Every number.
tells a story.
A boring ladder shows you who is winning. This shows you why - pulled from the lifetime totals of - active players, mined for the patterns the numbers were quietly keeping to themselves. No deltas. No opinions. Just the whole field, staring back.
The long war
Before we measure a single thing about how these players fight, here's the number that frames all the rest: how long they've been at it. Trace each career back to its first recorded match, and the median player on this ladder has been in the fight for 9.6 years. The shape below holds two crowds - a vast veteran core that never left, and a small, stubborn trickle of fresh recruits still turning up to a game the internet keeps calling dead.
Who everybody actually plays
Share of all merc-time across the population, most-loved to most-ignored. Tap any merc to drop into its full skill ladder - every qualified player ranked by kills per hour, top to bottom. Watch for the trap: the most-played merc is almost never the one the best players call home.
The grind is brutally unequal
The Gini coefficient is how economists measure unfairness - 0 means everyone is equal, 1 means one person owns everything. Run it on hours played and the ladder is brutally lopsided: a tiny core of no-lifers has each sunk thousands of hours, while most players have barely logged a few nights. The red gap below is that unfairness made visible. So the veteran wrecking you isn't normal - they're the rare few who actually live in this game, while most of the board barely registers next to them.
Your kills obey a law from 1938
Benford's Law says that in numbers that grow naturally, the leading digit is a 1 about 30% of the time - not the even odds you'd expect. The reason is the grind: a kill count climbing from 1,000 to 2,000 sits on a 1 far longer than it ever sits on a 9. A mathematician spotted this exact curve in 1938, and auditors still use it to catch faked tax returns and rigged elections, because invented numbers always break it. Thousands of players ground out their kills alone, never comparing notes - yet every total lands right on the line. The ladder passes the cheat test: nobody's numbers are made up.
Set aside the rookies entirely — every player here has 1,000+ hours, and their kills still miss the curve, one of them past half a million. The red dots are the ten that stray furthest. Here is the strange, benign reason a 4,000-hour veteran can break a law the whole ladder obeys.
The meta splits by skill
Each merc's bar is the average ladder RR of the players who main it. The gap is enormous: the sharpest players on the entire board cluster onto the highest-skill-ceiling fraggers, while the crowd-pleasers are held up by the mid-ladder. Honest caveat: this is correlation - strong players gravitate to these mercs; it doesn't mean swapping mains will lift your rank.
Which one are you?
We clustered all - players by the shape of their merc-time - pure machine-learning, no human tags - and it fell into a handful of distinct species. Type your name and the Atlas will pull your dossier: your archetype, your career, the merc you fell for first, and a fingerprint of exactly where you're elite and where you're a tourist.
Archetype
Skill fingerprint / percentile vs population
The apex and the abyss
Split the ladder by raw performance - kills and XP per hour - and look at who the very top and very bottom choose to be. Everyone here has 50+ hours logged, so the bottom group isn't lost newbies; they're players who have put in real time and still struggle. The reveal: the best don't just play better, they play different mercs. The chart shows where each group pours its hours.
Top 3% - the apex
Bottom 3% - the abyss
Why we play what we play
Here is where the numbers cross into psychology. If you had to guess what makes a merc your merc, you'd say the one you win with, the one you're best with, or the one you started on. The data says all three are wrong.
The mastery paradox
Of every pattern in this data, this is the one that stopped us cold - and it may be the most human thing a leaderboard can show you. For every player we found the merc they frag best with, then the merc they actually play the most. They are almost never the same. You don't play your best merc. Almost nobody does.
So are players secretly optimising for something else - XP, maybe - or is this just a low-skill habit the good players grow out of? The data closes both doors.
It isn't secret XP-farming
The best don't grow out of it
So why do we do it?
This isn't laziness or bad decision-making. It's one of the most studied findings in the psychology of motivation, and the ladder just reproduced it by accident. Three forces are pulling your hand.
Being good is only one of three drives
Psychology's leading model of motivation - self-determination theory - finds people are pulled by three needs: competence (being good), autonomy (choosing for yourself), and connection (belonging). A merc you're skilled with feeds only the first. The merc you choose, freely, because it's yours, feeds autonomy - which research links more tightly to lasting enjoyment than raw skill ever does. Playing your "worse" merc isn't irrational; it's feeding a need the scoreboard can't see.
You main an identity, not a kit
People don't pick a loadout, they pick a character to be in the fight: the reckless fragger, the clutch medic, the patient sniper holding the long angle. The choice is a statement about who you are. That's why 9% knowingly main the merc they're worst with - the role fits them even when the numbers don't, and identity beats efficiency almost every time.
Fun lives in the moment, not the result
Enjoyment comes from the texture of play - the rhythm of a reload, the weight of a gadget, the feel of the gun - not the final scoreline. A merc can be more fun while making you measurably less effective, and across 596 players the data shows people will trade away nearly a fifth of their frag rate for that feeling, again and again, without blinking.
The class system nobody designed
Nobody ever labelled these mercs by role. So we let the numbers do it. Plot every merc by how hard it frags (kills per hour) against how much XP it earns per kill - and the entire role hierarchy reassembles itself out of thin air. Medics and engineers float to the top: they earn through healing, reviving and building, not bodies. The pure slayers sink to the bottom. Aura earns 2.4x the XP per kill that Fragger does. The class system was hiding in the stat sheet the whole time.
