People keep misusing win/pick/ban data
I see this quite often: If a popular champ is getting raged on again, people pull up ban rates. If an unpopular champ is being discussed, people pull up pick rates. And most of the time, people will fling around win rates and no one cares because everyone's halfway skeptical about them. I'm making this thread to address how poorly the community utilizes these three demographics.
Win rate: The issue I have with win rates is that people just outright disregard them whenever they want. If you're making a claim about how strong or weak some champ is, you need stats to back it up, and general win rates are one way to do that. You can't just say "This champ's op", and when they have a 47% win rate in your elo, you make excuses as to why that doesn't matter. You ALSO can't say a champ's NOT op, and then when someone points out a massive 54% win rate in Diamond elo, you turn around and say "Everyone's just playing against the champ wrong".
Like, I agree that you shouldn't blindly follow win rate stats, and it's good that people want to be skeptical about them, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Everything needs to be done within reason, and that includes utilizing or not utilizing win rate stats to make a point.
Pick rate: The issue with pick rate is that people like to either ignore or abuse it to make a point. If a champion's doing "pretty good", people will say "Well, they have a 4% pick rate so this 53% win rate champion should be buffed a little bit" (this was an actual conversation I had with someone about Katarina in another thread on Gameplay, but I don't remember which thread. You could surf my post history if you want to burn that time). Or they'll be talking on Lee or Yasuo or whoever that's more infamous and say "Well, yeah, their win rate's like 48%, but their PICK RATE'S like 10%+ so they should be nerfed".
As far as pick rate goes, if you want to use it for a credible argument, a vastly large or abnormally small pick rate could make a case about treating champion power differently. Someone with a 1%-ish pick rate? You could make the case that mains hold their stats up, even if they look ok (like how Morde plummeted after Morde jg made an LCS appearance and it started showing up in solo queue for a bit). If the number's super high, then you could make the case that the champ's generally even more powerful, and their stats are being dragged down cause everyone's on the champ's junk at the time. Most people actually are pretty decent with pick rate stats, unless they're incredibly biased, so that's not an issue to harp on. The ban rate thing, however, is, and it's the main reason I made this thread.
Ban rate: The issue when people use ban rate as an argument is that they assume that "Since X was banned, they were banned because they'd otherwise win that match", and it creates this mentality where people sort of "add" a champ's ban rate to their win rate when assessing how strong that champ is. That's just the wrong way to go about things.
For example, let's say you're running a race with 10 people, and for some crazy reason, your coach has the option to allow you to run this race and place where you end up, or he can say "Regardless of what place you get, you're gonna be 3rd place". You can be first, second, or dead last, but if your coach picks the latter option, what you ACTUALLY do won't matter anymore. Bans are kind of like that. If we have, say, Gragas, banned for 5 matches, you can't assume he'd have won or lost any of those matches. You can only state that people did not want to see him in those matches.
Bans aren't a statistic for how powerful a champ is more than they're a representation for how powerful the community thinks they are, just like how your coach simply thought you weren't fast enough, rather than actually seeing that you would have lost that race. Not saying there's no correlation, but I am saying there's no conclusion about champion power you can draw from ban data alone.
Conclusion: A healthy discussion generated from pick/ban/win rates can be done when you pay head to the general win rates, pick rates, and "champion main win rates". Ban rates should probably be reserved for other types of commentary, because they aren't a statement on the strength of a champ in the first place. Maybe you can say something like "Everyone hates this champ, see!?!?!?", but that doesn't make that champ good or not good more than it makes them annoying.
