devtrackers.gg
Hey I've seen this one, this is a classic
Hey I've seen this one, this is a classic
Hey I've seen this one, this is a classic
Hey, I know this guy!
Did they give you a corner office in the game design dept cause of your tenure at Riot or did they put you in bullpen with the rest of first years and you gotta now get GalaxySmash his coffee every morning? Just asking so we know what the pecking order is and know who to bribe in the future for changes.
Hes sitting next to me so basically he won the seating lottery.
My favorite takeaway from this video is that some champions' win rates are skewed by how they fare into Yasuo, Zed, and Katarina because of how popular those three champions are
I did some digging on this right before the holidays. Zed, Yasuo, Katarina, Yone, Sylas, Akali are all top tier popularity champions in mid lane and there've been patches where at least one of them is in something like 30-40% of all games as a mid (it varies - but not as much by win rate as you might think, the patches where these go down tend to be when there's a new mage midscope, or Viktor got a huge and permanent playrate spike from Arcane, that sort of thing, not necessarily the patches where they're relatively weaker or stronger).
The thing that makes this hard is that they all have weaknesses to a specific profile - durable stat checkers with a reliable CC. It's pretty hard to get reliable data on true toplane bruisers midlane because they're so unpopular there, but aggregating the data from patches 12.17 through 12.21, we were able to get a decent dataset on Renekton, Riven, and Sett. I looked at Pantheon as well because even though he's played mid lane, he fits the predicted counter profile (reliable CC + stat check).
All four bruisers outperform their average matchup against every single one of the 6 assassin/skirmishers listed above over that time period, and all four champions underperform their average matchup against literally every mid lane mage with a viable sample. The only ranged character of any type that any of these champions outperforms their baseline against is - Renekton slightly outperforms his baseline against Akshan.
There are a million caveats with this sort of data. We're measuring how different they are from their average matchup - if they have a very high average win rate, they might still win more than half the time against champions that this analysis counts as them being countered by. It looks at four patches of data, which means there's a lot of potential noise introduced - champions being buffed and nerfed, the Worlds tournament drives changes in player pick behavior in solo queue, it doesn't factor in things like experience on the champion, experience playing against a specific matchup, rate at which the champion is picked as a counter, etc. It's not at all clear what we should do with the information. Found it really interesting though.
Hey Axes do you think this trend is applicable to other non-traditional matchups in other lanes, like Seraphine and Ziggs bot or Vayne going top?
Certainly for at least some of them, but not necessarily with the same implications for game balance. Bot carry very likely has a related pattern with the set of mages who tend to counter ADCs, for example, since nearly every matchup is vs an ADC.
Using Pantheon as an example, his mid lane win rate appears to (and there are LARGE caveats on this analysis, so I emphasize "appears to") be inflated because he is both sharp in terms of who he counters and is countered by AND because the things he sharply counters are so much more popular than the things he is countered by. If every champion was exactly equally popular, his average win rate would very likely fall quite a bit in that position even with no gameplay changes.
(The inverse pattern is found on Akshan - his mid lane win rate is depressed by the fact that Yasuo is very strong counter to him, which gives him the appearance of being better top lane sometimes)