Beating a Dead Horse: End of Season 8 Takeaways from Top 500 in Different Regions
A final update to the shift in hero-main concentration we see in Top 500 Ranked for Season 8. I feel like I have gotten all the ‘editorial mileage’ I can at this point — in the future I will look to find more in depth ways to look at Ladder movements.
tl:dr — Mercy mains in NA continued to drop or swap to different heroes, main tanks representation in the Top 50 was basically 0 in NA and Asia, with a small number in Europe, and Asian Top 500 players don’t mess around with off-meta heroes the same way westerners do.
I wrote in mid-February about how the trends in NA Top 500 had changed from pre-Mercy nerf (Jan 15) to post-Mercy nerf (Feb 15). As the season has now ended I thought it would be appropriate to see where Mercy lay at the end of it all. Unsurprisingly, the medic’s numbers continued to fall since mid February — landing at a final 26 Mercy mains in the Top 500 (down from 79 and 35 on Jan 15 and Feb 15 respectively).
One additional item I did look at this time around was the breakdown of hero main by rank distribution in top 500. Although for plebs like me all Top 500 accounts are amazing players, I have often heard pros say things like “only top 50 matters”, so I figured I would see what the hero distribution looked like at only top 50 vs other ranks.
With the exception of 1 Winston main, 1 Mercy main, and 1 Mei main — all of the players in the Top 50 mained Tracer, D.Va, Zenyatta, or Genji. I suppose given that OWL players play on NA ladder, because those 4 heroes have been a staple in professional Overwatch for stage 1 and stage 2, this result is not surprising. What is surprising though — is the lack of main-tanks in the top 50. The single Winston main in top 50 was the Fusion’s own SADO who finished rank 20. I wanted to see if this issue existed in Europe and Asia — regions which did not have 113 OWL players sitting on the ladder.
In EU there were a total of 6 main-tank mains in the top 50 (4 Winston, 2 Reinhardt) and in Asia there were a total of 2 (only 2 Winston mains). There were a few other regional differences. More so than America or Asia, EU had the most diversity of mains in the top 50 with 14 different heroes compared to America’s 7 heroes and Asia’s 9. Hilariously, the Doomfist main in EU top 50 was actually not Chipsa, but a guy named PHKiller (who might be a Chipsa smurf who knows). All three regions had more or less the same number of Mercy mains in the top 500 (26, 26, and 23 for NA, Asia, and Europe respectively). The last item of note is while the season ended only a few days ago — Asia has already seen one player exit the Top 500 ladder — which to my understanding means he was banned for cheating or breaking the ToS.
That’s all for today. As I said at the start I’ll be looking for other ways to explore ladder meta changes in the future — in Season 9 I plan to run my scraping code every day and maybe make one of those neat gif charts to see how hero distributions change over time. ❤ Beezy.
