#data neuron

you can see here that the default coin count given to newcomers is 1500 coins, which is higher than the average for over a quarter of the players (for some, this is because they’ve historically performed poorly; for others, it’s because they haven’t played very often, or—in pearl’s case—have usually played twitch rivals events, which are six games instead of eight, meaning coin counts will obviously be lower):

smp pvp is a lot different from the kind of pvp you get in events like mcc. in a setting such as the life series, not everyone starts on even footing (e.g. the RNG in last life or the UHC gimmick in secret life), not everyone has the same gear, not everyone is fighting on the same terrain. this is one of the reasons someone like scott tends to do so well in the life series (he’s good at survival) despite being worse at pvp than someone like joel (he’s... not as good at survival 😭). the scott jimmy 1v1 I mentioned from the build battle video is a great demonstration of why having different gear will make all the difference. also a great demonstration of the fact that jimmy is good at pvp, because he was in iron armour whilst scott had full diamond and a netherite sword and jimmy still very nearly won. (this isn’t intended to be a jimmy glazing post sorry but I genuinely cannot help it.) also Also a great demonstration of how important the mental aspect is in pvp—and one of the reasons that scott has historically beaten joel in pvp despite joel being mechanically better—because confidence and risk assessment are both crucial to being Good at pvp.

snow made a proper tier list at some point that I can’t find for the life of me but I’ll do my best to recreate it based on stats and my own memory. the caveats here are that not everyone plays in mcc the same amount (including TCC, scott has played 54 times compared to martyn’s 34, for example) and also pvp in mcc is not directly transferable to pvp in the life series. if it were, joel would win every time and jimmy would never have been first out. not even close to it, actually.

generally you can divide the life series cast into the following groups:

joel: joel

people who are good at pvp: gem, grian, jimmy, martyn, pearl, scott

people who can pvp: impulse, ren, scar

non-pvpers: bdubs, bigb, cleo, etho,** lizzie, mumbo, tango, skizz

but obviously this isn’t set in stone, and it doesn’t mean that nobody from a lower tier could (or has) ever beat someone from a higher tier. I know I usually talk about jimmy when it comes to underrated pvpers but it’s really such a perfect example of how someone can consistently do Fine Actually in events like mcc but then acquire a reputation for being terrible in a more social game-focused setting like the life series.

the smp context also adds other complications. grian had a crazy high kill count for past life, but the majority of those kills were due to the octokill, fall damage from the square hole, or tnt traps—not pvp. meanwhile joel only got one actual kill (on scott in episode 2) the entire season... of course he also had other things going on in his real life so it makes sense. in a fair fight joel would win against anyone in the life series, but the fights are almost never ‘fair’ (which is literally fine. that’s part of the fun of it! if it were only about who’s best at pvp, it wouldn’t be as interesting; it’s a survival series).

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so, the actual mcc stats! there are four pvp games: battle box, meltdown, sky battle, and survival games. for the ‘good at pvp’ group (+ joel), looking at average placements in those four games across all five seasons (pre-TCC):

^these are all really good numbers. obviously joel kinda gaps everyone except in survival games, which is hilarious. jimmy beating scott at battle box and meltdown is so important to me. jimmy beating grian at everything but sky battle is so important to me. the main takeaway here is that these people are all really good.

also, this is across all five seasons, including earlier seasons where certain people (namely joel actually lol) did poorly compared to more recent seasons. if you just look at the two most recent (complete) seasons, the numbers are a bit different. looking at these data is also trickier though because there are fewer overall events and fewer opportunities to play each game. but here’s ONLY s3:

^again, please keep in mind that not all of these games were played in every event, and not everyone played every available event—gem only played survival games once in s3 for example, and obviously placed 10th. pearl only played battle box twice, in mcc scuffed and mcc33, and placed 21st (very reasonable placement for her) and 39th respectively. across all seasons, this wouldn’t drag down her average too much, but when there were only two events she played in that one season, it’s more noticeable.

and here’s ONLY s4:

^this season was wild because what was going on with scott in battle box... actually I do know what was going on and it was kinda joel’s fault actually. anyway joel only played survival games twice all season and placed 39th and 40th. #myflops

if you combine the stats from s3 and s4, you get the following:

gem: battle box 23.4, meltdown 25.15, sky battle 21.2, survival games 18.0

grian: battle box 18.9, meltdown 31.2, sky battle 28.7 [he didn’t play skb in s3 so this one is tricky], survival games 26.3

jimmy: battle box 18.6, meltdown 23.0, sky battle 24.2, survival games 27.0

joel: battle box 12.6, meltdown 16.6, sky battle 20.1, survival games 24.3

martyn: battle box 20.0, meltdown 24.9, sky battle 20.0, survival games 22.3

pearl: battle box 20.5, meltdown 11.0, sky battle 17.5, survival games 16.5

scott: battle box 26.8, meltdown 21.5, sky battle 22.2, survival games 20.7

overall thoughts: joel is on another level in battle box entirely. pearl’s stats are really good; she played meltdown once in s3 (mcc33, 11th) and thrice in s4 (pride ’24, 13th; ender cup, 8th; trsd, 30th), so yeah she really is just that cracked apparently. it means so much to me that jimmy’s battle box stats are higher than everyone else’s except joel’s (he’s good at pvp!!). scott honey what Happened. 😨

...okay that’s a bit unfair of me to say. anything in the 20s (20th->29th) is good; anything in the 10s (10th->19th) is really good; anything 10 or higher (1st->10th) is s-tier pretty much. honestly anything from 1st->15th is s-tier level depending on how highcomp the event is but that’s more complicated and this post is already long enough. joel could be genuinely s-tier if he played more. the rest of them are like a-tier I guess. go ask snow about this if you want to know more!!!!

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now, in the ‘people who can pvp’ tier, it gets even more complicated. remember that these are not comprehensive assessments of someone’s actual abilities, especially because not everyone has played the same number of events. here are the average placements across all five seasons:

^these aren’t bad, for the most part. these are people who can pvp, but aren’t top tier (or joel tier I guess. he’s not a top). remember that mental intimidation and being able to keep a cool head in a mêlée*** situation can make all the difference, especially in smp pvp! ren’s performance in the first two seasons of the life series and ren’s performance in literally any mcc event ever are very different, for instance... maybe if he started doing more roleplay in mcc he’d do better. but I digress.

the non-pvpers:

^these people have all either played only a handful of times or, in the case of bigb and mumbo, never. as you can see, their average placements are a lot lower; again, I really cannot overstate that they have not played enough for me to get an adequate look from just mcc stats what their actual skill levels are. some of these averages seem too high honestly.

again: these are stats from all seasons (pre-TCC), which also feels unfair to, say, etho, who placed 17th overall in builders’ guild; I need him to play in more events soooo bad so I can get a better idea of how much he’s improved. similarly, lizzie isn’t a pvper but she can pvp sometimes and frankly I would put her in the ‘people who can pvp’ tier if she played more and also stopped suicide bombing people instead of killing them normally. I love lizzie actually.

really the mental aspect is soooo important. this is why cleo, despite being objectively kind of terrible at pvp, does reasonably well in the life series. it’s a survival series. pvp skill is not the be-all end-all of success.

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in conclusion:

to return to your original question, to the best of my ability: within the life series it is often a negligible difference between the non-joel pvpers (gem grian jimmy martyn pearl scott). I really do not think I can objectively rank everyone in the ‘good at pvp’ tier, because pvp skill is so variable. within a life series context, you can look at who tends to win in fights, e.g. martyn > scott, gem > pearl, and so on; but even this is questionable because, again, although I would say that jimmy > pearl is probably true, I don’t know if I would say grian > gem is consistently true... it’s complicated. they really are all just very similar.

anyway! I hope this was helpful or at least interesting. I like minecraft pvp and I like statistics, and the difference between smp pvp performance and event pvp placements is something that I find particularly interesting. it’s kinda funny, the mcc stats spreadsheet started as a way to collate data so I had actual hard evidence that jimmy doesn’t suck at pvp. my original page in the spreadsheet still has a lil ticker off to the side noting if he outplaced scott in each event :') but obviously at this point it’s grown into something much more comprehensive.

^for the record I knoooww the mcc wiki (my beloathed) doesn’t count jimmy’s 1st indiv in mccJJ as ‘canon’ and that’s Fine I don’t Care it’s Whatever. scott is so mean to him about it too 😭 the point isn’t that jimmy placed 1st (although that is also very cool), the point is that he outplaced both scott and martyn. that’s the most relevant part to me. they could have placed 38th 39th and 40th and it would still matter that jimmy outplaced both scott and martyn. okay that’s Enough I promise this is not a jimmy glazing post. THE END.

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*only slightly an exaggeration. I played minecraft once for maybe thirty minutes in like 2015 and haven’t touched it since. and the only thing I did was go into creative and place a block at world height and spawn like 500 chickens on it, then break the block so the chickens all fell and exploded outwards. this was obviously foreshadowing my later interests because of, idfk, scott’s chicken bandit prank that made lizzie so mad at him that she crashed the server, or whatever. or chick chance I guess.

**I Don’t Know About This One Actually. etho has been on some kind of insane sweat arc (can we talk about his 17th indiv in mccBG? what the fuck was up with that actually?) but there was so little actual pvp (#AllBoxNoBattle) that it was difficult to get a good idea of his current skillset. he’s somewhere between tiers 3&4 probably. but I genuinely don’t know.

also, to be clear, bot fragging in mcc doesn’t automatically correlate to being treated like shit the way being designated ‘worst’ in the life series does. someone’s always gonna be the bottomfrag on a team; it was scott last mcc, and that wasn’t even the first time he’s been 4th. it wasn’t even the first time in s5. I just want to make sure everybody understands this.

anyway I’m using this as an excuse to talk about mcc stats (SORRY):

I said earlier that jimmy is very good at mcc. he’s good! I’m not actually in scott’s head so I don’t know for sure but I’m guessing (GUESSING) he’s balanced this team as scott > jimmy > oli > pearl just based on their overall stats (the order is variable though. seriously, they’re all so comparable, and scott’s placements keep decreasing each season whilst jimmy’s are mostly consistent, so if they get good teams then it’s only a matter of time—assuming the pattern holds—before jimmy is more frequently outplacing scott**). BUT I DON’T KNOW THIS FOR SURE. SCOTT HAS ACCESS TO INFORMATION I DON’T. there’s nooooo way scott put himself as topfrag in this team... RIGHT? I mean unless he really has been on that pvp sweat arc he talked about after gem and joel decided they were gonna kick his ass next life series season lmfao. I’m not going to complain if scott does really well. I’ll complain A Little Bit if he does better than jimmy but it won’t be the end of the world. I’ll just watch jimmy’s dodgebolt 1v3 for the nth time.

also pearl and oli haven’t played as much (21 and 27 times, respectively), jimmy plays a lot (39 times), scott plays literally all the time (53 times) (unless it’s mcc rising or something), so it’s a bit unfair to compare their stats imo. in a perfect world everyone would play every single event ever so I wouldn’t go all shy when trying to say shit like ‘jimmy is better at pvp games than scott is.’ I mean HE IS just based on the data (he consistently places higher than scott, and has a higher average indiv across seasons), but obviously that doesn’t translate into the life series, so ?? it’s complicated.

like okay this is so off-topic at this point but whatever. here’s some stuff I’ve been working on (this is just raw data for average per-game placements across all five seasons) (AS OF BG):

(martyn and joel are here as rebounds for comparison purposes)

and yeah obviously JIMMY OUTPLACING SCOTT IN BB AND MD IKTR 🥳🥳🥳 but also the raw data don’t really give you a wholly accurate idea of mechanical ability because they haven’t played every game the same amount of times. ‘wow jimmy’s cracked at foot race’ literally what the fuck is foot race. he played it four times in s1 (mcc1, mcc2, mcc3, mcc6) and did really well (3rd->13th->5th->19th) but this means nothing about his current ability to play a game that he hasn’t played since mcc6. scott played foot race the exact same amount of times in the same events in s1 and did really well also (6th->12th->13th->26th), but again this means nothing about their current abilities. also jimmy isn’t even bad at survival games, my god, 22nd compared to 19th is really fucking similar when you’re in that range. also what doing all this data analysis has taught me is that joel is fucking insane at mcc

okay. what was I talking about. right! pearl and oli. I haven’t done a detailed breakdown of oli’s mcc stats, but I’ve done pearl’s. her average indiv is 24th, and per season it’s 25th (s1), 24th (s2), 26th (s3), 16th (s4), and she hasn’t played in s5 yet. (notable also is the fact that she only played twice in s3 and thrice in s4, so it’s more complicated to get an accurate picture of her actual ability. I feel more confident talking about scott’s or jimmy’s skill levels because they play in mcc a whole fucking lot.)

just based on a general overview of the stats: oli’s overall average indiv is also 24th (again: this is lower than jimmy’s. if we were team balancing purely based on overall average placements then it would be scott > jimmy > pearloli). per season (take my calculations with a grain of salt here, I did these in like five seconds) his average indivs were 31st (s1), 28th (s2), 16th (s3), 22nd (s4), and 20th (s5 so far).

I COULD BE WRONG ABOUT HIS CURRENT SKILLSET THOUGH. OLI THEORIONSOUND TOPFRAG MCC TCC AND BE REINCARNATED AS A LOTUS FLOWER.

the real point here is that these four are all pretty comparable. there are no s-tiers and no flops on this team. it’s not like scott put himself and jimmy on a team with ren and shane or something (hilarious concept though and I lowkey want this to happen). it’s just a copy of last team: instead of scott + his side piece + jimmy + token woman, it’s jimmy + his side piece** + scott + token woman. this is kinda uncharitable to jojo and pearl (jojo absolutely carried that team in mcc BG and placed 7th, she’s cracked, nothing but support for jojo here). barring something crazy, I expect they’ll do pretty similarly to the previous team. I’m not actually too worried about it. BUT AGAIN I COULD BE ENTIRELY OFF THE MARK HERE SO DON’T LISTEN TO ME ABOUT ANYTHING ACTUALLY I’VE NEVER PLAYED MINECRAFT IN MY LIFE

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*I say this with nothing but respect and admiration. I think oli’s default state is being someone’s side piece. I think he’d be more offended if I called him someone’s main piece, honestly. that man thrives when he’s the third (or fourth) in a dynamic.

**like okay in s5 so far scott’s avg indiv is 23rd and jimmy’s is 27th, but that’s only from four (for scott) or three (for jimmy) events, and individually it’s 19 (BC)->23 (CTW)->22 (P25)->28 (BG) for scott and 25 (BC)->28 (CTW)->27 (BG) for jimmy. you could say that scott consistently placed in the upper 20s range and jimmy in the lower 20s range and that would be fine imo. they’re in the same tier, is my point, and there are some places (PVP GAMES) where jimmy consistently does better and some places (survival games lmfao) where scott consistently does better.

jimmy has (so far) outplaced grian multiple times every season they’ve both participated:

in s1 jimmy outplaced grian in mcc6 (20th vs 24th), mcc9 (27th vs 30th), and mcc12 (24th vs 25th).

in s2 jimmy outplaced grian in mcc14 (20th vs 24th), pride ’21 (14th vs 18th), mcc18 (24th vs 27th), and mcc22 (18th vs 23rd).

in s3 jimmy outplaced grian in party1 (15th vs 18th).

in s4 jimmy outplaced grian in mcc ec (11th vs 22nd), and party 2 (22nd vs 23rd).

in s5 grian hasn’t played yet.

important to remember as well is that they haven’t actually played all that many events together: in s1 it was 5 (so jimmy outplaced 3/5 times), in s2 it was 11 (4/11 times), in s3 it was 2 (1/2 times), in s4 it was 2 (2/2 times). that means jimmy has outplaced grian a total of 10/20 times, and vice versa.

their average indivs per season also keep going back and forth: in s1 jimmy’s (19.0) was higher than grian’s (23.3); in s2 grian’s (21.1) was higher than jimmy’s (26.0); in s3 grian’s (19.0) was higher than jimmy’s (23.0); in s4 jimmy’s (19.0) was higher than grian’s (21.3).

s5 isn’t technically over yet so it feels a bit unfair to do any kind of real analysis with everyone’s s5 stats. instead there’s s4 (s3 included for comparison):

^idk what jimmy was on during s4 but can he bring it back please***!! I’ve also included the average indivs for some of the other people whose stats I’ve been looking at, for comparison purposes. what a delightful season really.

if you calculate indivs like the mcc wiki does, then scott and jimmy actually have the same average (19th) for s4, which makes me feel weak in the knees icl. that’s not even how I calculate indivs, but still!!

s4 is also the first season where scott got zero top10 placements 💔 and his 37th indiv in haunted hoedown dragged down his overall stats A Lot. I’ve mentioned before that scott’s average indivs are decreasing by season, which is true (12.8->16.8->17.6->18.6->23.0), but not automatically correlative of his getting worse. he was fine in s4. it’s s5 where he needs to lock in and stop distracting himself by randomly threatening people during events.

joel continued on his sweat arc (from 21.1 in s1->15.2 in s2->12.1 in s3->10.4 in s4); his lowest placement in s4 was his 17th in ender cup, and he ended with placing 5th in party2, thus kicking off a trend (his average indiv for s5 is 5.0 so far).

pearl and martyn each only played thrice (out of a total of seven possible events—obviously none of these people are playing in mccr3 lol) but did very well in s4! pearl’s average indivs by season are 25.3->23.9->26.0->16.3 (she hasn’t played in s5 so far), and martyn’s are 18.9->19.2->12.7->15.0->20.5 (in s5 so far).

grian also only played thrice (ender cup, haunted hoedown, and party2) and placed 22nd->19th->23rd, so a pretty consistent showing in s4 imo.

s4 was a really strong season for oli (although nothing compared to his absolutely legendary 15.7 average indiv in s3?? again idk what he was doing in s3 but can he bring it back Please).

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*it’s NOT inevitable it’s NOT 😭 he’s held his own against grian’s targeting before!! it’s just, well. grian’s apparently been on some kind of insane sweat arc recently, and he’s said he’s specifically going to target jimmy, and jimmy’s said he’s specifically going to target grian, and that combination rarely ends well.

**caveat that this is only looking at average placements... at some point I should do a more detailed breakdown looking at their respective performances in each game, but that’s a lot more complicated, and also snow already did it. as always: please feel free to double-check my calculations and let me know if you spot any mistakes or anything I’ve missed. I’ve made stupid mistakes before and I’m sure I will again.