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The irony of underpowered champiosn with high winrates, vice versa

Kowe The Ewok··4 votes·792 views

We have 2 core factors

  • a huge amount of champions
  • "the information age", where once something becomes top-notch people will instantly be informed of this and copy builds / strategies

This leads to a situation where whatever is strong at the moment gets continiously played and picked up by the majority.

Even with these superior picks and builds many people will fail, simply because they are inexperienced with the champion - or their "skill level" is too low to use him properly.

This leads to an ironical situation where some of the most broken champions have beneath 50% winratios. He-who-most-not-be-named being part of them (everybody knows which champion I am talking about, ironically I would get downvoted if I typed him his name here because of above popularity. What champion did you have in mind when you read the above phrase? You just tricked yourself and confirmed it ;) )

On the other side we have underpowered, thus underpicked champions.

People never see these champiosn being picked (since you basically see the same 35 champions every match) and don't know their abilities, their range and what they can.

Thus these underpowered champions have an instant advantage - by being underpowered and underplayed - when facing less experienced opponents.

On a side note: Players who dare to play these champions usually know to how play them well, possibly because they used them a lot back in a season where they were viable.

As a result however the underpowered champions have high winratios, while some overpowered champions barely reach the 50% mark.

And because of their winrates Riot refuses to buff these underpowered champions

Oh sweet irony!

12 Comments

Joe Dredd3 votes

ur an idiot

Kowe The Ewok3 votes

Said the 11y.o though guy, lol.

Joe Dredd1 votes

Said the 12 y.o guy who wants to feel superior, lol.

Kowe The Ewok1 votes

Well, you are the one of us who joined the topic just for the sake of trolling, spamming and insulting people ;)

So do us all a favor and get lost, you are wasting precious bytes of cyberspace which could be used to save constructive posts :)

Joe Dredd1 votes

[deleted]

Kowe The Ewok1 votes

Wow, you can copy other people statements xD I just hope you get what you deserve. Your posts have been send to the support.

Joe Dredd1 votes

lmao it got removed. Not banned tho :)

Enyria2 votes

Interesting idea, a few points however:

  1. If a champion is "broken-level" strong but has that power locked in hard to master strategies, one would expect that kind of stuff to show up in LCS (not now as we are in preseason, but balancing will only stabilize when the structural changes are done). Thus at least the offenders from S4 should have shown up (and Riot had a lot of fun playing Whack-A-Mole with balance changes last season).

  2. The concept of a champion's strength includes enemy players' ability to deal with it. (Example: If anyone learned over night to dodge skillshots almost perfectly, Lux would probably drop a tier in usefulness). Also as long as players can play around their underdog's weaknesses and achieve reasonable success with it (aka acceptable winrate) the champion can apparently perform acceptably; just requiring more work to do so (so the champion is not neccessarily terribly weak, just hard to play).

  3. The phenomena described here can be very well observed by filtering pick-, ban- and winrate against MMR, which is easy even for players to do approximately. Given Riot's huge investment into statistical techniques, I am fairly sure that they do this as a bread-and-butter analysis.

Keep in mind that Riot has a significantly larger metric base potentially available than what is computed from the end-of-game screen information, including possibly:

  • Skill shot hit percentages
  • "Trade results" on lanes (HP wise)
  • Skill leveling orders
  • Typical combos

All in all I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think it is a real problem concerning game balance.

EDIT: Removed X.1 subsection numbers as it causes the forum code to mess up all over the place.

Kowe The Ewok2 votes
  1. We continiously have these champions and they do show up in LCS. I won't name current champions, since fanboys will be mad. but look at Lee Sin and how powerfull he remained for years before all the "recent" nerfs.

2.1 The point you have here is half valid: It's the case of extremes. Case 1 where the enemy played is suprised because he doesn't know they champion and case 2 where above champions becomes useless (since he's underpowered). but his opponent actually knows the champion and how to play against him. (Heimerdinger would be a good example here. Bronze Elo players who don't know him tend to facetank his turrets and complete ignore them trying to dive onto him. Experienced players however know that his turrets have high CD (24s) and that using an ability to kill them is not a waste - but a open up a huge timeframe where he's useless and during which you'll win any clash against him.)

Enyria1 votes

(1) Don't know but I also have a blind spot towards champion balance as I think the players behind them matter significantly more (probably because I play fighting games).

(2.1) But those are, as you say, extremes. The majority of situations lies somewhere in between ("knows the matchup a bit, but not completely"). If the champion can perform somewhat reliably here, the winrate would be reasonable. If the champion doesn't, then the winrate would be expected to be "too low" (binary wordings, but the actual stuff would happen on a sliding scale).

ProfDrDeath2 votes

First of, underplayed doesn't necessarily mean underpowered. It just means that the respective champion can have strengths that only matter in certain contexts or that are weak in regard to the currently favored champions, thus not fitting the current meta.

Effectively, there are four different states, if you just look at winrate and pickrate as metrics:

  • High pick rate, high win rate: Strong indicator that the champion in question is above the baseline power level - can be meta-dependant or meta-independant. Examples being 4.20 Warwick.

  • High pick rate, low win rate: Indicator that the champion in question is actually shaping the meta game, forcing people to play around him/her or suffer for it. Winrate is rather low due to people picking preferable (conciously or not) countercompositions to this champion. Prominent examples: Lee Sin, Vayne, Ezreal, Lucian

  • Low pick rate, high win rate: Can be one of three things: Either is the champion a good situational counterpick in the established meta game, or the champion is strong but unsatisfying to play, or the champion is very difficult to master. Examples: Pre-nerf Fiora, Current Cassiopeia, Anivia

  • Low pick rate, low win rate: Generally underpowered in the current meta game. Lack of power makes champion unsatisfying to play. Example: Urgot, Ryze after nerfs, Zilean after nerfs

Disclaimer: All examples are refering to soloqueue winrates only. Some champions are way better in actually coordinated environments than in the invariably teamplay-deprived thing that is solo queue.

Spacefight0r1 votes

Not really. You'll see champions that have been around for ages doing poorly across all elos all the way up to diamond (probably the last tier where you can get a meaningful sample size). Prime examples would be Zed and Lee Sin. The fact of the matter is, we as players are absolutely terrible at understanding what actually wins matches. Champions with seemingly strong, high impact kits can have bad win rates while relatively benign, low impact champions like supports can have high win rates.

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