The Interceptor has arrived; how is it faring in the competitive metagame?

The following is my most recent blog post over at BayStats (there's an update about the website at the end!)

For the first time in the game's history, a new ship has been added to Battle Bay. Seeing as how we're moving from five ships to six, this has the potential to shake the meta in ways we've never seen before.

However, if any such "shake" has occurred yet, it's been relatively suppressed. Over the past few days, the Interceptor's use rate in the Nightmare League has been stabilizing around 4%, which is in 5th place - just above Defender.

That's certainly not bad, given that many players may not yet have had enough of a chance to sufficiently upgrade their Interceptors. But during the Interceptor CTF Event, we saw a peak Interceptor use rate of 12.4%, which means that roughly two-thirds of the players who had unlocked it have since shelved it for regular elimination play. While it's impossible to tell how much of that drop is a direct result of underleveled Interceptors, it's also giving us some sort of a window into the overall "balanced-ness" of the brand-new ship.

In order to maintain relative balance within the realm of ships, 5th place out of 6 is probably the perfect place for the Interceptor to land after its first few weeks of availability. Given the consistent amount of usage that it's currently seeing in Nightmare League, it's almost certainly a competitively viable ship - and I'll bet that, after a couple more opportunities for players to collect ship pieces, it'll find itself hovering around 2nd or 3rd place.

In terms of weapons, the Interceptor's presence hasn't exactly revolutionized any offensive strategies - rather, it has strengthened the existing Fire-Cannon meta. Explosive Cannon and Blast Cannon remain extremely popular choices for weapons, and are constantly being trailed by Flare Gun. Fire Bomb still stands as the number one choice for a mortar-style weapon by a very large margin. Most notably, Grenade Launcher has found a home as the most popular weapon for Interceptors, bringing it to the impressive position of 2nd-most-popular weapon. Meanwhile, the rest of the mortar family, finding no new targets in Interceptor players, continue to occupy the bottom of the usage charts, alongside the poor Gatling Gun.

What about yellow items? Nitro has seen a healthy boost in usage recently, in part due to the fact that virtually every Interceptor player has chosen to use it for their single yellow slot. It also helps that, with the reinforced presence of fast-moving cannon projectiles and grenades, players are valuing more the ability to quickly jump away from incoming threats.

I have no doubt that more trends and insights will present themselves in the future as the Interceptor is given more time to settle!

Bonus: BayStats Website Update!

If you've been paying very close attention lately, you'll notice that I've been regularly mentioning usage-over-time charts, and how they'll be on the website soon. You'll also notice that I've been saying that for months now. Don't worry, I promise that we will have historical usage charts within the next week! I've been holding off on releasing this new feature because I want to release it alongside another new feature that I'm excited about - the "Popular Loadouts" page!

Basically, the "Popular Loadouts" page will be a fourth page of stats that list frequently re-occurring combinations of red, yellow, blue, and green items for each of the six ships. For example, in the latest snapshot, 33% of Speeders ran an Explosive Cannon/Flare Gun combo... 64% of Speeders ran a yellow-item set consisting of Nitro + Overboost + Tesla Shield... and 76% of Speeders ran a blue-item set of Big Shield + Turbo + Bandage!

 

I think because Interceptor is still new, the first builds are likely to be a bit ‘derivative’ of what we already know. The natural impulse seems to be, to take what works on Speeder/Enforcer and just do more of that. So Flare/Grenade and as many Blasts and ECs as you can fit.

Over time, however, I think we might see interceptor develop a bit more of a personality of its own.

While it threatened to be a close combat beast, with all those red slots, and speed. I think Enforcer still has the edge there, with much better utility.

I have a feeling that Interceptor might prove best suited to ‘crowd control’ builds, running things like Torps, Napalm and FB, and using its speed to reposition quickly, rather than as a head-on assault ship.

 

Thanks for upkeeping your bbstats website. Hope you keep it up

 

I think in-game should already calculate the stats already for everyone’s convenience. But I guess such inaccessiblilty allows fans to make their own website!

 

It's far to early to evaluate it's use. Unless a player spent hundreds of dollars and no-lifed the event, they won't have an Interceptor equivalent to the rest of their boats.

 

Remember that we’re not evaluating the ship’s usage across all of Battle Bay - only in Nightmare League. And if there’s any group of players who have the time and money at their disposal to grind out the Interceptor... that’s the group.

I’m not treating the Interceptor like it’s peaked in usage - my post is simply speculating, based on what we can see right now, what kind of a future it has.