The Valentine's Duel marked the 35th Duel in league history, if you can believe it. That's a nice round number to prompt some character analysis.
I decided to see what it would look like if you stacked up each character's individual finishes, in descending order, and compared them to each other. That would give you 35 "rounds" with a numerical value of 1 (win) through 12 (last). Is there anything we can learn by comparing character finishes this way?
Click on the chart above to expand its size. The x-axis represents the number of Duels played (35) while the y-axis represents their best order of finish. Some things begin to stand out immediately. That brown/orange line that tends to stay at the bottom of the group? That's Jango Fett. Through the first 15 rounds (games) he's no worse than a third place finish. Throuh 19 rounds he's no worse than fourth. 25 rounds? He's still a top six finish. As you can imagine, he holds or shares the leads from rounds 6 through 27. That's nothing short of incredible, and a clear indication as to why he's the top ranked character.
There's another way to look at this too. Who are the best and worst characters through all 35 rounds? That's harder to see on the graph since so many of the 12 lines intersect. Check this out:
Again, you can click on the image above to get a better view of the data, but the chart is simple. If your box is highlighted green, it means you lead or are tied for the lead with the best finish in that round. If your box is red, it means you have the worst (or tied for worst) finish after that round.
Right away you can see Luke's career goose egg for victories hurt him in this graph. It takes him until round five to get out of the red. After that, though, you can see he's a pretty average character, even sharing a lead in four subsequent rounds. Darth Vader has a pretty line. He leads through six rounds and then leads again in rounds 26 through 30. In fact, he has the second fewest red bars of the 12 characters.
Who has the fewest red bars? That would be Mace Windu...with zero! That's right. While eight characters have finished last at least three times, Mace never has, with three 11th place finishes his worst performances. That's outstanding over 35 Duels.
Who has the fewest green bars? Emperor Palpatine, with 1. He's a middle-ranked character who, unsurprisingly, finishes in the middle of the pack a lot of the time. In rounds 8 through 28 he had no color at all. Another interesting snapshot is Obi-Wan Kenobi. He's tied for the career lead with victories and has the longest uninterrupted green bar streak through seven rounds, but he falls off a cliff starting in the ninth round.
What stands out to you in the charts above? Talk about it in the comments below!
