PhreakRiot

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.

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.

Would be decent. But they show 1.3 CS/M in the same graphic. That’s definitely support-only.

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 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.

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 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 eit...

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.

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.

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.

Being against using data is pretty troll.

And have all the other good qualities that made me and other people thumbs-up the interview.

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.

Ah you're right, I forgot about that extra rule. I'll edit that in.

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...

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.

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.

It only measures solo queue, so none :(

My man hit D2 (well done), got a job at Riot (well done), and then hung up the claws.

TFT is innately more random and crit damage is 1.3x baseline. Even if you crit it’s less damage than an item of similar power (Deathcap) unless you build into more crit.

The way I see the game is that players don’t actually mind individual champions having fairly predetermined builds. What’s more important is getting to build different items overall across a day’s games. Darius, Garen, Gnar, Irelia? All different builds despite the player getting 4 straight top lane games.

This appears to be what players actually respond to. Because there IS a lot of diversity on an individual champion level outside of stuff like Sterak’s but individual players refuse to pick alternate Mythics even if the power levels are comparable.