Probably last chart til the update. I think the below shows what’s been happening to Naval over the time of the last update.
Quick recap: in late January, the naval matchmaker was changed to force 16v16 matches, with bots filling in for human players in both modes. In March, the Hornet’s Sting update changed AB aiming significantly, and also greatly increased the amount of SL earned by killing bots.
Statshark allows us to compare the naval AB and RB modes before and after the March changes.
As we know (see charts in OP), the majority of high-tier naval games are either a match BR of 5.7 or a match BR of 7.0. Splitting up the player data into those BRs allows us an apples-to-apples comparison between mid-tier (4.7-5.7) and high tier (6.0-7.0) play.
Subtracting all player deaths from all naval kills gives us an upper bound for how many bot deaths there were (upper bound because lower-tier ships brought up into these tiers would also be counted). Adding these to the human spawns gives us a minimum number of ship spawns (not counting bots or lowtier surface combatants who survived). This allows us to give an upper bound to the number of bots in matches (max %nonhuman). Dividing Min Ship Spawns by days in the month and 32-ships per match, 3-spawns per match gives us an absolute minimum of the number of games that were played in this mode and BR range in this month (min games/d). The actual number is larger than this, but it allows comparison. I also added a column for the % of kills by ships at this BR that were air kills, K/D, Deaths/spawn (D/Spawn), botkills/death (botkills/D), human kills/death (“Human” K/D"), and human kills/death with planes removed (Hship K/D)
A couple obvious conclusions:
*RB is still more botted than AB, but not by much, at top tier it’s basically the same amount now
*Gaijin bots are more common at higher tiers
*Loss in games played due to the Hornets Sting changes has been in midtiers in both modes and AB high tier, only RB high tier has been unaffected by the drop off in players
*Drop in the number of air players is more pronounced in AB than in RB at both mid and high tiers. Because the number of bots hasn’t changed, as much, that means its human players playing less air vehicles than before.
*RB is superior to AB in terms of both ship survival (deaths per spawn) and kills per game at both mid and high tiers (and hence likely SL and RP earnings even before better multipliers are factored in), probably attributable to the greater number of bots
*AB at 5.7, an average ship life will net <1 bot kill (botkill/D), and about half as much as toptier AB. Bot kills/death for RB at both 5.7 and 7.0 are significantly higher. The amount of humans killing humans (“human” K/D) is sufficiently closer, especially if you factor out the Air kills (“Hship K/D”), basically a little above the parity you’d expect overall in the system (the remaining residual presumably being mostly the general fuzziness introduced by the smaller numbers of lower-tier matches within the brackets)
*Human K/D vs bots in AB actually got WORSE with the new simplified aiming system, even not counting for the decline of air play