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"Win rate is solely determined by how good the champion is."

cFlame·1/30/2015, 6:06:58 PM·1 votes·913 views

NOTICE: When I made the title, some of you didn't realize that was a joke. Why else would I put "" there unless its said in a different tone such as sarcasm? I don't actually believe that win rate is solely determined by how good the champion is, as I explained there are factors that can make a win rate go down making it appear that the champion is weaker. Iv'e heard batches of silly arguments before, and I really disgust them. When someone explains why a champion would be too strong and needs real weaknesses. (EXAMPLE: Zed, Lee Sin) Or when the community explains that a champion needs more work done to them especially after giving feedback on the PBE claiming the changes will ruin the fun or strengths of the champion. (EXAMPLE: Cassiopea, Skarner) And then people think they can counter argue like this so easily: "But the winrates OP! Lee Sin isn't strong becuz he got a less than 46% win rate! Cassiopea is OP! She got a above 50% win rate in all ranked divisions! OOooooohhhhh!" It would be that simple to believe that they were fairly balanced and no work needed to be done. But being like that wouldn't be using any common sense period. So lets add in some common sense, obviously if something is strong there will be an amount of people who would play a champion just because they're strong. Whats the amount of people who would play a champion just because they're fun? A lot of these players can be found in non-ranked games actually. But a large majority of the players in ranked don't have time to consider whats fun at all, they instead go for something that they learned how to play and can carry games with. Not to mention the past of when a champion may have been broken or extremely op. Using common sense, this occurs many times: A mature, grown player is 7/0 as Lee Sin, his little brother (12 years old) is watching him and goes "Wow! Your so good with that guy!" But then the adult player goes "Yeah I guess... Its more about the character than the actual skill." The twelve year old will keep this in mind for the next time he plays. He eventually buys Lee Sin, and plays him; He even gets into ranked after a while, and plays Lee Sin for a total of around 20 games over two months along with one other champion. He has a 26% average win rate with Lee Sin, while his brother has a 73% average win rate with Lee Sin. This is very easy to understand, and it also changes the total average win rate on Lee Sin across all stages when people like this play Lol. Now I'm not saying its wrong of them to play Lol, but Riot should consider that they are a deciding factor in win rates, and so should we. There could be a really good player at Lol who has a friend, and the friend usually feeds on average 2/14 while his brother carries the games with someone like Nasus or Tryndamere. Please leave feedback, thanks for reading.

2 Comments

Nybx4life1/30/2015, 7:05:39 PM1 votes

Win rate is more of popularity / skill.

Funny enough, looking at the lolking stats for highest winrate champs, only 2 were above 12% of popularity (Kat and J4). The rest were under that. Hell, KogMaw is on that list with 1.4% popularity.

I think it's due to Flavor of the Month and champ ease than actual skill. Most of those champs have strong counters to them, yet they consider them good.

Dunno what I'm getting at here, but I think it's skill =/= popularity =/= "good" champ

Trylobyte1/30/2015, 7:27:15 PM1 votes

Win rate is affected by a few things that have nothing to do with the champion.

  1. Popularity. The more popular a champion is the more their winrate gravitates towards 50% because the sample size grows much larger, which has a normalizing effect on the win percentage. A 51.5% winrate across ten million games is much more significant than a 60% winrate across ten thousand games.

  2. Ban rate. The more often a champion is banned the lower their winrate tends to get because nobody has the chance to actually get good with them. It also leads to a scenario where if a champion isn't banned someone will nearly always take it even if they're terrible with them simply because of the perception this champion is OP. This effect gets exponentially stronger the higher the banrate gets; a 25% banrate has almost no noticeable effect but a 75% ban rate has a large one and a 90%+ ban rate has an enormous impact.

  3. Complexity. The more complex a champion is the lower their winrate if they're also unforgiving of mistakes. LeBlanc had this going for her when she got nerfed - She was hard to play well and her extremely fragile nature meant that if you weren't pro with her you died a lot. Syndra gets a fair bit of this too.