Vision Score Details
Hey everybody! We're trying a new "Vision Score" end-of-game stat (among some other new ones).
The TLDR: Vision Score is a loose measurement of vision game contribution, and can be ballparked as "about 1 point per minute of ward lifetime I'm responsible for providing/denying." It tends to be in the 5-150 range.
If you want more detailed info, here's more stuff to read below!
Vision Score Context
Participating in map vision is a powerful way to contribute to winning the game, but compared to many other types of contributions (like killing champions), there aren't very good tools to identify vision performance. You can check "Wards Placed," which is better than nothing, but as a lone data point, it's too isolated to paint a meaningful picture about how vision went in a game.
Vision Score is a new tool to help players in this effort. It's more complex and comprehensive than Wards Placed, incorporating temporary reveal effects and vision denied while also establishing some anti-cheese rules. The hope is that this score is a more meaningful, trustworthy number for players to analyze and compare performance.
It's important to note that Vision Score is not trying to be the last word on what good vision looks like. We felt that vision was such an ambiguous, indirect system that replacing player analysis with computer evaluation was not realistic or desirable. We're trying to keep it comprehensive enough to be meaningful but simple enough for interested players to break down and analyze. Vision Score is less trying to be Champ Mastery and more trying to be CS or Damage Dealt--it's a useful metric to evaluate performance, but nowhere near a "final score" on how well each player did.
So, this system focuses more on "how much are you contributing to vision in a way that's potentially useful?" and keeps "exactly how useful was it?" a more secondary question.
Vision Score System
The "scale" of the point system is "every point of Vision Score is about equal to one minute of ward lifetime in value." So if your vision score at the end of a game is 121, you can ballpark "my vision contribution this game was worth about 2 hours of ward lifetime." This number comes from three main sources:
- Ward Lifetime Provided: Each minute of ward lifetime you provide by placing wards will give you 1 point (can give fractions of points). There are actually a lot of modifiers to this score, see "Ward Lifetime Provided Modifiers" below.
- Ward Lifetime Denied: When you get a ward takedown (earned gold from a ward's death), you get 1 point for every minute of lifetime remaining on the ward (permanent wards are assumed to have 1.5 minutes of lifetime remaining).
- Vision Mechanics: Various vision-providing mechanics have a baseline score on-use (usually 0.1 to 0.5), and can also give bonus scores if revealing unseen champions or epic monsters (usually 0.1 to 1.0). This includes Scryer's Bloom, trinket activation, ward placement, Scuttler Ward, Ashe Hawkshot, Kalista Sentinel, and Quinn Heightened Senses. A Hawkshot that reveals a full Baron attempt will give much more than a Quinn W that reveals nothing (which will still give some score).
A typical Vision Score can be single digits (short game where you're not using trinket well) to well over 100 (long game with consistent sightstone use). Generally, vision-focused junglers come out on top for shorter games, whereas Sightstone supports come out ahead on longer games.
Ward Lifetime Provided Modifiers
The rule of "my wards give me 1 point per minute they're alive" actually has a bunch of rules that can reduce the score. Each of these reduces the score multiplicatively: if two rules each reduce the point value by 50%, the resulting ward will give 0.25 points per minute, not 0 points. Modifiers only apply to the value from their actual duration: getting a -50% modifier for 6 seconds will translate to -0.05 points, not a -0.5 reduction from the entire minute.
- Staleness: A ward that hasn't seen any interesting units (enemy champions, wards, and epic monsters) in a while will gradually go down in point value, starting at -0% at 60 seconds of staleness and worsening to -50% at 120 seconds of staleness.
- Redundancy: While a ward is near other friendly sources of vision (allied wards, structures, and lane minions), its point value will be reduced, starting at -25% for 1 redundancy and worsening up to -75% for 3+ redundancies. Lane minions don't count as redundant if the ward is in brush.
- Safety: A ward that's very close to your base can give less score, starting from -0% score around your buff camps and worsening to about -50% score at your base walls.
- Pointlessness: A ward that's very close to a friendly structure or inside your own base will have a -100% modifier to its point value.
- Baseline: If a ward is quickly killed by enemies, it will still give lifetime score as if it survived a minimum of 20 seconds (0.33 points).
This modifier system does make some compromises in the name of avoiding cheese while hopefully staying understandable. The goal here is to capture general contribution, not perfectly measure ward usefulness.
Closing
We're excited to start seeing utility contributions get some much-needed visibility. This is an early take on this particular facet of the game, and I'm sure both the mechanics and the presentation have more work to do.
Hopefully, Vision Score becomes a number that you can appreciate and analyze without it feeling too arbitrary. We'll be looking to iterate on it based on game results and feedback.
can get pretty good vision score
