Vision is important! PROOF

Since the very start of League of Legends, it has been a great discussion how important vision actually is and up till now, there is no systematic research available about this issue. Therefore, I decided to experiment how important vision really is in this game.

Methods I randomly chose whether to play with full or impaired vision based on a coin flip. All games were played with champions I am familiar with (Wukong, Nasus, Janna, Thresh, Leona, Jinx, Ashe, Sejuani, Amumu, Fiddlesticks, Vi, Talon, Swain, Malzahar). I always picked as last of my team and never queue dodged. All games were played in Blind pick Summoner's Rift. In the first phase of the experiment, I reduced my vision by putting off my glasses. In the next phase, I completely removed all vision by blindfolding.

Results

Reduced vision impairs your winrate In the first phase I compared the winrate with and without glasses giving respectively full and reduced vision. Out of the 112 games I played with full vision, I won 68 of them. When putting off my glasses to reduce my vision, I won 31 out of 98 games. This is a significant difference compared with the full vision winrate.

Blindfolding further reduces winrate and is not appreciated In the next phase I compared the effect of full blindness on the ingame performance. Out of 37 games of full vision I won 24 games while Blindfolding reduced my winrate to 1 time in 28 games. The limited size of the sample is due to the ban I received after this amount of blindfolded games. Appearantly my team did not appreciate me playing without vision. One must note that the reduced winrate may be partly caused by the negativity that playing without vision causes in your teammates. However, the personal decreased performance also plays a great role as the KDA reduced from 6.1/3.4/8.9 to 0/13.2/1.4.

Conclusion There is a strong negative correlation between the degree of vision impairment and the winrate and this can be triggered by manually changing one's vision. Disabling vision has effect on your winrate both directly through your own performance, and indirectly through your teammates' motivation to win. This was the first time that the relation of vision and winrate has been examined by systematic analyses of a randomized experiment. These findings may also explain Lee Sin's low performance on the ladder in ranked solo queue. However, whether this low performance is due to his lack of sight or due to the many nerfs and inexperience among the average player has to be confirmed in future research.