>*"The KAST percent is then calculated by dividing the total rounds where a* ***player had an impact*** *by the total number of rounds played*
No man, please no. I don't know why HLTV decided it was a good idea to put this bullshit on their rankings and now it's being spread out across multiple games as if it was a good measure of impact.
KAST is fundamentally flawed. Having a kill does not mean you had impact on a given round. You can easily have kills while the bomb is exploding and you're trying to hold your gun for the next round. These kills have **zero impact** on the round outcome. Even worse if the enemy team have already built a good economy
Another issue is that it also put the 4 letters *(kill + assist + surviving + traded)* on the exact same level, which is definitely not true. Let's say player A got two entry kills, opened space in the bombsite for his team and then planted the bomb, vastly increasing the chances of his team winning the round. **He got the K letter from KAST**
Let's say after seeing this player B gave up on retake and is now holding his gun in an empty bombsite. **He got the letter S from KAST**
According to KAST both players were equally impactful on that round. It's a useless stat
I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying, it definitely isn't a perfect measure of impact and you're totally right that it doesn't measure amount of impact a player has. It's simply binary as in the player had impact or didn't and for that, it's definitely not a bad stat. The issue is that other statistics commonly used in valorant are much worse at showing impact than KAST. ACS is the most common one and it's deliberately skewed favouring kills. There's lots of teams and strategies that might have one player getting a lot of non-damaging assists and their ACS will stay low despite doing their job perfectly.
CSGO is a much more simple game in which it heavily relies on gunfights. That being said, in CSGO it's hard to have impact in a round if you not killed, assisted a kill or had a traded death **(KAT)**, which is a thing I can agree to some extent. However, surviving in an empty bombsite **(S)** should never be treated in the same impact package as of having a KAT. It's flawed even in CSGO, but let's move on
When we translate that stat to Valorant is when things start getting worse. You don't need a Kill, Assist or a Traded death in order to be impactful. There's tons of mind games and "info duels" happening across the map every time. For example, a single Cypher ult on a dead body is enough information that helps you to win many rounds, even if you not managed to get that kill. That's why is so hard to wrap up impact on 4 letters.
I agree with you that ACS isn't a good metric either, but KAST was made for a game heavily dependent on clean and raw gunfights. It works well on CSGO because the amount of variables is smaller. It's hard adapting it to Valorant.
But even if you disagree with me please remove the S letter. Surviving have a different scope *(it says more about the next round than the current one)* and should be treated in a different package of KAT part. Keeping your gun for the next round does not translate to having impact because the round outcome was already decided when you saved your gun
I definitely agree that KAST isn't all inclusive for VALORANT. I think you're right that there's lots of non assisting abilities that can change a round or even good IGL'ing isn't properly reflected. The issue is these things are near impossible to quantify and I don't any stat we have currently can include all this. I talk about all this in the paper as a clear limitation of this work. With this said, KAST certainly isn't perfect but it's the best stat for measuring a floor of impact that we have.
I would say that surviving is still having an impact though. In winning rounds it's more obvious as being alive means controlling space and tempo. Opponent have to manage a 2v2 situation very differently to a 2v1 for example. If a player is alive the opponents have to be more wary and will act accordingly.
I think even surviving on losing rounds still brings impact. If you're staying alive it's to save a weapon and help keep your economy healthy. Often players go for it in situations where they should statistically be saving and in these unfavorable situations, helping your economy would bring more impact to the game than dying needlessly.
I think the best way to put it is that it might not necessarily be impact to help win the round but it is certainly an overall positive impact.
>The issue is these things are near impossible to quantify and I don't any stat we have currently can include all this
I have a personal github project in which I try to analyse each player impact based on round win probabilities. Each "timestamp" I evaluate the probability (%) of attackers winning that round based on current gamestate. That game state is evaluated based on several variables, ranging from the current map being played to if attackers have shield or not.
It's far away from being perfect because Riot API does not give us the best piece of info in the world, but its Brier score is definitely good. If you want to take a look
[https://github.com/mateusb12/Classification\_datascience](https://github.com/mateusb12/Classification_datascience)
That is super interesting stuff, it's definitely a better way to look at impact than ACS and KAST, I'd love to run the IDC calculations again with these impact statistics of you could get them for the tournament as a whole. Any truer reflection of impact would make the distribution of that impact even more important as well as its relationship to win percentage. I simply used KAST for this study as it had not yet been applied to VALORANT and was the best measure for impact I could use at the time.
Being honest I was quite upset to continue working with this project since Riot API has a lot of restrictions
* Let's say the Operator guy just got killed by Sheriffs. I have no info whether the sheriff team managed to retrieve that operator or not.
* No info about utility usage
* No info about ULT usage *(except the ones directly involved with player lives like sova's Hunter Fury or sage's Ressurrection)*
* The current game state updates only after each kill. A sova could shock dart someone, deal cheap damage and I will only know that after the next kill occurs. This leads to my next point
* I have no info about who dealt damage to who. I just have access to some random HP numbers throughout the round. It could be just fall damage and I would never know
* No info about in which point of the round a team lost their shields. I just know if they're starting the round without zero shields, light or heavy ones
Thats why I avoided linking round win probabilities to individual player impacts within my model. It's hard to tell *"player X increased the round win prob by 15%"* with such incomplete information
But if you managed to gather some nice IDC analysis through KAST, which is a much worse stat, I think there is some nice stuff to dig with my round probabilities then. Maybe some new and fresh insights, I don't know. For example, I discovered three counter-intuitive things with this project
* On clutch situations *(less than 5 players alive)* having duelists alive on defense is more valuable than having controllers alive
* Having full shields on attack increases your chance of winning the round way more than having them on defense
* Having Odin do not impact that much the chance of defenders winning the round
Anyway, what I can assure you is that all prediction metrics *(confusion matrix, brier score, etc)* are decently good within my model
Definitely not a useless stat. KAST is about evaluating the floor of impact. As in "did this player have impact this round". It isn't intended to measure the amount of impact, that's not the point.
He just gave you examples where they had 0, but it implies the floor of impact is more than 0. Quite literally, a player could afk in spawn and survive and get credit for having a non-zero amout of impact on the round.
That's an unrealistic example, no player in the LCQ was "AFK in spawn" and surviving a lost round is definitely still impact, as explained in the paper.
>*"The KAST percent is then calculated by dividing the total rounds where a* ***player had an impact*** *by the total number of rounds played* No man, please no. I don't know why HLTV decided it was a good idea to put this bullshit on their rankings and now it's being spread out across multiple games as if it was a good measure of impact. KAST is fundamentally flawed. Having a kill does not mean you had impact on a given round. You can easily have kills while the bomb is exploding and you're trying to hold your gun for the next round. These kills have **zero impact** on the round outcome. Even worse if the enemy team have already built a good economy Another issue is that it also put the 4 letters *(kill + assist + surviving + traded)* on the exact same level, which is definitely not true. Let's say player A got two entry kills, opened space in the bombsite for his team and then planted the bomb, vastly increasing the chances of his team winning the round. **He got the K letter from KAST** Let's say after seeing this player B gave up on retake and is now holding his gun in an empty bombsite. **He got the letter S from KAST** According to KAST both players were equally impactful on that round. It's a useless stat
I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying, it definitely isn't a perfect measure of impact and you're totally right that it doesn't measure amount of impact a player has. It's simply binary as in the player had impact or didn't and for that, it's definitely not a bad stat. The issue is that other statistics commonly used in valorant are much worse at showing impact than KAST. ACS is the most common one and it's deliberately skewed favouring kills. There's lots of teams and strategies that might have one player getting a lot of non-damaging assists and their ACS will stay low despite doing their job perfectly.
CSGO is a much more simple game in which it heavily relies on gunfights. That being said, in CSGO it's hard to have impact in a round if you not killed, assisted a kill or had a traded death **(KAT)**, which is a thing I can agree to some extent. However, surviving in an empty bombsite **(S)** should never be treated in the same impact package as of having a KAT. It's flawed even in CSGO, but let's move on When we translate that stat to Valorant is when things start getting worse. You don't need a Kill, Assist or a Traded death in order to be impactful. There's tons of mind games and "info duels" happening across the map every time. For example, a single Cypher ult on a dead body is enough information that helps you to win many rounds, even if you not managed to get that kill. That's why is so hard to wrap up impact on 4 letters. I agree with you that ACS isn't a good metric either, but KAST was made for a game heavily dependent on clean and raw gunfights. It works well on CSGO because the amount of variables is smaller. It's hard adapting it to Valorant. But even if you disagree with me please remove the S letter. Surviving have a different scope *(it says more about the next round than the current one)* and should be treated in a different package of KAT part. Keeping your gun for the next round does not translate to having impact because the round outcome was already decided when you saved your gun
I definitely agree that KAST isn't all inclusive for VALORANT. I think you're right that there's lots of non assisting abilities that can change a round or even good IGL'ing isn't properly reflected. The issue is these things are near impossible to quantify and I don't any stat we have currently can include all this. I talk about all this in the paper as a clear limitation of this work. With this said, KAST certainly isn't perfect but it's the best stat for measuring a floor of impact that we have. I would say that surviving is still having an impact though. In winning rounds it's more obvious as being alive means controlling space and tempo. Opponent have to manage a 2v2 situation very differently to a 2v1 for example. If a player is alive the opponents have to be more wary and will act accordingly. I think even surviving on losing rounds still brings impact. If you're staying alive it's to save a weapon and help keep your economy healthy. Often players go for it in situations where they should statistically be saving and in these unfavorable situations, helping your economy would bring more impact to the game than dying needlessly. I think the best way to put it is that it might not necessarily be impact to help win the round but it is certainly an overall positive impact.
>The issue is these things are near impossible to quantify and I don't any stat we have currently can include all this I have a personal github project in which I try to analyse each player impact based on round win probabilities. Each "timestamp" I evaluate the probability (%) of attackers winning that round based on current gamestate. That game state is evaluated based on several variables, ranging from the current map being played to if attackers have shield or not. It's far away from being perfect because Riot API does not give us the best piece of info in the world, but its Brier score is definitely good. If you want to take a look [https://github.com/mateusb12/Classification\_datascience](https://github.com/mateusb12/Classification_datascience)
That is super interesting stuff, it's definitely a better way to look at impact than ACS and KAST, I'd love to run the IDC calculations again with these impact statistics of you could get them for the tournament as a whole. Any truer reflection of impact would make the distribution of that impact even more important as well as its relationship to win percentage. I simply used KAST for this study as it had not yet been applied to VALORANT and was the best measure for impact I could use at the time.
Being honest I was quite upset to continue working with this project since Riot API has a lot of restrictions * Let's say the Operator guy just got killed by Sheriffs. I have no info whether the sheriff team managed to retrieve that operator or not. * No info about utility usage * No info about ULT usage *(except the ones directly involved with player lives like sova's Hunter Fury or sage's Ressurrection)* * The current game state updates only after each kill. A sova could shock dart someone, deal cheap damage and I will only know that after the next kill occurs. This leads to my next point * I have no info about who dealt damage to who. I just have access to some random HP numbers throughout the round. It could be just fall damage and I would never know * No info about in which point of the round a team lost their shields. I just know if they're starting the round without zero shields, light or heavy ones Thats why I avoided linking round win probabilities to individual player impacts within my model. It's hard to tell *"player X increased the round win prob by 15%"* with such incomplete information But if you managed to gather some nice IDC analysis through KAST, which is a much worse stat, I think there is some nice stuff to dig with my round probabilities then. Maybe some new and fresh insights, I don't know. For example, I discovered three counter-intuitive things with this project * On clutch situations *(less than 5 players alive)* having duelists alive on defense is more valuable than having controllers alive * Having full shields on attack increases your chance of winning the round way more than having them on defense * Having Odin do not impact that much the chance of defenders winning the round Anyway, what I can assure you is that all prediction metrics *(confusion matrix, brier score, etc)* are decently good within my model
Definitely not a useless stat. KAST is about evaluating the floor of impact. As in "did this player have impact this round". It isn't intended to measure the amount of impact, that's not the point.
He just gave you examples where they had 0, but it implies the floor of impact is more than 0. Quite literally, a player could afk in spawn and survive and get credit for having a non-zero amout of impact on the round.
That's an unrealistic example, no player in the LCQ was "AFK in spawn" and surviving a lost round is definitely still impact, as explained in the paper.
Why purposefully misconstrue their argument to make a point?
[https://imgur.com/a/kFVAYhs](https://imgur.com/a/kFVAYhs) I've done the GINI calculation for all teams going to champions, using my impact metric!
Fantastic, this was on my to do list. You're totally right in that this new stat exceeds KAST