Weapon Popularity by Platform, v2 (BF3)

[Incarnate]

Original Title: Weapon Popularity by Platform
Author: J0hn-Stuart-Mill

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Alright, it’s been a year since my first version of these graphs, and the game is almost 20 months old now. Let’s see how things have changed.

First off, since last June, we have seen four new expansions which included 14 new weapons. I have 12 months of new data, compared with the original data from just the first 9 months or so.

Methodology: If you remember my first set of graphs, then the methodology for these is very similar, just with higher thresholds. Here’s what I wrote a year ago, for those of you new to this thread:

Weapon Popularity by Platform, v1 (BF3)

Methodology - What you’re looking at is total numbers of players who have carried guns past 600 kills. A shockingly high percentage of people stop using guns after they get the 500 kills dogtag, so I chose a 600 kill threshold to remove those players who only used the weapon to get the dogtag, and what remains are the guns that experienced and capable players are electing to use, presumably because they either feel the most effective with a given weapon, OR because they have some reason that a given weapon is their favorite. The more potent and experienced a player is, the more represented that player is here. If a player only played BF3 for 20 hours and doesn’t have any weapons beyond 600 kills, that player is not reflected in this data at all. With the data gathered, each graph is skewed so that the most popular weapon of each class becomes the “benchmark” and all the rest are relative to each other shown in percentages.

On with the show! Pardon the watermarks, previous work I’ve posted here has been widely shared on the Internet without citing this site as a source, and without asking permission.

*** All data scraped from bf3stats.com ***

The three sets of graphs above are… Row 1: 10,000 Kill threshold, Row 2: 1,600 Kill threshold, Row 3: 1,600 Kill threshold from ONE YEAR AGO (for comparison)

The gun order listed on all graphs is simply the gun order I used one year ago. I did not re-sort it based on changes, because I wanted the graph colors to stay the same, and not have one gun show up as two different colors, or a different part of the pie chart.

For Assault 1,600 kills only, I subtracted the “old” data from the “new” data as there were a few weapons that changed drastically in the amount they were used. The Famas on console is the biggest example. It went from being extremely popular in BF3’s early days to almost unused in the past year. The other Classes I did not subtract the old data because doing accomplished little (the usage ratios often remained the same anyways, and it only further exaggerated the new weapons prominence, and I didn’t want to incorrectly represent the new weapons.

Here are the numbers behind the 1600 Kill graphs, and precisely how they changed from a year ago

• These percent changes are calculated ignoring the new weapons in each class
• Unlisted weapons were generally ones that saw less than 1% change in usage
• The old data is subtracted from the new data, and then the two data sets compared
  

Notable things about Assault:

• The “Big Three” have fully asserted their dominance since the Heavy Barrel buff. They now account for 85% of all assault kit usage on PC, and 70% on Console
• The other nine assault rifles share the remaining 15% on PC, 30% on console.
• Assault has the most guns in it, but it is easily the least diverse class with the most irrelevant weapons.
• Console still sees some relevance with the F2K, and the AUG.
• The Famas’ early dominance on console is completely gone.

I did not graph 10,000 kill charts for engineer, just because Engineer saw so little change, except for the addition of the ACW and MTAR

Notable things about Engineer:

• The two new guns both saw heavy adoption on all platforms. The ACW favored on PC, and the MTAR used most on PS3
• A-91 hit hard by the foregrip nerf
• Usage wise, this class has become more balanced than it was.

Notable things about Support:

• The M249 is the big loser here, losing ground on all platforms.
• The MG36 saw it’s use cut in half on all platforms, mostly because the L86
• The M27 also gave up ground to the L86
• LSAT almost completely unused for good reason.

Notable things about Recon:

• The M98B is still completely dominant at higher kill thresholds. A solid 70% at 10,000+
• The M40 being the biggest gainer in total numbers
• The SKS being the biggest percentage increase with it’s new heavy barrel and lower recoil.
• The 417 and JNG both finding themselves equally popular

Notable things about PDWs:

• The VAL saw decreases on all platforms.
• The M5K is one of the most used PDWs now.
• I combined the XBOW data, but if anyone was wondering XBOW is 4x more used than Scoped XBOW
• The UMP buff increased it’s usage on all platforms
• The PP19 and PDWR saw the biggest PDW decreases across all platforms, giving their share over to the M5K

How did the new weapons fare compared to each other?

Notable cross platform observations:

• M5K and MTAR most popular on PS3
• The new Sniper Rifles most popular on PC
• The LSAT and XBOW pretty much completely irrelevant.