It’s been official now that Pearl and Fracture will be entering the active competitive mappool of VALORANT. However, what were the key storylines on this map? It was the teams that pioneered these maps and the players that stood out on this map. Let’s take a deep dive.
The Method
But first you might have a question. How did I calculate these Rating differentials? What was the criteria?
- First of all, I scrapped the Average Rating for each player across every Franchise and every international event during 2023.
- And then I scrapped the Average Rating for each of these players on the maps Pearl and Fracture separately.
- From then on it was straight forward, I subtracted the difference between both, the Overall Average Rating and the rating across both Pearl and Fracture individually.
The Pioneers
One of the most momentous, meta defining things to happen in 2023 was EG’s Fracture.
On April 3, 2023, during the first week of the Americas league against Cloud9 on Fracture, Evil Geniuses pulled out their new comp that would change the way this map is forever played.
Although they lost the opening match 13–9 with this composition, their faith reflected as they stuck to this comp for the remainder of the year and would lose just once from there on. Overall Evil Geniuses had 87% winrate on Fracture with this comp, winning 11/13 matches in the process.
I’m not going to go deeply into details, rather show you the major strengths of this composition.
If you were to look at the Far Right of the above graph you’d notice it being filled with Evil Geniuses’ players, that holds true as not only did they have a high win rate on this map but also frequently picked this map.
However, what I want you to focus on, are these two players in particular — C0M (+0.18) and Ethan (+0.16). C0M played Sova on this map while Ethan played Breach. These two agents combine to contribute the most significant chunk of utility available to them on Fracture.
These two players being so high up there, clearly displays a level of comfort and understanding that these players showed w.r.t to the team and the composition. Ethan in particular frequently recorded the most Assists Per Round (APR) on this particular map.
The reason why I chose to highlight two players was for the following reasons:
- jawgemo (+0.20), although the best performing player on Fracture for the year, played smokes on the other maps which gives him a significant advantage over others to boost his rating on Fracture. And the same could be said for Demon1 but reverse as he plays smokes on Fracture and is at a disadvantage.
- Finally Boostio (+0.12) is also up there among the top five but since he plays Killjoy and is more concerned about holding particular areas of the map. And hence I didn’t choose to highlight him.
The fact that C0M and Ethan find themselves so high up on the list represents that this composition that Evil Geniuses were running was a very well thought composition and did not necessarily rely on any solo duelist firepower or any sort of gimmicks but rather a well-supported composition where players knew exactly what to do and the right protocols set up by their coaches. In the months after Masters Tokyo many teams across different regions went on to copy this composition, also enjoyed a significant success as this composition recorded a 53.58% WR till the end of VCT Champions 2023, the highest on Fracture.
The Experimentalists
Finally, we come to Pearl and much like Evil Geniuses, Natus Vincere also pioneered this map but for very different reasons.
While I will not get into the nitty gritty of things, but NAVI’s success on Pearl also highlights the major reason for their inconsistency.
You see NAVI had a very tumultuous year to say the least. The team was marred by inconsistency and players having a dip in form during the wrong periods of the year.
Clearly Shao (+0.23) and Zyppan (+0.20) stand right at the top and is a good thing however, that does not hold true for the rest of the players. cNed in (+0.21) in particular had a very rough year in the duelist department, he had an Average Rating of 1.06 which is far below than most duelists with a 1000+ Rounds this year. In fact the only one below him was ardiis, for whom you can make an argument if he even played a lot of duelists this year or not.
So cNed being so high up there doesn’t necessarily mean anything nor does it show the true picture. The same can be said for SUYGETSU (+0.04) ANGE1 (+0.14) who you’d expect to be much higher on this list.
One of the major reasons for this inconsistency can be attributed to how much NAVI experimented this year.
“No team ran more compositions across their map pool than Natus Vincere this year”
Well, you may ask then, “How were NAVI so successful on Pearl?” The answer is simple, NAVI experimented the least on Pearl, running only TWO compositions on this map all year long.
They enjoyed a 92% win rate on Pearl winning 11/12 games on this map. The one game that they lost was on Overtime against EDward Gaming with a scoreline of 15–17 during VCT Masters: Tokyo.
The Peakers
Finally let’s take a look at the players who actually peaked on this map, above and beyond their peers. From just a glance at the graph you can say jawgemo (+0.20) and Shao (+0.23) were players who peaked the most on Fracture and Pearl respectively. However, that’s far from the truth.
You see, unlike Evil Geniuses and NAVI players who form a cluster at the positive ends of each of the axes, mindfreak (+0.19) and Rb (+0.16) are just there on their own. They are far from the majority of their teammates.
- Difference between mindfreak and nearest teammate for Fracture: 0.14
- Difference between Rb and nearest teammate for Pearl: 0.12
The reason why I chose to highlight them is because sometimes when you have a really high win rate on a certain map, which is the case here for Evil Geniuses and NAVI it tends to be easier to maintain a higher average on that map for any metric than your overall average. As I found there is a strong correlation between Winrates and ACS in my studies previously.
“The Correlation between Average Wins and Average Kills was noticed to be +0.7 which indicates a strong correlation in statistics” So the fact that Rb and mindfreak are so high up there on these respective maps holds more weightage than any of the Evil Geniuses and NAVI players.
