Community Spotlight: LCS Gold Distribution
Riot·3/27/2014, 4:27:36 PM·0 votes·66 views
The way gold is distributed on a team can tell us a lot about their general strategy, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. The pair describes how some of the graphs were very straightforward, leaning heavily toward the players we consider to be the main stars or carries of the lineup, but others were much more surprising. While it's not shocking to see TSM's gold centered around Bjergsen and WildTurtle, most fans wouldn't expect Aphromoo to be leading in gold for CLG. For North America, they even point out that Team Coast has poignant trends across their wins and losses: games they lose tend to have gold centered around their Mid Laner Shiphtur, while losses tend to lend more gold to their Top Laner ZionSpartan.
After the popularity of the North American article, Spellsy and Thoorin also added a European LCS edition and slightly modified their analysis based on statistical feedback on the first article. These graphs reinforce a few details discussed at length before, such as Fnatic's Jungler Cyanide focusing on selflessly supporting his team instead of increasing his own farm and Gambit's Jungler Diamond placing more emphasis on clearing and counterjungling.
As discussed in the second article, many of these graphs must be taken with a grain of salt due to winning bias (teams who win more games will naturally have more balanced graphs due to objective control and global gold) and a lot of factors that are hard to control for. Bearing these reservations in mind, this is a great start to using gold analysis to break down team strategy and individual player performance. Let us know what you make of the analysis in the comments below!