Numbers never lie. But they can be misinterpreted

I wrote how winning and losing streaks are a thing in World of Warships. In short: the outcome of a battle should be not correlated to the battle before. Ergo your chance to lose twice is L*L, win twice is W*W, lose once and win once is L*W*2. In reality, both double (and triple, and quadruple) wins and losses are more common, proving correlation between them.

I wrote some reasons why it can happen:

1. me being tired, annoyed, distracted or other way unfit to play competitively
2. if a game ends, many players queue again, so the next battle likely contain many of the people from the old game. If I manged to make them mad with my unique playstyle, they start the game mad when they see me on their team again.
3. win chances greatly depend on ship composition, a 4-4 destroyer game is completely different from a 4x battleship game. Since most players play the same ships again and again, ship compositions are likely the same in the following games.

Then I “wisely” made the rule to don’t push “Battle On” after a defeat but do something else for 20-30 minutes. My results indeed increased, reaching rank 3 on Saturday. Then on Sunday I managed to get back to rank 5, losing 12 out of 14 games. I kept the letter of the rule.

I was sure that if I do statistics, I will find solutions and it clearly didn’t work and it upset me to no end (sure that helped with playing). But as the title says, the numbers don’t lie, but can be misinterpreted. For example see the list of possible explanations. Out of them only #2 is removed by waiting half an hour. #1 can be somewhat mitigated, but not if you spend your “break” in a random battle because “+200% XP weekend”.

So I went back to the same numbers and this time looked for longer trends:

“Previous score” means the outcome of the previous N games, win being 1 and lose being 0. The first line is my total winrate during that period.

The first section, looking just the directly previous game is what I’ve found earlier: I have much higher chance to win a game after a won game than after a lost.

The second section looked for 2 previous games: the winrate after 2 losses is abysmal, it’s great after 1 win 1 loss (in any order) and average after 2 wins.

Looking at 3 games at a row was the most interesting: winrate after 3 losses or “2 loss 1 win” is bad. It’s great after “2 win 1 loss”. Surprisingly it’s bad again after 3 wins in a row.

I don’t know why win-streaks predict worse results than “good winrate with some losses”. It’s possible that I get overconfident and pull stupid stunts. It’s possible that the matchmaker has some anti-streak method. But the new rule is: I “Battle On” even if I lose my first game in the session and keep “Battle On” until

• I lose both of my first 2 games
• My last 3 games have 2 losses
• All my last 3 games are won

After these I end my session and do something else for at least 2 hours. If I do randoms for XP, the 2 hours starts from the end of closing the client.

I am pretty confident that I’ll rank out soon with this. Long pauses help regenerate if the problem was my lack of ability and help the players replace if the problem was unfavorable ship composition.

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Update: I wrote this post on early Monday, since then I’ve done some sessions:

1. 2x Loss
2. 3x Win
3. 2x Loss
4. LWL
5. WWLWL
6. 3x Win
7. 3x Win
8. WWLL
9. WLWWW

This works like a charm. As you can see 4 out of 9 sessions contain 3x Win blocks, despite the chance is about 1/8. To the victor go the spoils: