Hey Tankers! Interesting day today, where posting this cat meme turned into several lengthy explanations about what's a Unicum and the various player ratings... But first, the offending cat meme...
WN8 Explained
WN8 is the most popular player rating system. Basically the team behind WN8 data-mines information from players globally to determine "expected" values for every tank for metrics such as damage per battle, kills per battle, winrate, initial spots and base defense points.
The WN8 value is supposed to be a determination of the players skill based on how far their performance deviates from these expected values. Because each tank has their own set of expected values, your WN8 won't suffer from driving an absolute lemon of a tank because the measure compares to how everyone else performs in it. The equation to determine WN8 weights damage and kills more heavily than other factors
Where WN8 is probably a less reliable metric is that focussing on damage and kills makes it somewhat unrepresentative for some classes like LT's for which damage and kills should be a secondary priority. It also doesn't consider the intangible effects a player has on the battle, such as initiating/leading a successful push in battle but dying in the process.
As data-mining continues, the expected values feeding WN8 will shift and change over time, particularly as different tanks are rebalanced or the meta changes. As such your WN8 can change without playing the tank if your historical performance is better or worse than the efforts of more recent players in the tank.
For some tanks however, these expected values are still influenced by figures obtained from a pre-nerf configuration. For example in the SU-26 Tier III Soviet SPG, WN8 thinks you need to cause: - 280 damage per game to be Average (Top-52%) - 440 damage per game to be Good (Top-48%)
- 700 damage per game to be Great (Top-56%) - 850 damage per game to be Unicum (Top-60%)
But according to the WoT Player Ratings, the #1 players in the SU-26 on ANZ/HK from the last 6 months averaged 530 damage per battle. This tells us that the WN8 figures are still heavily based on the SU-26 prior to v0.86 when it had the powerful 122mm gun instead of the current 76mm "Popcorn Catapult of Doom"
What's a Unicum?
Quick answer:
Something I'm definitely not!
Long answer:
It's short for "Unicorn Cum", if the inference being that they're really good players but also really rare, likely Unicorn Cum. For a tangible statistical translation, if you ask WoTLabs.net, they represent the top 0.1% of players with winrates exceeding 60% and average WN8's exceeding 2450.
Explaining the original joke a little further, a 60% winrate and high player efficiency can be achieved by consistently playing well in lower tiers on the ANZ Server. Wandering bots allow one to achieve high damage scores and a course of many games leads to training highly-skilled crews, which can outspot and outgun human opponents with impunity.
As stated earlier, WN8's are determined by analysis of "expected values" drawn from the battle results of the global pool of players, most of whom are humans fighting other humans on the EU/NA/RU Servers. With less humans to fight and bots to farm at Tiers I-V, players on the ANZ server have the potential to utterly smash these globally-calibrated WN8 expected values. Hence, it is not uncommon for unicums or blunicums to be made so by the virtue of their actions at lower tiers on the ANZ Server.
Personal Rating (PR) Explained
Personal Rating (PR) is the original scale used by Wargaming to evaluate overall player performance, which takes into account: - Total battles played - Winrate - % of Battles Survived - Average damage and XP over ALL battles - Total battles played since v0.88 - Total assisted damage since v0.88
(Post-v0.88 stats benchmarked as I suspect that's when they started keeping records beyond just damage and XP and collected stats on assisted damage as well. I think that's also when they introduced XP bonuses for Premium Tanks, which are not counted for PR)
In theory you can achieve an increased PR just by having played a metric crapton of battles, particularly at higher tiers. If you focus on lower tiers, your potential Damage/XP is lower than a higher tier battle whereas you could collect several battles worth of low-tier damage with a single well-placed HESH round from a Conway or FV4005 Stage II. If most of your battles are at Tier 7 on average, then you can also expect your PR to decline temporarily if you drop back to Tier 1 to start a new line grind.
The trouble with PR is that it's a global statistic, and doesn't really speak as to how a player performs in individual tanks and classes. With reference to the PR equation below, it also makes the assumption that a player becomes more skilled just by playing more battles. For example, a player with 20K battles has the battlefield inputs of their PR multipled by 39, whereas a player with 5K battles has their battlefield PR inputs multiplied by just 23 (see [bc^0.37] at the front end of the formula).
Like all personal statistics in World of Tanks, it needs to be taken into context.
Finally, World of Tanks Rating (WTR) Explained
WTR which is another metric conceived more recently by Wargaming. It will eventually replace PR completely as the official personal statistic metric.
Unfortunately WTR lacks transparency as to how it's calculated. On face value it appears to be superior to WN8 as since it is fed by more contemporary "expected values" and also assigns weighting to different aspects of vehicle performance based on the vehicles' battlefield role.
Tailored weighting based on the battlefield role means you're not judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree, while reliance on recent performance inputs to rate players means your WTR won't be poor today as a result of the tank being OP in the past, as in the case of our SU-26.
