Quick Gameplay Thoughts: September 14

Hi folks,

Usual Disclaimers

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler

http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png

Average games per champion

Wanted to share some somewhat different data today that looks at, when you encounter a particular champion, how many games on average the person playing that champion will have played on them. This is related to the mastery curves talked about previously, showing how far through a champ's mastery curve your opponents or team mates will likely be. Figured this would be good to look at in part since common arguments I see are 'X champion only has a high win rate because only mains play them' or 'Y champion is OP despite a low win rate because most of their play is new people bringing their win rate down'. It's also a pretty easy to display piece of information, compared to something like mastery curves, so for once we can show all champs easily, rather than just a subset.

As you'll see below the average number of games at the high end and low end can vary radically. That doesn't necessarily mean equate to 'most popular' and 'least popular' though. Some champs are popular and have player bases with a lot of average games played (e.g. Yasuo and Lee Sin). Others are pretty niche, but, when you do encounter a player, they're probably played that champ a lot (e.g. Anivia). At the other end of the spectrum new champs especially have low averages because, well, they're new, and people haven't had time to build up as many games yet, even if they're really popular picks (e.g. Kai'Sa). Some champs also have low averages because people are interested in trying them, but conclude what's on offer isn't for them (Ivern's a good example of this). That's not to say those champs don't have mains who've gone really deep on them too, just that they represent a smaller proportion of total games played on that champ.

Data below. This is from all MMRs, in all regions.

https://imgur.com/a/KCtchUZ

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Odyssey

Hope you've all been enjoying Odyssey! Keep an eye out if so for a dev blog coming next week that will talk about its development, looking at things like the intended feelings to capture, approach to difficulty levels, work in progress augments (some of which didn't make it) etc. Additionally once the mode's been out for a while we'll pick your brains on how various parts of it feel (e.g. augment system, Kayn fight etc), so that if we take another crack at similar PVE in the future we'll be able to use that feedback to improve things further.

If you're still having problems with the mission of augment systems, apologies. We've addressed a number of problems that cropped up with those, still working on some though. This has been a demonstration that the mission system especially needs to be bulked up somewhat if we're going to be putting this much weight on it. I expect we'll continue to do a lot of mission stuff in the future too, so we'll be investing more time into making that system more robust. Those issues are ones that the PBE can't catch either unfortunately, given they're about load on various server functions that PBE doesn't push the boundaries on enough to reveal problems (nor do some of the smaller regions either incidentally).