A Statistical Approach to Team Fortress 2

Welcome to my site on Team Fortress 2 statistical analysis.

My inspiration for this work is the site Advanced NFL Stats. Brian Burke, the author of Advanced NFL Stats, applies statistical analysis to NFL football, and has found that a lot of the common wisdom of the sport is not borne out by the data.

Advanced NFL Stats has produced two very interesting systems which I hope to be able to port to Team Fortress 2, specifically the 6-man competitive format of Team Fortress 2. The first of these is a win probability system. The win probability system for football gives an estimate of a team's chances of winning the game, given information about the score, time remaining, who has the ball, and the current down and distance. By collecting all the times in the historical data that the state of the game matched the state of the current game, and whether the historical team went on to win, we can take the percentage of the time that the historical team won their game as the probability that the current team will win theirs.

For Team Fortress 2, a similar system should be possible. Instead of score, and field position for football, the relevant variables for Team Fortress 2 are possession of control points, which players are dead and alive, and whether the medics have ubercharge. Win probability can inform us about the value of different advantages. Is ubercharge-advantage worth more than the scout sent to force the pop? What about the demoman versus the medic at the mid-fight? Win probability can help answer these and other questions.

The second system that Advanced NFL Stats has produced is a statistics-driven game prediction system. Different from just examining the likelihood of winning based on current position and players, the prediction system uses the statistics that are most highly correlated with teams winning, and builds a logistic model that gives each statistic the correct weight for how important it is. I expect some kind of statistical prediction system to become more relevant as tf2lobby.com grows in popularity, and more players are introduced to 6-man competitive Team Fortress 2.

I have data compiled for the in-game win probability system, but I am still working on a nice interface for browsing it. I'll build the spiffy interface as quickly as I can, and post with an update and a link to the result.