Stronger, Smarter: The Mobalytics Stats Tool
Mobalytics Stats Section — The Why and How
When we first started this journey, we had a very clear goal. We wanted to be more than just another stats site. We wanted to be a place where people went to have their stats analyzed so they could focus solely on the process of playing and improving their game. It’s a strange thing now that our biggest reveal for the month is the stats section we have been working on — I suppose there are stranger things.
Since January, we have been working intensely with players of all skill levels to try and understand how they want to view their League information, and what they use to improve their game. The majority of this work is being done by our coaches and analysts. We learned that most coaches (including ours!) use OP.GG to get a snapshot of their players and what they do before trying to coach them. Let me just preface by saying, we are all long time users and fans of OP.GG (and Lolking and Champion.gg and Probuilds.net and Lolnexus.com), and our goal has always been to create a tool that minimizes the amount of places someone has to go to play excellent League.
We wanted to allow quicker searches and figure out how to access different timing windows of stats (both in-game and across player lifetime) and be able to compare the patterns we found to deliver the best information for users on how to improve. To accomplish this, we built a set of internal tools that allowed the team to forage for whatever information they needed. They used this information to create cases studies between players of different tiers and playstyles in order to inform the rest of our team what was working in our ratings and what wasn’t.
TL;DR - The tool was immensely helpful. It cut our research time down drastically by allowing our RND group to not have to search through multiple OP.GG profiles and pages to get the information they wanted. Great! Now we had this internal tool, an ugly mess of text and commands, that our team was using to explore summoner profiles. One day in a random meeting, someone randomly dropped the bomb on us…“Why don’t we dress our tool up and show her to the world? Surely others will like her?”
It made sense…people love our design, and they love stats. Why not give them easy access to what they want and make it an enjoyable experience? The next step was to sit down with our hardcore Dev team and understand what it would take to make it happen. There’s something you need to understand about our Dev team: they’re more like a mafia than a traditional Dev team, and this guy (our CTO) is the one running the show. They enforce our grand ideas, and make sure shit gets done. If they say something isn’t happening, then it isn’t happening.
I know they really want to share their story with you guys, but right now they are completely overwhelmed with creating everything we need for Open Beta. Long story short, the mafia approved the deal under specific conditions. One of them was to have an exact list of features needed, the other was to play more Counter Strike…realizing that these were not the worst terms for a deal, we quickly set about determining the exact specs needed to make the process a go.
The final result is a stats section which allows you to do several key things:
Versatile Condition Filtering:
One of the first issues we wanted to address was that players really wanted to look at their stats on a per game basis based on role, champion, victory condition and matchup. Right now you can search through your matches and find the matches with specific constraints (for example: all your Vayne vs Caitlyn matches). We aren’t stopping there. In the future, we will add even more filters for you to play around with.
Personal Records
Personal records are super cool, so we built a page that showcases some of your personal bests. Share with your friends, or compare yourself to your hero (or nemesis), and make sure everyone bows before your supreme prowess.
Graphs, so many Graphs:
We knew that analytical players wanted better graphs and more filters to view different circumstantial stats. To solve this, we added a robust graphs section to play around with. It’s far from final, but right now you can look at many things across different roles, champs, matchups, victory conditions, and number of games. Even cooler, you can click on a specific data point and go straight to that game!
Match Details
We wanted to give the same overhaul to a particular match as we did for the more general areas of the section; so, we created several sections and put in features like Match Records (shamelessly inspired by the Overwatch post-game screen), clear timeline plots, as well as map visualizations of the game. We are really excited for the other features we have planned for this section in particular, and will keep you updated in our future Changelogs.
These are just some of the features we decided to include in the section. There will be other features to come, but our primary focus is still the GPI and the tools that surround it . We believe that there are so many awesome metrics that we have created, and will continue to create more. On top of that, we wanted to share a more convenient and pleasing way to look at stats, so we feel this was a good investment of our time.
Well… Go ahead. Play around with it! And let us know what you think. We are in the business of improving, and don’t worry about the Dev mafia either… We will make sure they implement the changes.
