Interesting stats for the state of the game by LCK.

I'm not gonna act like professional games are similar to the casual games we all play, but some of their features are interesting to list here, so that we can get some guidelines on how the game state is right now. Below are the game times for all first 5 matches that happened so far:

37 mins 26 mins 30 mins 30 mins 32 mins 26 mins 23 mins 23 mins 27 mins 37 mins 39 mins 23 mins

The longest game, traditionally, was held between KT and Jin Air (who else than JAG), with the only two other games reaching 37 minutes being the debut game of the new team (Griffin) and the second game of SKT vs AFs. Everything else has been pretty much a stomp. A lot of 23 minute games, which means that the game just ends before it gets a chance to transition into anything resembling a late game.

At this point, I'd like to point out that we had short games in previous seasons as well, but the big difference here is how the wins come. This time around, there are huge gold differences. For example, there had been 10k gold leads at 15 minutes quite often. Even 7k at 10 minutes! Basically, something happens around the 5 minute mark, and the game just snowballs extremely hard and the team that got that 5 minute victory will win the game basically at that point.

In previous metas, you could at least stall out the game a bit with an ADC clearing waves, or a mid laner like Taliyah. As it stands right now, I believe that ADCs were only picked 7 times out of the possible 24 selections. I think that Kaisa was picked 2 times, we had 2 Ezreals and 2 Lucians and 1 Ashe. I'm not here to discuss if ADCs are viable or not for soloQ, but it seems like ADCs ramping up time takes way too long now, which is why the teams have been avoiding them.

The game has transitioned from a carefully planned strategic game to just a random x vs x deathball around 10 minutes. Even if the strategy was easy to execute in the spring split (basically play around ADC and take towers), at least it was something that you could follow up and understand, and maybe even apply it to your own games. Right now, everything just seems so whacky. Nunu + Karthus is trying to make the duoQ work in pro, failing horribly. Everything just seems so random now. I can say I like watching it, watching all the new picks and all this fast pace, but playing the game like this feels so unrewarding.

How am I supposed to strategize, pick a good champion into the enemies, when everything is just so random now? Again, I don't want to compare pro play with soloQ, but some things are paralleled. The game is extremely fast paced now, certain champions are completely unviable because their early game is weak (most ADCs, Viktor, Azir), and there are also strategies where one guy surrenders his entire gold income and feeds it over to his teammate, be that either a Taric-Yi, or a Nunu-Karthus.

Again, fun to watch, not fun to play with or against. What if I'm a mid laner and I have to face something that isn't there? Let's assume I'm Viktor in the mid lane. I'm extremely gated by mana costs early, so I can't spam my abilities to push to the enemy tower. Therefore, while I'm struggling to push the wave, the enemy mid laner (Karthus + Nunu) goes into the jungle, takes blue buff, spams Q to clear the 2 waves, goes back into the jungle and eventually hits level 6 at 5 minutes with almost double gold over me, and I sit there with 0 interaction in lane being unable to do anything. Same could be said about Taric-Yi; there is no point trying to push Taric out of lane, honestly.

I don't even know where I want to go with this post, I just had these random thoughts in my head. Average game time is faster now, game is decided even earlier, comebacks are almost non-existent because of the nature of melee champions. The strategies are annoying to play against. Certain champions are completely unviable.