Zilean's buff is not actually live - his winrate still rose a lot this patch.
Zilean was supposed to receive a buff this patch that would remove the mana cost of his W. By playing it last game I found out that it is not even live, and then I proceeded to feed hard. Then I looked up his winrate, and it rose from 47%, one of the worst ones in the game, to 50%, which is even a bit above average. When I found out that the W buff did not actually become life I became extremely demotevated, since before the patch Zilean was known as a generally bad champion, at least that is what everyone said. By having this mindset, I fed a lot, even though I was playing decently before that. Yet a lot of players seemed to have seen this buff in the patch notes, went into a game with a good attitude and won that way. This is an interesting thing to note. This way I realized just how much of our play is influenced by how confident and with what attitude we go into a game. By realizing that you get a much better perspective of the game. Here are some thoughts:
-The winrate of a champion is influenced by the playerbase. If it just is a very small playerbase of people who main the champion, it is generally higher, because they go into a game with more confidence.
-The winrate of a champion is influenced by how fun he/she is to play, since when you have fun playing a champion you have a generally better attitude.
-In contrary to that, the winrate of a champion goes down if he/she is boring to play.
-The winrate of a champion is also influenced by how unfun it is to play against .
-And most importantly the winrate is influenced by how the public opinion on said champion is. This one will take a bit longer to explain. If the public opinion is "Champion XY" is OP, people will go into a game with a negative attitude against it and a positive attitude if they have it on their team. The reverse is the case too. Some examples. Vayne did not receive a lot of buffs lately, yet heer winrate slowy rose. This is because people became more and more confident with playing her while at the same time it became more and more unfun to play against her. This way a lot of people started to say that she is OP, even though nothing actually happened to her. Another example would be the Juggernauts. While they are undeniably good their winrate was influenced a lot by how people saw them as a champion. The public opinion really favoured the side that they would be OP, even though they surely were undeniably good but still countered by a lot of meta champions at the time. The best example for this is Darius. He always had is imba heal, yet the people only began to notice when he received a minor buff to his W. Before the buff, when people did not know how good he was yet, he had a 50% winrate just to make it 53-54% the next patch. To have an example for the reverse case you could take Gragas. A lot of old Gragas players had a really negative opinion on his rework and his winrate was amongst the worst of the game with about 46%. Yet the numbers of his kit spoke for him and showed how good he actually is, first as a toplaner and then as a jungler. Only the competitive scene, which influences the community by a lot, was able to make his winrate rise to 50% and above, just because they discovered it. By the time Cinderhulk was around for quite a while already, yet it didn't make an immediate impact.
The general message behind all of this is that everyone of you should try to remain neutral and to form your very own opinion on what is good and what's not. Don't let yourself be influenced too much by the mob and don't form opinions based on winrates, buffs, nerfs, public opinion and what is played competitively. I for my part main Mundo, and even though he is not played competitively, the public has a bad opinion on it and his winrate is around 47%, I still have about a 70% winrate with him in rankeds, since I'm a confident main.
Oh yeah, and make the Zilean buff actually go live, Rito plz.
