Statistics states no such thing. It says the larger the sample size, the smaller the error. Statistics isn’t perfectly accurate until you have a 100% sample size, and isn’t perfectly inaccurate until you have a 0% sample size. (If you have a 100% sample size it’s really just ‘measuring’ so there’s no probability anymore.)
Statistics also is looking for a random sample of the population. Which overbuff doesn’t have. It has a sample that is 100% people with open profiles, and mostly people with enough interest to track their own stats, although people can also get added to overbuff because someone else looked them up.
That’s not random, so we shouldn’t take the data at face value. There are ways to control for non-random data but maybe not here. It’s likely that people tracking their own stats take the game more ‘seriously’ or are ‘more competitive’… but how do you control for that?
In any case, whether you could or not, Overbuff isn’t controlling for anything, they’re simply assembling the raw, biased data as it comes in. That means you should very much take its global results with a big pinch of salt.
For tracking your own personal statistics, of course, it’s nearly perfectly accurate. It should have a 100% sample size of your activity, after all. Where it places you in ‘percentile’ compared to the rest of the population though is just as questionable as any other global data.
It’s more reliable than not, but only if you understand how to read the stats you’re looking at properly, meaning, that’s these stats are only comparable to players of roughly your own SR and are subject to changes depending on if you’re climbing or dropping.
Basically, if you have a 3/1 K/D on say Mcree in Bronze, that doesn’t mean you’ll have that same K/D if you were thrown into a Platinum game.
Overbuffs stats don’t take rank into account. You could be the #1 Genji but be in Bronze if your stats are good enough. That doesn’t mean that if that bronze Genji was thrown into a Gold game they’d have the same stats as they do when playing against bronze players.
The last official stats I recall was March in 2018.
Overbuff last time was generally comparable but, it was also wrong some of the time if the interval that Jeff posted on was similar to a week.
What I had written down from back then was that at the top end Overbuff overestimated Winston’s pickrate and underestimated Mercy’s pickrate. At the bottom it overestimated Zen’s pickrate and underestimated Ana’s pickrate. (Winston and Zen at that time may have had higher pickrates with try hard players that are more likely to look themselves up and Ana and Mercy may have appealed more to non try hard players (Ana was lousy at this point in time).
Overbuff scrapes users/gets names from people looking it up and as such is not complete and can have a biased sample. The addition of users being able to have private profiles likely makes this worse.
I personally assume that the trends are generally accurate, the winrate is within a point or so, and that the pickrate might be off by two or so.
You’ll find naysayers to everything Overbuff has to say because it can threaten their personal position on topics.
Its as reliable as your profile as seen from the forums. Because thats exactly where the data is scraped from for every single stats site.
Until blizzard has a true API available for the game, none of them can be considered anywhere near 100% accurate.
Take all the data with a huge grain of salt. Like a 20% margin of error grain of salt for your own personal stats, and even more for the “pick rates / win rates” screens.
I went to your profile to check that it was public then I copied your profile name and number into the search bar for Overbuff.
I’m not 100% sure on how exactly Overbuff’s search functions. It’s possible that when it doesn’t find a result it checks to see if a profile with that name and number exists and if so makes the result and my typing out the whole thing triggered it. Otherwise, it might just be a typo/database issue (From what I can tell you were first scrapped back in March of 2018 https://www.overbuff.com/players/pc/Portamento-11974/activity ).
Actually, Overbuff uses around 900,000 accounts compared to the 40,000,000 accounts that Overwatch has (whether they’re active or not, Idk). In this case, Overbuff falls short of the 10% requirement to be valid.
But it is still the closest thing we have and I would assume isn’t insanely far off actual statistics.
It’s honestly the only reliable sources that we have currently as of right now, however, it lost a lot of its creditability when private accounts was pushed to LIVE.
I’m genuinely curious - how do you know this? What are you basing this claim off of? Could you give an example of what kind of data you find highly inaccurate and why?
There are really good statistical reasons to believe that Overbuff is accurate when you look at its data properly.
It’s reliable for silver through diamond, where the majority of the population plays. The closer you get to bronze and masters, the fewer people play,which means fewer potential accounts hooked up to Overbuff, but this all on a day to day basis.
Even if the exact percentage isn’t reliable, Overbuff can still show trends through the weeks and months, for any rank.
He’s never provided any kind of response other than “private profiles” to this argument, just FYI. I think he mostly just opposes it because people have used Overbuff data to argue in favor of the Torbjorn rework (which he opposes) and have used it in the past to argue in favor of another Mercy rework (which he also opposes)