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Riot doesn't care about Academy
Just straight up, huh lol.
Riot doesn't care about Academy
Just straight up, huh lol.
LMAO.
The import restriction as it regards academy was in part written by the teams.
Personally, I defend the idea that there are 3 starting import slots (from major regions) per team (2/1 or 1/2) if the goal with academy is to help promote native talent.
I think it's reasonable to hold a different opinion and want academy to mirror LCS more closely; that's just not the opinion I hold.
Excited for any team that's going to do serious statistical analysis.
Head-scratching that they wrote CSD and CS/M for a support into the script, though.
Probably just for the sponsored segment LS is pretty vocal about looking at the context of the data like Lane matchups and so on so i don't think they are actually just using raw data like this
It's tough. Here's where I'm at personally with League data:
A lot of things are instantly useless. So for example, the winrate of X champion at Y tournament is pretty much always bad as an analysis tool. Not only are there usually not enough data points to do anything more than, "yeah this champion is probably strong on average," you also have biased data by, say, EDG playing more Lucian+Nami than any other team. Now you're just measuring EDG's win rate, not Lucian's.
This trend continues with things like, "Show my Viper's CSD." Well, we already established that EDG plays a lot of Lucian Nami, so he probably has inflated CSD from lane matchups, not necessarily because of player skill.
You can build upon that and construct a model for, "OK, what is the average Lucian vs. Ashe CSD and how does that compare here?" You can maybe construct Lucian vs. Ashe across all pro play for an entire year but more likely you're looking at Master+ solo queue instead. Keep in mind, you want a reliable baseline. Do teams have access to that? I don't really know. But that's kinda where you have to start for this sort of thing if your goal is "Is X player good?"
We get to cheat on the broadcast. We can just say, "Doublelift has been really lane dominant, he has the highest CSD in the league." We're not marketing him to a team or evaluating him for signing. We're just saying, "Hey, of all the players, Doublelift has won the lane by the most." Sure that can be caused by Lucian. Doesn't really matter.
Thankfully, teams play lots of scrims. So you look at the 15 Jax vs. Camille games that Summit has played after four weeks of play and get a pretty good picture for how well those lanes have been going. Of course you probably knew by watching, but if you want to look at your historic data and you're planning for your week 5 opponent, you know they're likely to pick Camille, and you're confident your Jax looks good, then great. Just make sure those Jax games were against quality opponents. What is Summit's CSD supposed to be in his scrims? Because this time he's against Huni. Is Huni's Camille better than your scrim opponent?
Anyways I'm kinda rambling at this point. What it comes down to is that using this as a serious team-analysis tool is kinda tough and I'm pretty skeptical about it for outside player evaluation. It probably has good legs for internal evaluation because you've got like 8x the data because of scrims, especially since you can target things like lane matchups and jam through them aggressively.
Overall, though, I think solo queue data is pretty underrated for things outside of just win rate because it's easy to crunch through a ton of data and get interesting takeaways on lane matchups, item builds, objective power, and so on.
Just to add: Academy teams still have a second import slot for minor regions players (see TSMA with Takeover and Yursan).
Ah you're right, I forgot about that extra rule. I'll edit that in.
They just say a couple stats from Oracle's Elixer and call it a day.
Winsome could easily just have really long game times which gives the support a chance to have high vision scores. Or it could be a rune choice he always takes even if it isn't optimal.
Fwiw I think it is also very defensible to just “lie” and not give away the stats they actually use in analysis as a competitive edge. I know that if I thought I was far ahead of the game in any facet I wouldn’t give away my secrets. It’s why I name changed when I started playing WC3 competitively.
I was absolutely certain it was satire and was waiting for LS to pop out and say, "sike, this year at C9 we're going to avoid bad statistical practices like this." because LS is generally against using stats in LoL.
Being against using data is pretty troll.
I don't think LS is implying anything about imports and their role in Academy. I think he's saying that, because it doesn't matter at all if your Academy team nabs first place in their league, they're going to keep Zven slotted in for practices, so they can focus on making the best LCS team. Even if the Academy team ultimately loses some games due to K1ng not being practiced with them, does that really matter? I believe that is LS's point.
EDIT: And here's confirmation from LS himself: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cloud9/comments/rpvxos/building_the_2022_cloud9_lcs_academy_roster_ft_ls/hq74z2c/
I'd argue that it's fine if winning academy doesn't matter. The point of academy is, in fact, to develop players for the LCS. That's literally the express purpose. To say Riot doesn't care about academy and the evidence provided is that winning academy doesn't matter is really missing the point of academy.
The point of academy is player development. Rolling academy into the amateur circuit and proving grounds are the key pieces of evidence here. It's why Danny got a starting spot on EG LCS. That's a key success story of academy. It does not matter how well EG's sub-LCS teams performed or what place they got. What matters is that Danny got a bunch of games that let EG decided he was ready for an LCS starting spot.
What LS wants is a powerful practice squad. Fair enough. He's got one.
I think a major problem with LoL data is that it is obviously observational and not experimental. We know there are confounders (ex. who is playing that champion, what team composition they are in), and we have statistical tools to adjust for their confounders. However, I assume there are too many confounders for how little data is available (especially considering variables that change over time, like patches). I also don't know if they have professional statisticians, which would be another necessary condition. I do health science research and am not a statistician, but it seems extremely difficult to make any use of professional player data.
Yeah pro play is probably far too sparse.
But generally speaking, most of the noise washes out. I'm very confident I could tell you which champion is supposed to win a matchup if you gave me 10k games of Gold/XP differences by the minute almost regardless of MMR. Because I can test for matchup strength against MMR and the impact of "well this player got Elise as their jungler" just washes out more often than not.
League has the luxury of tens of thousands of games of sample for almost any given 1v1 matchup. That's going to give you really reliable answers as long as you're asking the right questions.
More likely because there aren't many people in the industry who know how to properly analyze data given what is available.
I'm a college drop-out and while I studied economics and thus econometrics in university, I've forgotten a large portion of what I was taught and re-learned a bit of it.
So like, I'm an undergraduate economics student in skillset at this point and I'm one of the better stats people in the English-speaking scene? Honestly there should be people out there who demolish me at this stuff. And maybe they're out there and I don't see their content. But yeah, there are bound to be tons of questions that are answerable but aren't.
it sounds like you dont think traditional sports statistics will work with league?
i'd assume mainly cause of patches/ever changing?
I think there are plenty of things that could carry over and work. Napkin math, MLB pitchers throw ~100 pitches a game for ~160 games a season. I don't know how accurate either number is exactly, but that's what Google told me. So 16k pitches a year. That's a lot of pitches you get to analyze.
EDG's Viper played 121 games this year. About as many games as a MLB player. So find something that he does ~100 times a game and you've got something with as much data as an MLB pitcher does. Find something he does ~6-20 times a game and you've got as much data as an MLB batter.
I think patches are much less important. Sure there can be some really big changes, like lane swaps, funnel, or playing support as Senna but you can manually tag those and they are often player-driven actions anyway. So just account for the Senna games when you're analyzing Viper.
It comes down to how much you have to subdivide. MLB batters face left- and right-handed pitchers. Fatigue for either player in the game probably matters. Weather probably matters. The current runs and players on-base probably matter. So it depends how much you want to subdivide. But it feels like there's a comparable amount of data compared to traditional sports.
It's tough. Here's where I'm at personally with League data:
A lot of things are instantly useless. So for example, the winrate of X champion at Y tournament is pretty much always bad as an analysis tool. Not only are there usually not enough data points to do anything more than, "yeah this champion is probably strong on average," you also have biased data by, say, EDG playing more Lucian+Nami than any other team. Now you're just measuring EDG's win rate, not Lucian's.
I don't think that stat is useless at all. It gives you a good jumping off point.
X has a high winrate -> What's the relative strength of teams playing X -> What champions is X being paired with? -> Why are those champions good with X? Are there other champions that fit into those roles? Conversely, is there a champion that can fulfill X's role?
I think there's definitely an issue where teams go "X is broken this patch, let's pick it with no practice" but that's more because of poor coaching imo.
Well, sure, anything can be inspiration. But I'm saying more for the sense that time is limited. If you want to look at a spreadsheet and come away with answers without going and investigating every single game, then you want to be presented with something more curated.
I don’t disagree with you on the point of Academy being player development, and I’m glad that’s become a bigger focus in recent years. Still, I don’t think LS is wrong to more or less ignore Academy - though it’ll negatively impact me as viewer tuning in for the Academy games. Most likely, Copy and Isles will get more improvement from scrimmaging their LCS counterpart than their matches in Academy league. Which is normal for basically any sport, since practice is far more influential to development than official matches. If this were to spread, leading to notable players like Zven not being seen in the league’s games, it could negatively impact viewership, which is the biggest drawback - and different people will have different opinions on just how big of a drawback that is.
On a tangent, I know you’ll likely have much more knowledge than me about how things are set up among the other teams and their Academy rosters, but I don’t know how common it is for Academy and LCS rosters to heavily scrim one another. I also know - whether baseless rumors or with some truth in them - that there’s been lots of discussion about LCS players not wanting to aid Academy players, for fear of losing their spots. Do you think that’s never really been an actual issue, or is it a real one? And do you think LS’s proposed system is the right hammer to the protruding nail?
If your internal scrims are better practice than the academy league, then so be it. Those 10.5 players are getting a lot of great practice.
But let’s face it. The other nine LCS teams don’t seem to have that aspiration. No teams in history have gone for an actually-strong practice squad that can compete with LCS teams.
As for not helping academy players, that sounds like a poor teammate. I’m in direct competition with other play-by-play commentators for big assignments and never once have I ever considered withholding or begrudging help when asked. Never once have I considered sabotaging them. I can’t fathom that mindset. These people are my friends. If teams can’t get that out of their players they should hire better.
Love this perspective and have a lot of thoughts on the matter myself. Agreed on broadcasts being able to “cheat” by choose their scope very carefully to frame a discussion - at the end of the day they’re there to give background enough to fuel a compelling point, and not do a thesis on most topics.
The main problem I see a broadcast having as a format, is that you don’t always have the airtime to fully flesh out the context needed to give a watertight argument. Stats may not lie, but they can lie by omission, and commonly at that too.
I don’t mind if arguments aren’t watertight. We are there to entertain first and foremost. Generally pre-planned segments are given room to breathe, though. And ad-hoc ones usually have smart hosts (Dash, Gabby) who let us explain enough. I’d say I’m happy with how LCS handles it.
If its csd of the whole botlane it makes sense though, doesnt it?
Would be decent. But they show 1.3 CS/M in the same graphic. That’s definitely support-only.
Do you think it's a problem that teams are seeing a path to the best way to "develop players" and are being met by obstacles which result in doing things like playing a different roster for academy stage games vs. practice?
I get you are taking the position that it's fine that teams winning or losing doesn't matter in academy, but surely you can't think this solution is fine.
Also, if you are taking the position that winning academy doesn't matter and teams think they can develop talent the best without obstacles...why put those obstacles in place? It seems like the obstacles are in place to
prevent getting easy results...which we've said "don't matter"
promote native talent development...which this team is taking the stance that it's actually hindering them. The rule is hindering their development of Winsome and Copy (NA natives).
I think it’s a strange aberration in this exact case but in general I think rules should update with the times. If every LCS team pushes for stronger practice squads and signs much stronger teams and needs new academy rules as a result, then that’s what owners’ meetings are for.
I’m just not sure how well that jives with goals of promoting native talent. Maybe at a certain point they’re mutually exclusive. Maybe there’s a native sub-league and a practice squad sub-league. I have no idea. But right now I think the rule set supports most teams.
Shared import slots are non-sense, if the goal is to promote native talent then there shouldn't be any. In fact, why are veterans even allowed to play in Academy, to begin with? Does a player like Zven even remotely belong to a developmental league?
I understand that there are some financial reasons for this (multiple imports so some compete for starting slot while others play in academy)
But if this is a legitimate concern, then it makes more sense for academy teams to have two import slots, not one.
You either want your academy team to be the 2nd string, and be a genuine source of competition, or to actually develop domestic talent. The current situation is woefully inadequate.
The veterans rule is a tough one. What do you do when Blaber comes in to replace Svenskeren? Force Blaber to play Academy because Sven is barred? Sign a third player to warm the bench in case that happens?
Then there are players like Darshan who clearly want to compete. But he’s the 12th best top laner right now. If “winning academy is useless” then why sign Darshan if he doesn’t have the same prospects as someone else? This is one of those cases where I can probably trust teams to make good choices.
viper(pretend hes a toplaner) may have played 121 games, but (next part is pure bs just theorying) for 60 of those games jax was redside ban#1. for the next 61 he only got first pick 12 times, so a majority of times he was vs jax. so he had a lower wr the 2nd half (61 games) but in reality he was vsing a 'strong' champ a majority of the time.
or hes playing weakside when theyre blueside, and that skews his numbers down.
LoL just feels like it has way too many variables that effect a game. you say patches are less important, but idk how you can fully argue that when the games constantly changing every 2 weeks.
Tbh you can still do good analytics. You can contrast vs-Jax games with other vs-Jax games, for example.
(Sorry late reply) I think 1v1 matchup data can certainly be useful to answer those types of "champion vs. champion" questions. I think the answers to those questions definitely provides some utility. I imagine pros are usually correct predictors of that already, but there are almost certainly cases where the common sentiment is incorrect and those stats can help expose that.
Though the question I really am curious about is "If I pick this champion in the current draft state, how will it impact the probability that we win?" and that's probably not a realistically answerable question. However I'd be interested if it would be possible to answer questions like "If I'm running a poke comp, what is the best top laner to include?". I can imagine a model that categorizes the team comp based on champions, and then compares win-rates based on top laner. I don't think that would be easy (feasible, maybe?), but that kind of information on the synergy between champions could be really interesting, and more importantly, very useful.
You can't perfectly test comp vs. comp because there are just too many permutations, but you can just pretend each interaction is just a pairwise "AD+Supp" / "AD+Mid" / "AD+Jungle" and so on. You'll end up getting pretty close I think.
And there's no way a player's intuition is going to do better than a robot that crunches through each matchup and gives you a 10-champion short list of good picks for current comps.