I wonder what kinds of statistics would be helpful in arguing that strive should be run best of 3.

I suppose at the end of the day the argument really boils down to longer sets = more competitive integrity, but I can't imagine a single sport or game where that wouldn't be true in theory. I mean, baseball playoffs are best of seven right? maybe that should be the new standard? or I mean, why stop there, like, the physical demand of playing additional matches in a video game is negligible compared to even something like baseball after all. set lengths could be whatever we wanted.

clearly though there's a limit where the marginal returns of longer sets is low enough that the concerns about the production side of things that the wwgg crew has been adamant about since launch would hold more weight.

last summer hursh went through and did some calculations to determine how many sets in a few large tournaments actually went through all five games, which was a pretty useful metric to have. I think it would probably be worth repeating that experiment now that people have had a year to acclimate to the various mechanics and character quirks in the game and more data just exists in general.

I think the most valuable statistic on that end that I could look for would be how many matches that would have been decided one way on a best of 3 format were upset by the end of the set, and also which round of the tournament they happened in. I'd suspect that this would be higher than at launch because of familiarity, but just looking over the notebook I keep of all our stream match results, there's definitely a lot more 3-0s than 3-2s in pools at least. in top 8 the longer format might lead to more upsets because of higher player skill, but that's not part of our programming block so it's less of a concern

the problem there though is that there isn't really anything to compare it to, since to my knowledge it's pretty uncommon for +r or Xrd tourneys to run best of 5. no matter what the data shows, it's hard to say whether strive is more or less prone to successful momentum shifts in the back half of sets than the games it's most often compared to.

it might be worth looking at other games that run longer set counts, but most of those do it for other sorts of reasons- marvel, skullgirls, and bbtag for example only have one round in a game, so the longer sets help compensate.

there's also a lot of other ancillary arguments that leffen stans throw out that boil down to the sentiment that strive matches are decided in fewer interactions than previous games in the series, whether through combo damage or the balance between the strength of offense and defense.

since we have a pretty huge backlog of match footage for +r and strive lying around it would probably be easier for me to gather data and draw comparisons here, but it's also dealing with stuff that's much harder to quantify. there's certain more concrete things I could look for, like the number of times a match swings from neutral to pressure to combos, but even that is something that's pretty wishy-washy

the true end of this saga is me ascending into cyberspace like lain and becoming a one woman baseball-reference.com for wnf guilty gear