I woke up today to a lot of Enlightened players feeling cheated out of a win in Chicago. Please let me first start with a congratulation to Resistance for the win even if some of my fellow Enlightened players will find this hard to swallow. I had the time to look closer into the score. Hank and the bus played a role – but numerically that role might have been smaller as you assumed.
I start with a graph displaying the score across the different measurement points.
This graph pretty much explains why ENL feels robbed. Enlightened seems in clear control. Especially as Niantic only reported after measurement point 3 and somewhere between points 5 and 7.
In my view the dominance in the graph was deceiving and ENL lost it at measurements 3 and 8. You might disagree with this statement – but let me explain why I think this is when ENL lost against RES. For this I need to go deeper into the individual scores.
I start with the battle score:
| measurement | Enlightened_raw | Resistance_raw | ENL Score | RES Score |
| capture_battle_1 | 325 | 74 | 81.45 | 18.55 |
| capture_battle_2 | 246 | 158 | 67.29 | 32.71 |
| capture_battle_3 | 314 | 96 | 67.29 | 32.71 |
| capture_battle_4 | 343 | 65 | 68.46 | 31.54 |
| capture_battle_5 | 235 | 159 | 68.33 | 31.67 |
| capture_battle_6 | 289 | 118 | 68.33 | 31.67 |
| capture_battle_7 | 284 | 112 | 68.33 | 31.67 |
| capture_battle_8 | 160 | 205 | 62.59 | 37.41 |
| capture_battle_9 | 267 | 118 | 62.59 | 37.41 |
Enlightened had a great start and dominated the play box throughout the game. RES did manage a fight back at measurement point 2 and 5 but these would have been not enough to win. ENL did increase their score at measurement point 4 – but that was not enough. This was a swing of 2.3 points (+1.15 ENL / -1.15 RES). ENL would have needed a further 1.5 points. Something very, very difficult to do if you dominate already as the options for more portals are limited.
RES did a third and final fight back at measurement point 8. I assume this is when they used the Lens. This resulted in a swing of 11.5 points towards RES. It doesn’t look a lot in the graph. But it allowed RES to come from behind.
I don’t think ENL could have done much more without a lens of their own. The battle score is highly dependent on numbers at the anomaly. Without knowing these I can’t tell how well either team did.
This leads to the shard score.
| measurement | Enlightened_raw | Resistance_raw | ENL Score | RES Score |
| shard_battle_1 | 21 | 0 | 100 | 0 |
| shard_battle_2 | 13 | 3 | 87.5 | 12.5 |
| shard_battle_3 | 4 | 7 | 75 | 25 |
| shard_battle_4 | 3 | 0 | 75 | 25 |
| shard_battle_5 | 2 | 4 | 75 | 25 |
| shard_battle_6 | 3 | 5 | 75 | 25 |
| shard_battle_7 | 7 | 3 | 75 | 25 |
| shard_battle_8 | 2 | 2 | 75 | 25 |
| shard_battle_9 | 8 | 3 | 75 | 25 |
Enlightened had the perfect start. Controlling the play box does help for the shards. ENL would have need 2 more in the end to have won. This could have only happened in at the first measurement and I don’t think much more would have been possible.
ENL used the journal to know ahead of M1 where the shards would appear. This enabled them to gain 21 shards at the end of M1. There second best score was 13. The 13 would represent a score of 65/35 – so the journal represented up to a net +10 points for the score or a swing of 20 points in favour of ENL.
Resistance managed a swing of +25 points (ENL -12.5 / RES +12.5) at measurement point 3. This is surprising as this coincides with the 4th worse battle score. Luck / strategy / combination of both? I wasn’t there – so can’t tell. But just a single shard less at this measurement point would have resulted in a swing of 5.5 points less and resulted in an ENL win. So in my view this was the moment that RES laid the foundation for the later win. Without this one score of 7 they would have been too far behind.
This leads us to the artefact score. This score only gets revealed after the game
| Score | ENL | RES |
| Artefact raw | 5.13 | 6.69 |
| Artefact Score | 43.40 | 56.60 |
The artefact score represents a swing towards RES of 13.2 points. This truly helped Resistance to win. So how did Enlightened do? They increased their average raw score from Kaohsiung and Amsterdam by 0.65. They would have needed a further 0.33 or a raw score of 5.46 to win. This is one third of a media in addition for each agents in the field. Taking into account that Resistance managed a raw score of 5.78 (without Hank) in Kaohsiung this might have been the best chance for Enlightened to win it. Keep in mind – Hank must have been close to ENL at times as well and should have helped the ENL score as well – even if only by a little.
Driving around Hank in a car (he was changing portals in a 100 m radius to spawn media) and following in a bus caused a lot of bad blood between the two factions. I try to avoid a judgement if it was an ingenious way to use Hank or if it was against the spirit of the game. I just look at the numbers. Using the average RES scores as benchmark the bus + Hank resulted in a swing of 15.5 points towards RES. If I use the previous best score of 5.78 from Kaohsiung then the swing is just 7.2 points.
To me this is surprisingly little. Hank always should have given Resistance the advantage for the artefact score. But the advantage was either smaller then I expected or the bus wasn’t helping as much as we might think?
This leaves the last score – the Unique hack score.
| Hack Score | ENL | RES |
| Average Portals | 65.39 | 84.86 |
| Score | 0 | 65 |
The unique portals hacked score is an all or nothing. It represents a large swing of 65 points towards one team. The ENL score of 65 is the 8th best out of 18 anomalies. ENL did manage twice to score above 84.86. Auckland with an impressive 100.65 and Nuremberg with 87.86. And they were close in Bristol.
Resistance only had a higher score once – Las Vegas with 87.97.
So was it the bus?
In my view the answer is no. A score of 65 would have been only high enough to win this score during a single anomaly (out of 8) since the second lens started – Ho Chi Minh City. And RES had a pretty comfortable lead of 19.47 more portals hacked. In my view the bus was responsible for most of this lead – but not for the win itself.
All of this is a couch analysis of me sitting comfortably behind my computer screen without having been at the anomaly. I might be wrong in some aspects as I haven’t been in Chicago. But many players today voiced their suprise – how was it possible for RES to win. I hope this helps a little bit for everyone to understand how the scores worked.