Temporal Distortion and Anomalous Agility Barrier Conjuration (Edited, see my final comment below in this thread).
Most noticeable discovery:
The goddess has the ability to discern some traits of mortals that are not captured by the yes/no sorting system, and particularly likes to give Enlightenment to very impressive people who are already likely to win. It’s not a very useful trait at all, but she gives it out to people who are probably going to win anyway. Radiant Palace and Uncanny Luck might also show the same effect.
Comments on my approach so far:
The dataset is large enough that we can restrict ourselves to only people who have the exact same traits we do and still have a reasonably-sized dataset, so I did that and ignored everyone else. When we sort by pairs of traits, we can see which pairs of traits lead to good winrates.
The existence of the Chaos Deity lets us use that subset as a control, and check for which trait pairs have good winrates when picked by the goddess but not when picked by Chaos. This most noticeably flags Enlightenment as one we don’t want to bring.
After getting rid of Enlightenment, and requiring that the Chaos Deity heroes with these traits also do well, we’re left with definitely taking Temporal Distortion and then a lot of very close picks for our other power—Anomalous Agility, Barrier Conjuration, Monstrous Regeneration, and Mind Palace all look like solid choices there. Anomalous Agility is closest to the top, but if I have time for further analysis my main goal will be trying to figure out what distinguishes these and seeing if I can make the pick between them more accurate.
I spent a while messing around in hopes I could boil things down to a simple underlying structure, but with no real success:
The two best starts I found to an approach were:
Barriers/Monstrous Strength both work very well with a Dark Side but work very poorly with one another. This suggests some possibility where e.g. there are two different types of challenge, and Barriers/Monstrous Strength both protect against one (defending against Demon Assassins?) while a Dark Side protects against the other (building your own power base?)
Nerds with Temporal Distortion do very well. This could suggest some kind of attribute system where Temporal Distortion gives e.g. a larger bonus the higher your INT is (to think out neat things to do with it?) and Nerds have high INT.
Sadly further digging seemed to falsify most of my pretty ideas:
A Hypercompetent Dark Side also works well with Anomalous Agility and badly with Radiant Splendour and Uncanny Luck, but those aren’t consistent with the two-different-challenges theory: Monstrous Strength/Anomalous Agility work acceptably well together even though they should be pointed at the same challenge, and Uncanny Luck does not work particularly well with the things a Dark Side works with.
Hikkikomori do very badly with Mind Palace and very well with Radiant Splendor, which could suggest some kind of CHA-based effect. However, no other characteristics show e.g. the opposite effect—if Sociopaths showed the reverse effect, I’d strongly update to ‘Sociopaths have high CHA and Hikkikomori have low CHA,’ but that didn’t occur. Office Workers do benefit more from Mind Palace, but don’t show the reverse effect anywhere else.
In fact, ‘Sociopath’ doesn’t seem to have any interesting interactions with anything, making me wonder if the angel’s classification of Sociopaths is not very good.
Update with slight current progress towards general ideas:
There are three-and-a-half categories of power:
Anomalous Agility, Barrier Conjuration and Monstrous Regeneration are ‘Combat’ powers
Hypercompetent Dark Side, Rapid XP Gain, Shapeshifting, and Temporal Distortion are ‘Utility’ powers.
Enlightenment, Radiant Splendor and Uncanny Luck are ‘Mental’ powers.
Mind Palace, based on its name, should be a Mental power, but it doesn’t behave at all like the other Mental powers and does its own strange thing.
Having one Combat plus one Utility power is generally a good idea—any such pairing combines better than its two parts work individually.
Having two Combat or two Utility powers is not terrible, but generally less good than one of each.
Mental powers behave strangely, with some very strong interactions for no reason I’ve fully discerned. They seem in general to be weak but be given to/chosen by strong heroes. They might work well with Mind Palace or with one another.
Hypercompetent Dark Side is the most Utility of all the Utility powers: it shows the same kind of interaction effects as other Utility powers (good with Combat and bad with Mental) but to a greater extent.
Nerds, Otaku and particularly Hikkikomori do well with a Combat power, while Office Workers and Sociopaths do not. Perhaps there is a ‘Physical’ stat with diminishing returns, that stat is increased by any Combat power, and Nerds/Otaku/particularly Hikkikomori stay inside a lot and have a lower Physcial stat and more need for a power boosting it?
Hikkikomori do well with most Mental powers but badly with Mind Palace, while Office Workers do well with Mind Palace but badly with anything else. Perhaps there is a ‘Social’ stat with diminishing returns, Office workers have high Social while Hikkikomori have low Social, and most Mental powers boost Social while Mind Palace instead lets you use Social for something else?
While most pairs of Combat powers work badly together, Anomalous Agility/Monstrous Regeneration work acceptably well together. Perhaps this is why the Eldritch Abomination wanted those two?
Mind Palace’s strange behavior is exclusively an artefact of its very strong negative relationship with Hikkikomori. When we filter out all Hikkikomori and repeat the analysis, it becomes clear that Mind Palace is in fact another Utility power, behaving similarly to the other Utility powers. Doing this also makes it appear that, in the absence of Hikkomori weirdness, Mental powers work well with one another, and the two generally-good strategies are ‘one Utility and one Physical power’ or ‘two Mental powers’. Office Workers’ apparent good synergy with Mind Palace was an artefact of Office Workers being less likely to be Hikkikomori.
I’m unlikely to put in much more time, so my presumably-final answer and a summary of findings for the goddess:
My powers: Temporal Distortion and Barrier Conjuration
(I see very little to choose between the three physical powers for my second choice. Agility has a n=20 sample of people exactly like us vaguely suggesting it might be better for us, Barrier Conjuration has a smaller effect in a larger sample vaguely suggesting it might be good for non-Sociopaths. Since some other people have done Temporal + Agility I’m letting hipster-ism steer me to picking something different. Monstrous Regeneration is also an equally-good pick, but has no real evidence towards being better, and if it involves getting hit and then regenerating rather than not getting hit it might be much more painful.)
Key takeways for the Goddess:
Anomalous Agility, Barrier Conjuration and Monstrous Regeneration are Defense powers. Never give someone more than one of these.
Enlightenment, Radiant Splendor and Uncanny Luck are Mental powers. These tend not to be very good, but Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor work extremely well together for a subset of people (the subset is not readily identifiable by your Angel’s trait system, but may be discoverable with more work). That subset of people already tend to choose to take them/you choose to give them. Keep giving Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor to anyone who you would have given it to before, but don’t try to spread it more broadly.
All other powers are Utility powers. Most heroes should take one Utility power and one Defense power.
When picking out Utility powers, you can do this based on personality classification (ask your Angel for his list of traits):
Nerds do well with Temporal Distortion. They should take Temporal Distortion plus a Defense power of their choice.
Sociopaths and Otaku do well with Shapeshifting. They should take Shapeshifting plus a Defense power of their choice.
Someone who is both a Nerd and a Sociopath/Otaku can either take both Shapeshifting and Temporal Distortion, or take one of those plus a Defense power, both seem okay.
Hikkikomori do appallingly badly with Mind Palace. Never let a Hikkikomori take Mind Palace.
Hypercompetent Dark Side does poorly with Enlightenment or Radiant Splendor—this shouldn’t matter if you’re following the ‘one Utility and one Defense’ plan, but keep it in mind if people request something else.
If you found this information helpful, are you hiring? Since it looks like my winrate is probably only 80-90% even with the best-chosen powers, I might prefer a position as your new Data Angel over being a hero, depending on what the benefits are like.
Some additional takeaways for me in my new life:
Otaku do extremely well (~30% better winrate than anyone else). This suggests that this world is going to ‘behave like a story’ in some way, or reward people for acting in story-like ways. Even if I’m not as good as an Otaku at identifying these things, I should try to behave like one. If I see a damsel in distress, I should go try to rescue her and not think too hard about it. Even if it seems like a stupid decision, empirically the Otaku who are likely to do that end up succeeding at extraordinarily high rates.
Temporal Distortion does much better than most powers for Nerds, but much worse than most powers for non-Nerds. It probably requires careful nerdy thought to get the most out of it, I should make experimenting with it a high priority and see if I can figure it out faster than most other Nerds.
The amount of benefit gained from having a single defensive cheat power rather than not having one suggests that I am likely to be at risk of death from early physical attack. Be on the lookout with Barrier Conjuration early on, in case the Demon King can try to assassinate me before I level up.
Current plan:
Temporal Distortion and
Anomalous AgilityBarrier Conjuration (Edited, see my final comment below in this thread).Most noticeable discovery:
The goddess has the ability to discern some traits of mortals that are not captured by the yes/no sorting system, and particularly likes to give Enlightenment to very impressive people who are already likely to win. It’s not a very useful trait at all, but she gives it out to people who are probably going to win anyway. Radiant Palace and Uncanny Luck might also show the same effect.
Comments on my approach so far:
The dataset is large enough that we can restrict ourselves to only people who have the exact same traits we do and still have a reasonably-sized dataset, so I did that and ignored everyone else. When we sort by pairs of traits, we can see which pairs of traits lead to good winrates.
The existence of the Chaos Deity lets us use that subset as a control, and check for which trait pairs have good winrates when picked by the goddess but not when picked by Chaos. This most noticeably flags Enlightenment as one we don’t want to bring.
After getting rid of Enlightenment, and requiring that the Chaos Deity heroes with these traits also do well, we’re left with definitely taking Temporal Distortion and then a lot of very close picks for our other power—Anomalous Agility, Barrier Conjuration, Monstrous Regeneration, and Mind Palace all look like solid choices there. Anomalous Agility is closest to the top, but if I have time for further analysis my main goal will be trying to figure out what distinguishes these and seeing if I can make the pick between them more accurate.
I spent a while messing around in hopes I could boil things down to a simple underlying structure, but with no real success:
The two best starts I found to an approach were:
Barriers/Monstrous Strength both work very well with a Dark Side but work very poorly with one another. This suggests some possibility where e.g. there are two different types of challenge, and Barriers/Monstrous Strength both protect against one (defending against Demon Assassins?) while a Dark Side protects against the other (building your own power base?)
Nerds with Temporal Distortion do very well. This could suggest some kind of attribute system where Temporal Distortion gives e.g. a larger bonus the higher your INT is (to think out neat things to do with it?) and Nerds have high INT.
Sadly further digging seemed to falsify most of my pretty ideas:
A Hypercompetent Dark Side also works well with Anomalous Agility and badly with Radiant Splendour and Uncanny Luck, but those aren’t consistent with the two-different-challenges theory: Monstrous Strength/Anomalous Agility work acceptably well together even though they should be pointed at the same challenge, and Uncanny Luck does not work particularly well with the things a Dark Side works with.
Hikkikomori do very badly with Mind Palace and very well with Radiant Splendor, which could suggest some kind of CHA-based effect. However, no other characteristics show e.g. the opposite effect—if Sociopaths showed the reverse effect, I’d strongly update to ‘Sociopaths have high CHA and Hikkikomori have low CHA,’ but that didn’t occur. Office Workers do benefit more from Mind Palace, but don’t show the reverse effect anywhere else.
In fact, ‘Sociopath’ doesn’t seem to have any interesting interactions with anything, making me wonder if the angel’s classification of Sociopaths is not very good.
Update with slight current progress towards general ideas:
There are three-and-a-half categories of power:
Anomalous Agility, Barrier Conjuration and Monstrous Regeneration are ‘Combat’ powers
Hypercompetent Dark Side, Rapid XP Gain, Shapeshifting, and Temporal Distortion are ‘Utility’ powers.
Enlightenment, Radiant Splendor and Uncanny Luck are ‘Mental’ powers.
Mind Palace, based on its name, should be a Mental power, but it doesn’t behave at all like the other Mental powers and does its own strange thing.
Having one Combat plus one Utility power is generally a good idea—any such pairing combines better than its two parts work individually.
Having two Combat or two Utility powers is not terrible, but generally less good than one of each.
Mental powers behave strangely, with some very strong interactions for no reason I’ve fully discerned. They seem in general to be weak but be given to/chosen by strong heroes. They might work well with Mind Palace or with one another.
Hypercompetent Dark Side is the most Utility of all the Utility powers: it shows the same kind of interaction effects as other Utility powers (good with Combat and bad with Mental) but to a greater extent.
Further:
Nerds, Otaku and particularly Hikkikomori do well with a Combat power, while Office Workers and Sociopaths do not. Perhaps there is a ‘Physical’ stat with diminishing returns, that stat is increased by any Combat power, and Nerds/Otaku/particularly Hikkikomori stay inside a lot and have a lower Physcial stat and more need for a power boosting it?
Hikkikomori do well with most Mental powers but badly with Mind Palace, while Office Workers do well with Mind Palace but badly with anything else. Perhaps there is a ‘Social’ stat with diminishing returns, Office workers have high Social while Hikkikomori have low Social, and most Mental powers boost Social while Mind Palace instead lets you use Social for something else?
While most pairs of Combat powers work badly together, Anomalous Agility/Monstrous Regeneration work acceptably well together. Perhaps this is why the Eldritch Abomination wanted those two?
Further refinement:
Mind Palace’s strange behavior is exclusively an artefact of its very strong negative relationship with Hikkikomori. When we filter out all Hikkikomori and repeat the analysis, it becomes clear that Mind Palace is in fact another Utility power, behaving similarly to the other Utility powers. Doing this also makes it appear that, in the absence of Hikkomori weirdness, Mental powers work well with one another, and the two generally-good strategies are ‘one Utility and one Physical power’ or ‘two Mental powers’. Office Workers’ apparent good synergy with Mind Palace was an artefact of Office Workers being less likely to be Hikkikomori.
I’m unlikely to put in much more time, so my presumably-final answer and a summary of findings for the goddess:
My powers: Temporal Distortion and Barrier Conjuration
(I see very little to choose between the three physical powers for my second choice. Agility has a n=20 sample of people exactly like us vaguely suggesting it might be better for us, Barrier Conjuration has a smaller effect in a larger sample vaguely suggesting it might be good for non-Sociopaths. Since some other people have done Temporal + Agility I’m letting hipster-ism steer me to picking something different. Monstrous Regeneration is also an equally-good pick, but has no real evidence towards being better, and if it involves getting hit and then regenerating rather than not getting hit it might be much more painful.)
Key takeways for the Goddess:
Anomalous Agility, Barrier Conjuration and Monstrous Regeneration are Defense powers. Never give someone more than one of these.
Enlightenment, Radiant Splendor and Uncanny Luck are Mental powers. These tend not to be very good, but Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor work extremely well together for a subset of people (the subset is not readily identifiable by your Angel’s trait system, but may be discoverable with more work). That subset of people already tend to choose to take them/you choose to give them. Keep giving Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor to anyone who you would have given it to before, but don’t try to spread it more broadly.
All other powers are Utility powers. Most heroes should take one Utility power and one Defense power.
When picking out Utility powers, you can do this based on personality classification (ask your Angel for his list of traits):
Nerds do well with Temporal Distortion. They should take Temporal Distortion plus a Defense power of their choice.
Sociopaths and Otaku do well with Shapeshifting. They should take Shapeshifting plus a Defense power of their choice.
Someone who is both a Nerd and a Sociopath/Otaku can either take both Shapeshifting and Temporal Distortion, or take one of those plus a Defense power, both seem okay.
Hikkikomori do appallingly badly with Mind Palace. Never let a Hikkikomori take Mind Palace.
Hypercompetent Dark Side does poorly with Enlightenment or Radiant Splendor—this shouldn’t matter if you’re following the ‘one Utility and one Defense’ plan, but keep it in mind if people request something else.
If you found this information helpful, are you hiring? Since it looks like my winrate is probably only 80-90% even with the best-chosen powers, I might prefer a position as your new Data Angel over being a hero, depending on what the benefits are like.
Some additional takeaways for me in my new life:
Otaku do extremely well (~30% better winrate than anyone else). This suggests that this world is going to ‘behave like a story’ in some way, or reward people for acting in story-like ways. Even if I’m not as good as an Otaku at identifying these things, I should try to behave like one. If I see a damsel in distress, I should go try to rescue her and not think too hard about it. Even if it seems like a stupid decision, empirically the Otaku who are likely to do that end up succeeding at extraordinarily high rates.
Temporal Distortion does much better than most powers for Nerds, but much worse than most powers for non-Nerds. It probably requires careful nerdy thought to get the most out of it, I should make experimenting with it a high priority and see if I can figure it out faster than most other Nerds.
The amount of benefit gained from having a single defensive cheat power rather than not having one suggests that I am likely to be at risk of death from early physical attack. Be on the lookout with Barrier Conjuration early on, in case the Demon King can try to assassinate me before I level up.