Criminally Vulgar

It's hard to express how much I hate this plot from this otherwise enjoyable video.

There's just so much junk on the chart:

• The trends mean nothing unless you want to imply that before the change things were already trending towards upwards towards what would become "the post-QI normal". Why would it be upward initially, then downward/flat after? Did Scrabble stop improving suddenly? Or maybe...
• The sample is fucking tiny. You have thousands of matches over decades well recorded. Why are you only looking at weekly averages for a single year?
• Using the simple uncertainty calculation built into ggplot really oversells the confidence of the trend - 20+ point variations week-on-week make a <3pt uncertainty academic at best.
• There are clear high-leverage outliers in the data, which obscure the real story when you focus on means and trends - adding QI to the dictionary made it less likely for players to get shafted by bad luck - it made it a more consistent game, rather than a simply higher scoring one. Bulk averages are far less interesting than the distribution - which the plot could be highlighting with the exact same data.

Par for the course with 538, I know, but still annoying to see it referenced elsewhere.

Rocket League started a new season recently, and Psyonix included an update to the ranking system that, put simply, attempted to redress the ranking drift that had happened over the last few years leading to inflated and deflated ranks in 2v2 and 1v1 respectively. It's well explained by NorthstarUK here.

It's been a controversial move, but I put together some plots from the published data from Psyonix around rank distributions in different modes (reddit post here), and they pretty clearly show how imbalanced the ranks have got over, with D1+ ballooning in 2v2 recently, and collapsing in 1v1.

It feels terrible to suddenly be 2 ranks lower than you were last season when you feel like you're playing well, and Pysonix clearly needed to communicate this better (it was only mentioned after the fact in patch notes), but I hope this shows how necessary something like this was.

And I say this as a hardstuck Champ.