Only Winrates For EXPERIENCED Players Matter

SirLime·Dec 8, 2016·2 votes·514 views

Stop caring about random winrates in a vacuum. Unless you're looking at experienced players (assuming similar ELO brackets) with 50+ games on a champion, the winrates do NOT tell you about the objective strength of a given champion. They only tell you how easy said champion is to pick-up for Platinum+ players. Riot understands this to an extent and even said that if a champion like Zed had a 50% winrate, he'd be broken.

Finally, winrats should be viewed in the context of playrate. The less a champion is played, the more likely that it's by mains or that the champion is picked into favorable compositions. On the other hand, the same winrate for a champion with 20% playrate could be very worrying.

4 Comments

Seath no scalesDec 8, 20162 votes

If win rates don't objectively tell us the strength of a champion how would riot know that zed having a win rate of 50% would mean he's broken?

dominusxDec 8, 20161 votes

yes yasuo is broken with 49% win rate lets ban him and let fkn braindead syndra be 1st picked by the enemy and autolose .smh

SirLimeDec 8, 20161 votes

{quoted}

yes yasuo is broken with 49% win rate lets ban him and let fkn braindead syndra be 1st picked by the enemy and autolose .smh

True, the best Yasuos have ~54.5% winrate while Syndra goes to ~59.5%. Both average Diamond 1 ELO for their best players. This is actually in contrast to many champions. For example, the best Ziggs average Diamond 4 ELO and the best Kassadin's average Diamond 2 ELO. The lower ELO the best players are for a champion, the higher the average winrates tend to be since there are more mistakes to exploit and climb.

SirLimeDec 8, 20161 votes

[{quoted}](name=Mr Kite,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=rprZ08pB,comment-id=0000,timestamp=2016-12-08T22:22:42.406+0000)

If win rates don't objectively tell us the strength of a champion how would riot know that zed having a win rate of 50% would mean he's broken?

because if that was his average winrate, experienced players would probably be at 60%+.