In our modern days, online multiplayer games have become an incredibly popular thing, having worldwide competitions such as eSports (an organization owned by multiple game companies like Activision, Tencent, etc..), which runs multiple events every year for many popular games, like League Of Legends. The most recent numbers published by Riot Games (publisher of League) show that League has an active player base of over 80 million games worldwide, almost four times the population of Australia. With that being said, ‘data scientists’ are provided with a ton of information to clean and extract meaningful information that can help players win. 

Using the modern programming language, Python, with three libraries: Pandas, Matplotlib, and Seaborn, one can extract important factors from a dataset that would put a team in advantage to win the game. 

Kills are less important than Assists

In League, whether you’re playing mid, support, top, or jungle, the number of kills you get is less important than the number of assists. It’s not only a conclusion that should be put to support, but for all the other roles as well. 

In any game, where the concept of teams is involved, to assure victory, the team should work together. One should not kill alone if one can involve another team player with him, since a kill makes a player earn gold. Having your team involved would have the gold distributed and do not leave players of your team fall behind.  

We computed the win rate of the player as a function of the ratio of assists to death, and we can see that when your A/D ratio is 2.5 and higher, you are more likely to win a game, that is because the whole team was involved in the kills and won gold. 

Objective kills are the Most important

Killing your enemies is indeed an important factor in the game, which helps to get more gold to your team, just like killing creeps, but other important factors in the game help and boost the team in general with buffs and additional gold: Baron and Elemental Dragons. 

One must know that maximizing his KDA (Kills, Deaths, and Assists) alone is enough to win a game, but that is very wrong. Earning the first blood, or the first turret might help to win a game, but statistics show different results. Since Barons and Dragons not only buff your whole team but also gives additional money, this helps to be at a higher advantage against your enemy team. This is why your see, in the picture above, a fight happening next to the monster Baron, with wards (a deployable unit that removes the fog of war in a certain area of the map). 

We’ve also computed the correlation of our dataset to see how the objectives in multiple games impacted the result. As you can see, in the picture below, winning a dragon, increases the chance of winning by 0.63. On the other hand, losing a baron decrease the chance of winning by -0.63. Meanwhile, winning a baron increases the chance of winning by 0.69. On the other hand, losing a baron decreases the chance of winning by -0.69. 

Creeps, gold, and wards interactions

Killing creeps, gold earned and ward interactions are three other major factors to win a game in League. Killing creeps is more or less a job that you continuously do during the game to make money, sometimes referred to as “farming”. Placing wards in the map, whether it’s in the bushes to see if an enemy is planning to trap you, or to be alerted of the enemy jungler coming to gank (help) his teammate.  

As you can see in the picture below, killing a creep increases the correlation with the gold earned during the game. 

We’ve decided to also visualize the correction between the creep score, the gold earned, ward interactions, and the result using the heatmap as well. The conclusion was that killing creeps has a correlation with the gold earned of 0.87, winning gold in a game had a correlation of 0.36 into winning a game, and finally wards interactions had a correlation of 0.054 into winning a game, which doesn’t affect the result of a game. 

Conclusion

As a result of my project, here are the conclusions I made:  

• In early game, do not miss many creep scorers while defending as much as you can your turret, since that would increase your enemy gold. 
• In mid game, destroy your enemy’s turret of your lane, and be involved as much as you can in the team fights, since assists are very important.  
• In late game, with your team grouped together, find a strategy as soon as possible to get the first baron of the game. 

[1]”Five Factors that you should know to win League of Legends”, https://www.invenglobal.com/, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/8188/five-factors-that-you-should-know-to-win-league-of-legends. [Accessed: 23- Oct- 2021]. 

[2]”Some Factors that Can Guarantee Winning in LoL”, Boostroyal.com, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.boostroyal.com/blog/some-factors-that-can-guarantee-winning-in-lol/. [Accessed: 23- Oct- 2021]. 

[3]”League of Legends tips: Win a lot in the free online PC game – Sherwa”, Sherwaonline.com, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://sherwaonline.com/league-of-legends-tips-win-a-lot-in-the-free-online-pc-game/. [Accessed: 23- Oct- 2021].