The Math of Climbing in League of Legends
WIN RATE: a win or loss in LoL counts as approximately 20 LP. If your MMR is higher a win might count more and a loss might count less. If your MMR is lower, a win might count less and a loss might count more. So it takes approximately 5 more wins than losses to gain 100 LP. Most promotions are best of three which takes roughly two games to win and promoting a League is a best of five which takes 3 games to win. Therefore, it takes about 36 more wins than losses to climb one full League.
Win Rate / Expected Number of Games to Climb One League 51% / 1800 55% / 360 60%/ 180 65% / 120
This means that if you are only slightly better than the players you are matched with it can take a thousand games or more to climb, but if you are significantly better than the players you are matched with, then the number of games you have to play drops dramatically. This is the mathematics behind players that say you "belong" at your current rank. The reason you "belong" there is because even if you are "better" than the players you get matched with, you aren't significantly better (you need to be getting more than 55% win rate). But that isn't actually the important take away you should be getting from this mathematics. The important take away here isn't where other players tell you you belong. The important take away is: how much time are you willing to spend to climb. Maybe you do belong in the next League up, but are you willing to play 400 games to get there instead of the 120 it takes some other guy?
INFLUENCE ON THE GAME: You are one of ten players in the game (not five) and that means that all other things being equal each player has about a 10% influence on the outcome of the game. So if your influence on the game is just as profound as the other players, then you are the determining influence for one out of every ten games. Perhaps your Match History looks like this:
- opponent AFK -> easy win
- teammate AFK -> easy loss
- enemy smurf -> easy loss
- teammate hard carried -> easy win
- team imploded with negativity -> easy loss
- enemy team imploded with negativity -> easy win
- teammate feeds -> easy loss
- enemy feeds -> easy win
- close game but teammate picked off death timers OP -> easy loss 10. The outcome of this game was directly dependent on you
This is the mathematics behind players that complain that they can't climb. They often blame teammates for feeding or AFK or troll and they have the feeling that their own skill at the game just doesn't matter. And they get told that they shouldn't blame their teammates. But, of course, it is obvious from looking at the match history that many of their games were losses due to poorly performing teammates. They aren't actually technically "wrong" when they place blame on their teammates. So why shouldn't they blame them? The answer is that blaming random players won't change the mathematics of climbing. These wins and losses appear to be due to random factors beyond control. It is the equivalent of blaming the rain for spoiling your picnic. Yes, the rain spoiled your picnic; you aren't wrong. But you also can't control the rain... so why are you blaming it? You should've anticipated that it could rain and been prepared. So how do you do that? The answer is that you have to increase your influence on the game beyond the normal 10% that everyone is assumed to contribute.
SPENDING YOUR TIME: It should be clear by now that players have to spend time climbing. A player with a 55% win rate has to be committed to playing 300-400 games to see a result. That's actually a lot of time spent playing the game and if most of that time, you aren't the primary factor in who wins, then you need a strategy to deal with the rain.
Mechanics: For this we have to go back to the advice commonly given to players: improve your mechanics. It has been said by top players that getting to the highest ranks in LoL is all about improving your mechanics. Macro game, item builds, Runes, Masteries, blah, blah, blah - all of that is secondary. It's all a clever distraction. It's only important if you actually have the mechanics to back it up. It doesn't matter if teamfighting was the "right" call, if you don't have the mechanics to turn that fight to victory. This advice of improving mechanics comes from coaches that trained in Korea solo queue. It comes from Challenger players that confessed that they didn't think pro play was about mechanics until they entered pro play and discovered that other pro players were doing things they didn't even know were possible. You might think that you've climbed past the point of needing to improve your mechanics, but I'm saying that never actually happens; you can always have better mechanics.
Time and Attention in the Game: So let's say you are playing the game and you miss a cs or... you die. Maybe the chat blows up with every player putting in their two cents about why you suck. And maybe you get irked and type something back or maybe you don't type anything, but you can't get your teammate's negativity off your mind. This is all a distraction - a waste of time. While you are thinking about that missed CS, your lane opponent could land a skill shot and the next thing you know you are respawning on the fountain and you are still thinking about how bummed you are that you died while you chat with your jungler about how he isn't ganking for you and while that happens you miss three more CS because you are trying to play safe and not feed. There is a lot of mental attention being wasted and you don't deserve that win - you got carried. Here's the real deal: the reason for most deaths is obvious. Watch your replay. It's obvious. Most of the time, there isn't a whole lot to think about. If you are chatting about death (your own or a teammate's), then you are probably wasting time. Talking about it doesn't magically resurrect anyone or fix any problems. This is because most deaths are due to mechanical error. If you had simply been paying attention and on top of your game, you would not have died.
What this all boils down to is that you can improve your mechanics all the way to challenger and into the pro scene and mechanics is the primary factor in how fast you climb ranked queues. So how are you spending your time? If nine out of every ten games is out of your control and you are playing at least 300 games to get to the next league, then you have a huge amount of time. If you finish a game and didn't improve, then you didn't change the rate at which you climb.
This is the mathematics of climbing: to climb faster, you need to increase your win rate. to increase your win rate, you need to have more influence on the game. to have more influence on the game, you need to die less. to die less, you need to improve your mechanics. to improve your mechanics, you have to stop wasting time.
TL;DR: Once you do this, you will realize that whether you win or lose a game isn't actually that important. In fact, the mathematics tells us that it isn't that important.
