Fantasy LCS: The Fast Win Bonus

Ten points separate you and your opponent in Week 1 of your Fantasy LCS league. You have one starter left to play while your opponent has none as the final LCS match begins. Regardless of victory, I bet you'd prefer a nice, long 60-minute game over a 20-minute blowout; there are more opportunities to score fantasy points after all.

I don't blame you. In general, slower games outscore faster ones (but a loss in a slower game still scores less than a win in a faster game!). Here's a chart from last Summer Split that breaks down pts/game earned by all the Fantasy roles which verifies this.

Regardless of team or player, the longer the game, the more points you were likely to score. Also, note the considerable drop-off in the 10% chart between Team scores (nearly 6 pts/game between fast and slow winning teams!). How did we address this major pain point? Enter, the 30 Minute Fast Win Bonus. Now, there's a reason to cheer on your favorite teams that force a 20-minute surrender vote. On top of that, there's an additional layer of excitement as the game clock slowly ticks past 29:45 while champions are destroying nexus towers.

Context

How did we arrive at a 2-point bonus to Teams instead of giving it to Players?

- A fast win is a team effort. Between sweeping out the enemy jungle, starving out your opponent's vision, and knocking down towers to earn global gold, there are many factors that contribute into a quick victory and we want to reward teams that can execute at that level.

- A 2-point bonus is standard for the rest of our fantasy bonuses (see First Blood and +10 K/A).

- Players already outscore Teams by a decent margin (especially carries). By restricting the number of bonus points Players can earn, we’ll avoid increasing this gap.

- While Top laners and ADC's have larger point differences between fast wins and non-fast wins, the gaps for the other three roles are much more negligible. Due to this imbalance, we couldn't justify giving a Fast Win bonus to all Players and giving bonuses out to individual roles would be inconsistent.

Why did we choose 30 minutes?

Here's some quick math. The average game length for the Summer Split was 39:30. To keep metrics easy to remember (no one wants to get hyped over a sub-32:14 win), the potential breakpoints we had were 25:00, 30:00, and 35:00. Then, after calculating the percentage of games played in summer that hit those options, we arrived at 1.8%/14.3%/34.0% respectively. Lastly, to keep the bonus relatively rare in terms of occurrences, we chose 30 minutes as the cut-off.

If visuals help you understand this reasoning better, the graph below should be useful.

The red line represents the Team fantasy points earned in victories as game length increases. Adding the Fast Win Bonus will affect the red circle, increasing a Team's fantasy points in extremely short games. At 25:00, this breakpoint simply makes no impact (only 4 games would qualify from the Summer Split) and by the 35:00 mark, Teams are already on-par with non-AD/Mid fantasy points.

Hopefully this clarifies things and gives you some context as to why we made this additional change to the Fantasy LCS scoring. We hope you crush your foes (in less than 30 minutes) and enjoy the 2015 Season!