Did the flattener help against weak bots?

So, the best version that i ever had was 1.95, by a fairly large margin. In 1.96, I fixed a bug where I had accidentally had the flattener on for any bot hitting me more than (normalizedProbability-0.045) which happens with way more bots than a flattener would usually be used for (it corresponds to roughly a 7% hit rate). Is it possible that the flattener helps?

I think there's only one way to find out. :-) Try lowering the threshold?

But I'd say it largely depends on how heavily your flattener is weighted, how your hit percentage is normalized, and so on. A 7% hit rate might be low but it really depends on the distance and bullet power, so I'd have to see how you're normalizing it to say.

Diamond's main flattener is enabled at hit rate = 5.9%, normalized to precise escape angle = 0.98 and precise bot width of 0.1 radians, which is something like bullet power = 2 and distance = 500. I also found a little bit of improvement with another lower weighted flattener enabled at half that hit percentage. So maybe that can give you a ballpark idea of how high/low your threshold is compared to mine, which I think is pretty well tuned. I also add a margin of error based on number of shots, like they use to calculate margin of error in election polling, which lets me set it as low as possible without much risk. (So it's only really 5.9 after a lot of shots, early on it's quite a bit higher.)

Another thought is don't be afraid to just re-release 1.95 as 1.95b. There could have been some weird battles or something and you are just chasing shadows - I've definitely had that happen.