Higher ranks work the controller faster: about 410 inputs a minute through ranks 21–29, climbing steadily from rank 30 to nearly 500 at the top. Most of what looks like a character difference is the players, except for Akira, whose players press about a tenth more on him than on anyone else. The side that pressed more wins the round a little more often, and more so the bigger the gap.
Inputs a minute430
Ranks 21–29 → 40–46409 → 488
Faster side won the round54.4%
Player-rounds read802,480
An input is any change on the controller: a new stick direction, or a button pressed or released. Walking and crouching count as much as attacking. Only the live round is timed, from the bell to the moment it is decided. This is a fixed 1-in-10 sample of the matches: 104,911 of the 1,053,055 pulled for the opening-moves report.
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Inputs a minute by rank
Each side's rank at the time of the match; bars either side of the average over every rank
Every input over every live minute at that rank, so a long round counts for more than a short one. The whiskers are 95% intervals clustered by player, because one person's hands carry across every round they play. Ranks with fewer than 30 players are drawn faint.
The same players on different characters
How much faster a player is on this character than on their other characters, averaged over players
A character's raw rate is mostly its players: fast players pick some characters more than others. So each player with 3 minutes of live rounds on a character and 3 on their others is compared only with themselves, and a character needs 30 such players to be tested. The 20 tested are corrected together (Benjamini-Hochberg); a triangle marks a gap that survives at q < 0.05, and a faint bar one that does not. Characters are listed fastest raw rate first.
Does the faster side win the round?
Share of 389,987 rounds won by the side with more inputs, by how far apart the two counts were
Between two players of the same rank the faster side won 53.9%, so this is not just higher ranks being faster. It does not say pressing more wins: a player on the wrong end of a combo, a throw or a knockdown has less to do, so losing a round can lower the count as easily as a low count can lose it. The gap is the difference as a share of the two counts' mean. 3,402 rounds with level counts are left out. Intervals are clustered by match.
The pace through a round
Inputs a minute in each second since the bell, rounds won against rounds lost
Rounds wonRounds lost
The first second is the burst players buffer through the intro. A second is drawn while at least 1,000 rounds of each outcome are still live at it; the last, partial second of each round is left out, or every round would appear to stop dead.
Each side of every round counts once, whoever was pulled for the match. A side with no input in any round of a match is a controller left alone, not a slow player, and is left out, as are sides ranked outside 21–46 at the time.
The sample is drawn by a hash of the match, so the same matches come back on every pull and a full pull will contain this one. The figures will tighten, not move, when it lands.
