This article is written by MobaChampion.com. 

League of Legends is an incredibly popular game that has become a worldwide sensation. The most recent numbers published by Riot Games show that League has an active player base of over 80 million gamers worldwide. LoL players are always looking for a competitive edge, but the meta evolves constantly, so players need to stay up-to-date. Millions of games are played every day. This provides LoL 'data scientists' with a wealth of information to extract meaningful insights that can help players win.

Many players rely on simple LoL Tier Lists to pick the best champions for a given meta, and while tier lists are valuable resources, they don’t capture the whole meta. We present here an analysis using an advanced data science algorithm that has allowed us to rank the most successful player behaviors in the current meta that lead to wins.

The Analysis

Using a modern AI algorithm known as a Random Forest, one can extract the most important factors from the data that will lead a team to victory. Check out the Wiki article if you’re interested in learning more about how the algorithm works.

Shown in the figure at the bottom are the most critical factors that contribute to a team’s victory, ranked in order of importance. Let’s look at some of the more interesting results.

Assists are More Important than Kills

For mid, support, bottom, and jungle, the number of assists is more important than the number of kills. This may be an obvious conclusion for more supportive roles, but it is counter-intuitive for the bottom and mid positions, which are often occupied by carry champions.

To maximize your win potential, players should work together. Kills should not be made solo, if possible. They should be distributed and earned together. A kill made alone is worthless gold for your team than a kill earned with an assist. Players who don’t participate in fights will quickly fall behind.

We took a look at a team’s win rate as a function of the ratio of assists to kills. This conclusion is echoed here as well. If most of your team’s kills are earned solo (i.e. your A/D ratio is around 0.5 or lower), you will only win 40% of the time or less. If however, you share many of your kills with teammates (A/D ratio of 2 or greater), you could expect to win more than 55% of the time.

This is also shown in the gold totals earned for each position. All positions (except for support who gives up CS gold to their carry) contribute much more to a win when they make more gold. Share the love!

Objective Kills are More Important Than Anything

The most significant factor that contributes to a team’s victory is the number of objective kills (towers and inhibitors) a team makes. It is much more critical than champion kills or gold. If you have an opportunity to take an objective, do it.

Some players think that maximizing their KDA (ratio of kills and assists to deaths) is critical. This analysis shows that is incorrect. A player’s KDA only contributes a small amount to their team’s win rate. Your focus should always be on securing objectives. When that is not possible, earning gold and kills is excellent, but they should be secondary concerns to objectives.

In the early game, this is especially true. Teams that earn first blood end up winning 59% of the time, yet teams that take the first tower win 72% of the time. You can see in the table below the win rates for teams that reach each milestone first. It’s clear that while first blood is significant, you should focus your energy on securing objective kills in order to maximize your win rate.

Healer and Tank Supports are Better than Damage Dealing and Crowd Controlling Supports

Of course, some excellent matchups and synergies break this rule, but in general, the data shows that supports who heal or tank for their teammates win more often than those with superior damage or crowd control abilities with no tank or heal.

Vision Is the Responsibility of All Players, Not Just Support or Jungle

The vision score of all positions contributes strongly to a team’s win probability. Many players, especially in low tiers, rely heavily on their support to do most of the warding. Yet, it is the mid’s vision score that contributes most to a team’s win rate. This is most likely due to how easy it is to get ganked as mid if you push the lane without vision. All players have trinkets, and all players should use them to maximize their team’s vision.

When a team’s average vision score begins to exceed 25, there are diminishing returns for the extra effort, but up until that point, each well-placed ward or ward destroyed helps you towards victory.

Champion Difficulty Does Not Impact Win Rate

The 5 champion difficulty ratings were all ranked in the bottom 10. This analysis only includes Gold+ tier matches. Among intermediate and highly skilled players, a champion's inherent difficulty level no longer matters. Players are experienced enough to interpret what their foes will do and are practiced enough with their chosen champions to overcome their complexities.

Players in low tiers must practice well with a select handful of champions if they wish to advance. They can’t rely on easy-to-use champs to improve their rank.

The future of competitive esports lies in big data analysis and using predictive algorithms to verify your current strategy and test new ideas. Machine learning is at the center of these big data analysis tools. Staying up-to-date and using new tools is necessary to crush your competition and perform at a high level.