Alongside the Data Peek Series, one of our Data Analysts, Geoffroy Mouret, provided his own analysis of the overall data from Season 1. This is part 1 of a 2 part series. The next blog will take a look at the impact of new operators on win rates.
Every season brings a lot of changes with the new Operators that impact the metagame over the first weeks after their release. The new Operator pick rates usually follow the same trend with two spikes at season launch with early access to Season Pass owners, and at their global release in Renown and R6 credits. After that, pick rates slowly decrease before stabilizing until the next patch.
Jackal (Top) and Mira’s (Bottom) pick rates in Y2S1 (PC – all modes and levels of play)
Not all operators are equally impacted by the arrival of DLC operators. While most of them see a small decrease in their pick rates, some suffer more from having a similar function (think Smoke and Echo for example), whereas others take advantage of that new meta.
Operators’ Pick Rates per patch (PC Ranked – Top players)
Season 5 is no exception and it created a lot of tension over the control of Mira’s Black Mirrors. Operators like Hibana and Twitch took advantage of that as their pick rate remained constant over the first half of the season, while Thermite was picked a lot less. The top 4 defenders remained the same, with Bandit having the smallest decrease and Valkyrie being hit a bit harder by Mira’s competition for intel. Further away in the meta, it’s worth noting that Caveira’s pick rate was not greatly impacted as players used her ability to stay hidden from Jackal.
With the Velvet Shell Mid-Season Reinforcements, DLC operators settled in the middle of the pack and most players went back to their previous habits. Old favorites like Ash and Jäger came back to around an 80% pick rate and Valkyrie reclaimed her place as the true queen of vision. Addressing the elephant in the room, we have Glaz who went from a 7% pick rate to almost 50%. This was an obvious consequence of his recent buff, which put him in a competitive place, but not to the point of making him a must pick.
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