The Ring of Fire [Part 2] – Looking at North Americans & more in Kagaribi #10’s Pools

Golden Week has reached its apex. After two major events, we have an idea of how things might shake out at Tokyo’s Premier Major event and one of the most important events this season: Kagaribi #10. People will rally for big performances from their favorite North American and Japanese players, but so far, the biggest story is the depth Japan has to offer.

The event lasts two days, with the 1000+ attendees cutting down to 192 by the end of day 1, with 64 pools split across two waves. Today, I’ll be analyzing what we might be able to expect from North America during Kagaribi’s pools.

The Ring of Fire [Part 1] – An Analysis of Smash’s Busiest Month, and a Look at #1 Contenders

In Smash Bros, Japan has been a compelling force in the game’s competition since the beginning of the competitive scene. They have had good years and bad year, but things have heated up in a way that hasn’t been seen in around a decade.

Golden Week – a holiday period in Japan – sees the usual go down; multiple extensive events held in major population centers. They tended to be understood as majors or supermajors, but often lacked international attendance.

This time, all eyes are on Japan as a slew of North Americans attend both Osaka and Tokyo’s biggest events, supercharged by sprawling attendance from Japan as a whole. Here, we see an inverse of the usual. After a decade of Japan trying to prove themselves in North America, we see North America approaching a mammoth challenge in Japan.

 But this is not just a story of Japan. This is a story of Mexico, North America, and the big endgame that many have waited on since quarantine. Many events have been deemed significant and meta changing, but Battle of BC 5 – an event held in British Colombia – may be the most significant post-Melee Smash Bros. event since 2GGC: Civil War.

Across the Pacific, there is a ring of fire. This month, it will burn bright.

[DATA] The State of Smash 4 – 2018 Report – Character Stats, Attendance, Viewership, and Sponsorships

Introduction

Hello, I am Barnard’s Loop. You may recognize my name for previous articles I have done in relation to Smash 4, or for my involvement in OrionRank. Today, this report will examine and discuss Smash 4’s status in 2018 by looking at:

• Character stats
• Power Ranking data
• Attendance & Viewership numbers
• Sponsorship statuses
• Bayonetta (less extensively this time)

I tend to do small reports every 4 months, as each 4 months represents a Phase in my data collection. As of the end of April, Phase 7 ended, which led me to begin to produce this report.

I hope this report/article will divulge some important information about the current state of the metagame.

DATA – Cloud in Doubles – An Analysis

Introduction

I am Barnard’s Loop. You may know me for my data work, most recently a Bayonetta article examining how prominent she was in Singles. It was my intention to publish a similar examination of Cloud in Doubles by late 2018, but the announcement of Smash 5 has made this urgent.

Furthermore, several scenes have taken steps to mitigate Cloud’s presence in their doubles scenes. This includes things ranging from a x2 Cloud ban similar to what was enacted with Meta Knight in Brawl to scenes banning Cloud in doubles entirely.

I will attempt, as with my last article, to approach this subject in a professional manner with interpretations based on the data I’ve uncovered. Sources will be provided at the bottom.

DATA – Bayonetta – A detailed statistical breakdown of Smash 4’s most controversial character.

INTRODUCTION

I am Barnard’s Loop. I have collected tournament data at the regional and national level across most prominent countries for two years, and have used it to engineer a scoreboard for showing what characters do the best, alongside their meta saturation.

I have done a number of stats & data based projects for Smashboards & Reddit, as evidenced by the content on this blog. Some were with help, others without. I feel like I can call myself very qualified to discuss the issue at hand from a data perspective and have plenty of evidence to support it if asked.

I began to write preliminary versions of this article during May-June, possibly sooner, but priorities shifted and it became delayed. By late December, I decided to begin work on it again, and I have accelerated that work after GENESIS 5 and Frostbite 2018.

The reason, of course, is because the community has become pretty tumultuous as of late. Twitter, Smashboards, and Reddit are rife with discussion about this character with many top players or people who manage the scene chiming in.

I figured after doing experimental projects with Freezie like OrionRank, after analyzing character diversity across multiple titles, and after doing short-form analysis of character data for Kirby & Marcina, I decided it would be a good idea to extensively research the most discussed character in Smash 4.

This article will largely be based in factual data and reasonable interpretations based on that data. I will include sources and methodologies at the bottom.

[Data] A look at character diversity in the 5 main Smash games.

When I was making my massive stat post for Smash 4 during late April & early May, I had often wondered what the character stats looked like for other games. I thought it’d be entertaining to sift through the national results of the game that got me into competitive Smash –  Project M – and then I thought it’d be entertaining to see how dominant Meta Knight was in Brawl in terms of saturation.

At that point, I thought it’d be best to just do all five games, so I threw Melee and 64 into the mix and made it a bigger project. It was intended to be posted months ago, but I ended up letting it sit too long and had to re-construct it.

I decided to use pertinent data up to Super Smash Con 2017.

Character Data – 2016-2017 – An Extensive Analysis.

Hi, I’m BarnardsLoop. Since early 2016, I’ve been compiling character results data. While I mostly stuck to Smashboards throughout 2016, I eventually started becoming more active in my reddit postings as of 2017 in an effort to get my data more exposure to the general public.

This is a master post of sorts – of all data that I’ve collected and long breakdowns of it, from March 15th, 2016 to April 30th, 2017. I will be analyzing several characters and their data on the roster, along with how much certain players contributed, and average points gained by characters per month.