Season 11 will make you want to play more aggressively.
League of Legend
Riot Games brings massive changes to their game ‘League of Legend’ every year. This year, they changed their entire item system, drastically changing their game ecosystem. It has been a few months since the big update and now players have fully adapted to the changes. Let’s take a look at what happened to the ecosystem and what is the best team composition now. More specifically, let us answer three questions.
- What are the most popular champions?
- Which team composition is the best?
- How did the item change impact the game?
We are going to look at the top players(Masters above) from 4 different regions which are Korea, North America, West Europe and East Europe. Data were collected using web scraping on op.gg which is a League of Legends statistic website. If you are interested in how data were collected, you can click here. This will help us answer all of our questions above because the top players have in depth understanding of the game and are very competitive.
Question-1: “What are the most popular champions?”
Here is a quick look at the most popular champions in season 11. All of the champions above are ‘sword style’ characters who thrive the most when playing for aggressive kills or dominance. It is clear that in high ranked, players prefer high-risk high-return champions because they are confident in playing on a tightrope.
Question- 2: “Which team composition is the best?”
There are many factors that make a strong team. Well-balanced damage(ad/ap), tanks, crowd control and map presence usually make a better team than the off-balanced team. Let us have a look at what a computer think is the best team using machine learning. The following charts show the top 20 champions that affected the team’s win rate the most. (both positively and negatively). Hence giving us our best and worst team composition for both seasons.
Given a red team composition and blue team composition, the computer was able to guess correctly which team would win 80%(on the test set) of the time using a Random Forests model. Meaning that the computer has learnt what makes a stronger team pretty well. So the result above is based on pretty strong evidence. Note that NA means since we looked at the top 20, some lanes may have missing values.
Question- 3: “How did the item change impact the game?”
In season 10, the best champions consist of defensive champions that flourish in the late game. They are weak early but strong late so their goal is to try to go even with the enemy by playing passively. By just looking at their names you know these lanes are going to be ‘boring’. In contrast, in season 11, the best champions are all engaging and will get in your face. By just looking at their names, you know this game is going to be spicy. Therefore, the item changes impacted the game ecosystem by favouring more aggressive champions.
Compared to the official op.gg’s champion tier list, our best/worst champions match to this list with very few exceptions. Note that they have millions of more data and their method of ranking champions is unknown. However, from this, we can tell that our dataset is a good sample representing the population.
In conclusion, in high-ranked season11, you want to be playing aggressive champions to win more games. The majority of players have already figured this out and are just doing that. The new items have made them stronger and covered their weaknesses such as sustainability to be overpowered at the moment.
Full code and analysis available here: https://leejaeka.github.io/jaekangai/python/jupyter/crisp-dm/league%20of%20legends/linear%20regression/random%20forest/udacity/2020/12/30/lolpredictb.html