Prioritizing ban rates is the new thing. It's also the wrong thing.

Lately, since the turn of season 8 where Riot started to prioritize reworks, people have been justifying their disdain for a champion less via pick/win rates, which is what one would normally assume would dictate the general solo queue power level of a champion, and started basing their opinions more on ban rates instead...which objectively doesn't prove anything of value for champion power.

Like, if we're looking at someone like Lucian, who has a strong general win rate and massive play rate, indicating that a good deal of the population can find mileage on him, you can easily say the champion's overtuned for the solo queue environment. You can easily point to his stats and say "Hey, this champion needs to be nerfed. Any random schmuck can pick him up and he performs well into a ton of champs, even champs that should normally beat him".

But what if that champion performs less like Lucian and more like Trundle or Nasus (again, in solo queue, not the actual 5v5 competitive experience the game should be)? Then you can't look at win rate because they're getting bodied on the rift, and even if they're picked a good bit, that may show that the higher end of these players aren't doing poorly, but you can't totally prove that the champ's outright busted when you have poor (not just middling win rates, but straight poor) winrates coupled with high popularity. To boot, it also shows that, most likely, if you run into that champ in solo queue, you'll win that match more than you'll lose that match. The numbers won't tell why this is the case, but they do explain what's happening, which is that this champ isn't winning games.

So now we've come up to the 2018 scapegoat for wasting bans on solo queue's worst participants, which is ban rate. I've made a thread on this before, but to restate the point: Ban rate =/= champion power.

One more time now: Ban rate IS NOT champion power. Ban rate is simply a reflection of perception, and whether that perception is warranted or not isn't verified by just "citing the ban rate" and calling it a day.

So if I'm in a discussion with someone about a champion, and they're saying this champ is either too strong or too weak, a ban rate doesn't either prove nor disprove this argument. Like, if I say "Hey, Phreak is the fastest Rioter at Riot games" for a week before the big Rioter Race they hold a week before the big in-house League tournament, and I show off these photo shopped images of him running at Mach 3 to everyone in the building, and RedMercy comes up with a new League of Legends video about Phreak's high school track trophies, and PapaSmithy then shows up to the event and uses his ban on Phreak, no one can come up and say "Yeah, Phreak's the fastest at Riot. Look at that race they had where they banned him"...because he never participated to win or lose in the first place. This is the essence of champion bans. They don't make a case for how strong or weak a champion is. They disqualify a champion trial outright. You can't say "Yeah Irelia is super strong even though she's one of the lowest general win rate champs in the game. Look at her ban rate!". What you CAN say is "Yeah, Irelia may have a bad general win rate, but she's better balanced this way because people that master and climb with her still perform pretty well. Lolalytics shows a stat that states that the average for top rated Irelia mains is about a 53% win rate in Diamond 1." This would be a more informed way to convey the message people try to convey by shrugging off win rates for ban rates.

Someone that solely tries to utilize win rates to push an argument about champion power is shallow-minded, but someone that tries to use solely ban rates is even worse, because ban rates in and of themselves don't even prove or disprove anything outside of general discontent with the champ, regardless of if that discontent comes from champion power or other sources. If your point is "No one likes fighting this champ. Look at their ban rate", that's another topic...one I don't particularly care for myself, but I can't disqualify someone's personal disdain for a champion if it's so profound that it even overpowers their desire to ban actual threats to their odds of winning. This is me trying to set the record straight with this thread. If you're going to cite ban rates for why a champion is good or bad, I'm going to have to wholeheartedly ignore it. It's useless, anyway.