LoL: Simplifying competitive matches to get consistent team results

OBS: This is a repost of my previous blog on wordpress.

When I first meet League of Legends I was amazed by the infinite plays and skill that is needed to be a good player, so I had to look into the competitive scenario and help improve it! I tried to be a Pro player but I had two big problems:

1. I’m not that skilled (I didn’t really want to spend all the needed time);
2. I love math.

So I kept studying how tournaments work and how the heck could I help Teams, players & analysts to be better. While watching LCK, CBLoL, IWCQ and Worlds I noticed something that might not be known by every team and that’s what I’m here to share with you.

One of the most important parts of the game is how picks are chosen. What you pick will impact directly on how you can play the game! So with this in mind I had a few questions that I needed to answer before analyzing any game:

• Why do teams choose the champion A vs B or even A over anything else?
• What does C have that is not used by anyone?

I’m certain that If you watch LCK or even any other tournament regularly you might see sometimes some picks that are not common, like a Brand support or Teemo top! What I needed to find out is just why teams would not choose them over the rest of the pick list.

Thinking about it I came up with categories that every champion has (or not) and can be a reason to pick up or not some characters:

1. Engage;
2. DisEngage AoE;
3. Clear Wave;
4. Tower Siege;
5. Crowd Control;
6. Poke;
7. Escape.

I made this as parameters that I could use on every champion so they could get scores and by each score together in a game every team gets a champion score ( sum of all champion score). This way I was able to do a Proof of Concept that If this methodology was right or not (by analyzing some games).

Proof of concept is a realization of a certain method or idea to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle, whose purpose is to verify that some concept or theory has the potential of being used. A proof of concept is usually small and may or may not be complete.

Note: The game is much more than this 7 variables and It is filled with tons of strategies and skill, but I had to quantify as much as possible and It was the only way I could do without making it impossible to analyze.

On my next posts, I’ll show you how this 7 parameters helped me analyze and ‘foresee‘ 75% of the series result of the 2015 League of Legends World Championship. If you somehow know Portuguese -does not want to wait- or want to read using Google Translator, this is my article showing more about how I did my Draft Decision Making Tool.

If you want to discuss it just let me know on Twitter! @arxdsilva