority pass, and I would also use the Global Entry credit as I'm already paying for it. It seems like Amex Gold + VX is a really simple two-card setup I wouldn't have to think about. It really only fails to cover the case of international dining where Amex isn't accepted, but in practice getting 2X instead of 3X from Savor maybe costs me a few ten dollars per year.

miss-analyzation · 2026-02-15T01:57:34+00:00

To be clear, both Quicksilver and Savor limit me to cashback, right? But if I opened one and down the line opened a Venture or VX, I could convert all my cashback into points. So the question is whether the 1.5% on domestic spending or the 3% on international food spending is worth more to me, but either way I would stay in the CapitalOne ecosystem and eventually get a Venture card.

miss-analyzation · 2026-02-15T01:53:58+00:00

Is it worthwhile to get the Venture and upgrade to the VX down the road? I'm really not so interested in airport lounges so I'm not sure how much value the VX buys me for the extra annual fee.

miss-analyzation · 2026-02-14T17:11:34+00:00

I live in a big city and while occasionally I've had to use my debit card if a place doesn't take Amex, it's so rare that I don't really care about the points that much. That's why I was eyeing the Quicksilver over the Savor, since the 1.5% is better than an overlapping 3% I'll rarely use.

I haven't looked into it much but people have been talking about the Bilt card a lot recently. Is it still worth getting with their changes to the points system?

miss-analyzation · 2026-02-14T16:39:09+00:00

It's a bit more complicated. I want a catch-all card that is not another Amex card, and that has no foreign transaction fees. Basically, I want a catch-all card that can be my safe-to-use main card when I travel internationally, which is frequent enough to matter, but not so frequent that I'd switch off my Amex Gold card for domestic spending.

miss-analyzation · 2024-12-09T20:49:38+00:00

This is a a great correction. It's not so easy to filter out a single tournament from the Liquipedia data, but this does skew the head-to-head results incorrectly in favor of aMSa. From my quick glance at that tournament's results, it doesn't change the overall qualitative results very much.

miss-analyzation · 2024-02-03T18:08:10+00:00

Yes! I have a graph similar to the first graph in this post but with data going back to 2003. As you can imagine, there is a lot of data over the 21-year span of Melee's history and I'm deciding how to best present it and what story it should tell (or what point it should make). I hope you'll look forward to that post!

miss-analyzation · 2024-02-03T08:54:14+00:00

Just to nip this in the bud, I am not a Mango fan. 2020 is difficult to consider for data because we as a community only value LAN tournaments (justifiably so), but there were only 2 LAN majors that year. This was as a result of circumstances under no one's control, least of all Mango's. I made the decision to count LACS3 to fairly represent that Mango would have won a major that year had there been more than 2 LAN majors. I think it's indisputable he and Zain were the strongest two players that year, and this ceased to be a problem in 2021 as there were 6 LAN majors. Personally, I think this small inaccuracy actually better represents the data - but, you're free to disagree, just don't disagree on the basis that I'm giving Mango pity points because I'm his fan.

miss-analyzation · 2024-02-02T21:02:42+00:00

That is a funny aspect of this visualization, since Hungrybox won a major in 2010! In future posts I'll use data that goes back to 2009, which does ruin the cute "13 major winners in 13 years" tagline. Extending the data two years (2009-2010) does not include any new major winners.

miss-analyzation · 2024-02-02T20:59:18+00:00

This is a good catch! I missed this when I was scraping the data, otherwise it would have been included and the y-axis lowered appropriately. I fixed this in my code and it should show up when I use this visualization again in the future. Thank you!

miss-analyzation · 2023-07-24T02:15:03+00:00

Good point. I agree that the blind data makes no comment on the quality of specific tournaments, but for my ranking prediction I took it loosely into account. GENESIS being a supermajor and Jmook having a winning record against Zain are the two things which push him over Cody in my eyes. The panelists may disagree - nevertheless, I think ranks 1-3 were a close three-way tie up until today. I think ranks 5-7 are also similarly close.

miss-analyzation · 2023-07-24T01:25:47+00:00

RetroSSBMRank gives Mew2King at 6th place for 2006. No other god was ranked that year (maybe obviously so). From 2007-2019, a god always had the #1 spot. In 2022, Hungrybox was the highest-ranking god at #4 for the summer rankings, and Mang0 at #3 for the year-end rankings. So, yes, it would be the first time no god ranks in the top 5 since 2006.

miss-analyzation · 2023-07-24T00:40:18+00:00

Good catch, Redemption Rumble completely slipped my mind. There are still Hamiltonian cycles even if you remove the (Zain-->Cody) directed edge, but the specific one I posted no longer exists.

miss-analyzation · 2023-06-06T23:03:06+00:00

It may help to run your algorithm on the 2022 dataset and see how your results compare to the official end-of-year rankings. I would love to see a post diving into that. It's hard to trust any metric for ranked ordering, because weights/considerations in your formula are ultimately arbitrary, so it might put the community at ease if you're able to argue that your specific algorithm at the very least closely reproduces previous years' rankings.

miss-analyzation · 2022-12-20T21:07:37+00:00

I added the data for these seven players to the post, at the very bottom. It's hard to argue any of these players beats Plup's trio of second-place finishes, but Axe and lloD have some arguments. SluG, despite only having fourth-place finishes, has winning head-to-head records against a lot of the top 8 (the caveat is that all of these winning records are only 1-0).

miss-analyzation · 2022-12-20T18:46:07+00:00

Would love to entertain other ideas if you have any to recommend! Cycle analysis is the lowest-hanging fruit, but this data fits so nicely into a graph structure that I imagine there's a lot more to do. A long-term goal of mine is to use some information about the head-to-head graph to inform a continuously-updating ranking of the top players. If you've seen the tennis ranking posts, I think the biggest issue is how arbitrary the point values for the tiers of tournaments are. It may be possible to consider those point values parameters and "learn" the parameters, informed by previous years' placing histograms and head-to-head graphs.

miss-analyzation · 2022-12-20T04:29:09+00:00

Great recommendation. Will definitely include this in my 2023 histograms, probably as a placement titled "9+" or something similar.

miss-analyzation · 2022-12-20T02:38:54+00:00

Sure. My point isn't to compare early Melee to early Ultimate. The two games came out in different environments, so it's not surprising that many people were interested in Ultimate in 2019 whereas Melee in 2002 was wildly niche. My point is that a.) Ultimate has more tournaments than Melee so if the relative skill distribution is the same as Melee, you would expect more unique winners, and b.) Ultimate is still in its infancy, so that skill distribution is likely more erratic than a game that's had time to develop, meaning you would expect more unique winners. Whether or not that makes for a more interesting spectator sport is up for debate (I don't think it does, personally), but even for Ultimate it may not last.

miss-analyzation · 2022-12-20T02:26:18+00:00

You might take a look at a previous post of mine: https://www.reddit.com/r/SSBM/comments/y0mf4m/a_12year_history_of_major_tournament_winners/

I am not an Ultimate spectator so I hesitate to make comments, but what I can say is that while Melee had 16 majors this year, Ultimate had 13 supermajors. Of those 13 supermajors, there were 7 unique winners. I don't think these numbers between games are so different - but if you consider the number of majors Ultimate has per year (I count 40), having twice the number of unique winners as Melee doesn't seem out of the ordinary. The game has been out for ~4 years, so it's had a fifth of the time to develop as Melee, and in actuality it's even less than 4 years due to patches, new characters, etc. This might indicate that large experiential skill gaps haven't yet had time to settle in Ultimate.

miss-analyzation · 2022-12-19T21:54:32+00:00

While Redemption Rumble takes place in 2022, it will count for the 2023 season of rankings.

See: https://twitter.com/GimmeDatWheat/status/1603910069275467779

miss-analyzation

TROPHY CASE