Placing Rate

This article was edited on 2025-06-29 because I'm a compulsive perfectionist. You'll see the relevant section near the end of the article.

The goals for this site are:

1. Improve analysis of Kill Team through objective data.
2. Do so in a way that is accessible and digestible to the average player.

With these ends in mind, I like to compare Kill Team statistics to professional sport statistics. After all, both subjects are focused on analyzing competitiveness to a lay audience.

There are some obvious differences (a few hundred billion 💰 you might say). But a relevant difference is the sheer volume of key statistics utilized in the world of sports.

By key statistic, I mean a critical statistic that summarizes performance in an objective but approachable way¹. For example, in Baseball (the most statistic obsessed sport of all time) there are three major offensive stats known as Batting Average, On-Base Percentage, and Slugging Percentage. These performance indicators are well known among baseball fans; no one needs a doctorate in math to understand them.

On the other hand, faction analysis within the Games Workshop bubble is almost exclusively concerned with Win Rate. The reason for this is obvious: Win Rate is both easy to conceptualize and genuinely valuable.

Essentiallly, it makes for a great key statistic.

There really hasn’t been any other measure that has managed to achieve that combination of value and simplicity.

Still, is it not possible that a bunch of nerds (who play make-believe wars driven by mathematics) would be interested in more tools in the statistical toolbox?

The Loneliest Number

Maybe it’s worth asking, what is Win Rate missing?

After all, "win rate isn’t everything", it has some obvious weaknesses as a lone statistic. Two that come to my mind are:

• There are Gatekeeper factions that put up high Win Rates but struggle to win events.
• There are Sleeper factions that may have average Win Rates; But, in the hands of skilled players, perform exceptionally well at events.

Both these issues suggest there can be an inconsistency between a faction’s ability to win games and their ability to finish well at events.

Which makes sense. Competitive players aren’t just trying to win games, they’re trying to win events.

Perhaps what this bachelor needs is a companion that measures how well a faction finishes at events²?

Behold, my Stats

Here’s my attempt at this:

And in English:

A faction’s Placing Rate is that faction’s total number of top_placings divided by their total number of picks.

Let’s unpack this.

First, what are picks? A faction pick is whenever a player takes that faction to an event (they "picked" that faction). If 3 players take Kommandos to one event, that’s 3 Kommando picks. If those same 3 players take Kommandos to another event; we now have 6 Kommando picks. To get a faction’s total number of picks, calculate the sum of all its picks for every event in the dataset.

Easy. Now, what are top_placings?

That’s when a player (i.e. a pick) finishes in a top placing at an event.

Okay… but what makes a placing a top placing?

Well, that depends. Most people understand a top placing to be 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd place (which is what we call "podiums"). Although intuitive, only measuring the top 3 placings for events is a bad approach from a statistical standpoint. Kill Team GT events range from 16 to sometimes over 100 people. Obviously, it is much easier to get 3^rd place at a 16-person event than an 100-person event.

Instead, a better alternative would be to calculate top placings by the percentage of all players attending that event. For example, a 15% top percentage would yield 1^st through 3^rd as top placings for a 20-person event. Additionally, that same 15% top percentage would yield 1^st through 12^th as top placings for an 80-person event³.

This is comparable to what poker events do when determining which players finish "in the money". Regardless of the tournament size, just take the top percentage of players (usually somewhere between 10% and 20%). Those players are the ones who walk away with something.

If it’s good enough for Vegas, it’s good enough for me.

Alright, now we know to use a proportional value, rather than a static one. But if we’re using a top percentage, what percentage should we use?

I’m using 15% as an example because that’s the value I first ran with when testing this metric. Realistically, this decision is up for debate. If we use a lower percentage, such as 10%, we gain more validity but are sacrificing reliability. If we use a higher percentage, such as 20%, we gain reliability but are sacrificing validity.

I prefer 15% as a healthy sweet spot, but there are other sensible values to use (Update 2025-06-29: I've since adopted a differnt top placing precentage sinc this article has beem written, I'll explain near the end of the article!).

Finally, another great aspect of Placing Rate calculated from a top percentage, is it gives us a very clear expected value. If I’m using a 15% top percentage for my top placings, then a perfectly average (i.e. balanced) faction is expected to produce a 15% Placing Rate.

Why? because if 15% of all placings are top placings, then 15% of a faction’s player base is expected to finish in those placings. Therefore, 15% becomes the expected value, just like 50% is the expected value for win rate.

Let’s summarize all of this:

If we say Kommandos have a 20% Placing Rate. We mean 20% of all Kommando players finished in top placings at events. That also means Kommando’s Placing Rate would be about 5% above the average.

Pretty clear, right?

Update!

Edited on 2025-06-29

I've been working with Placing Rate for over a year now, since then I’ve decided to make some changes.

First, I'm lowering the percentage of top placings from 15% to 12.5%.

Honestly, fudging these numbers around has been an exercise in Bike Shedding.

As I mentioned above, there are many sensible values between 10% and 20%. In fact, nearly any value in that range produces similar results (I can validate this because it's easy for me to swap out different values).

However, I’m settling on 12.5% for the following reasons:

1. 12.5% is one out of eight. The number eight is meaningful in the context of Swiss tournaments. If you have 8 players, it takes 3 rounds of Swiss to conclude with a single undefeated winner. Every time you double the number of players, you need 1 additional round to get a single, undefeated winner (16 players need 4 rounds, 32 need 5, etc…). Eight becomes a magic number because all of these values are divisible by it.
2. Most competitive Kill team events are 4 rounds. The bigger events are usually 6 rounds. 12.5% provides a decent breakpoint for both of these event sizes.

For instance, in an ideal⁴ 16-person 4-round event, we’ll get 2 top placings, which would include the undefeated winner, as well as the best player who went 3-1 (3 wins and 1 loss). If the number of players increased but the rounds didn’t, the top placings will just fill up with more undefeated or high-end 3-1 players.

In the ideal 64-person 6-round event, we’ll get 8 top placings. That would include the winner, 6 players who went 3-1, and a single 4-2 player with the best record.

In both of these cases, we receive the kind of performances we are interested in. However, because Placing Rate is a proportion, it will flex to any event size, reward large events with more placings, and maintain a clean expected value of 12.5%.

Oh, and eight is Khorne’s number. So there’s that.

Finally, I'm not going to do any rounding. Instead, we'll provide partial top placings based on the remainder.

For example, suppose an event has 18 people. We'll give out top placings for 1st through 2nd like normal. But for 3rd place, we'll provide a partial placing of 0.25 because 18 * 0.125 = 2.25.

I probably should have thought of that earlier, but hey, I never claimed to be good at math.

Conclusion

The purpose of Placing Rate is not to replace Win Rate, but to supplement it.

Placing Rate is a greate differentiator between factions that have similar win rates. It provides a fuller picture of that faction’s ability to perform competitivly.

However, Placing Rate is a very hungry statistic. It requires a lot of data to produce reliable results (in case you haven’t noticed, people regularly voice concerns about sample sizes in Kill Team event data).

On that note, my next article will cover Kill Team sample sizes and how we can understand the reliability of our statistics.

Thanks for the read! 🧐🥃

Footnotes