|
THREAD IS DEAD... feel free to PM me if you'd like access to the docs with the purpose of continuing the study! Have a good night!
UPDATE! As of 6/13/12 ~11.44pm The new benchmark phase of this undertaking is partially completed. I have some new crunch for you all, and new startling statistic.
In all but one circumstance thus far, the winning team never falls 7% or more behind their opponent.
I'm currently in the process of compiling stats every 3minutes for every single game available on VOD by MLG. You can check the spreadsheet with the information here.
The chart of just the percentile information from which you can make your own charts is here.
From this raw information hopefully we'll develop an action plan to get a more tangible grip on just how snowbally LoL is.
Continuing on to the original post...
Orig Post:
Hey TL,
Long time lurker here who is trying to get into watching League of Legends. I've been watching tournaments for a long time but I began to notice a pattern that just really rankled me. If any team takes a lead by 12min, they are much much more likely to win said game. The game is setup in such a way that any early lead is basically insurmountable except by human error and throwing a game with sub-standard play.
To chart this information, I setup a reddit post I've been updating for two days. It can be found here. I'll copy and paste highlights, but basically over two days the results have been remarkable. The team that takes as little as a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes wins over 90% of the time. I wasn't expecting it to be so marked. Imagine watching game 7 tonight and seeing the Celtics go up 45-40 late in the second quarter and being able to say with 90% certainty that they are going to the finals.
Please please do give me suggestions and feedback either here or on reddit.
The raw data will be pasted below! Thank you for your views and time!
The Current Tally: 12min leaders are 34-1-3 The leader in gold at 12min wins over 90% of the time.
Losses are games in which an early lead was blown. Ties are games that were even for the majority of the game.
Here's a link to the Google Doc with all the information: updated as of 8:33EST!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1494qN0iu9SA6DCyqbpeG-nZp10M19_4cS-93tTLAfmY/edit
And the original reddit post: (this will always be as current as my data intake)
http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/utge5/the_snowball_experiment_day_2_charting_mlg/
|
uuuugh... anyone know how to make tables on the forums? that data does NOT transfer clearly there....
|
that is fantastic information nice work compiling this i think that says a lot for early game comps, way more than anecdotal evidence
|
On June 10 2012 06:38 gtrsrs wrote: that is fantastic information nice work compiling this i think that says a lot for early game comps, way more than anecdotal evidence
aww shucks! Thank you sir. Hard data doesn't get much traction on LoLreddit sadly, so I'm kinda thirsty for feedback.
|
hey thats good to know, i do enjoy LOL a little bit, but games are to long and boring to watch. If i can watch the first 12 mins and have a 90% chance to guess the victor hell ill watch every 12 mins of any Pro game!!. Then of course sc2 right after till next game !
|
Good work on this. I don't say this to cast a shadow on your work, but for the numbers to support the notion that a 10% gold lead at 12min is a predictor of success, you need to adjust for the skill differences in the teams. You're implicitly assuming that each team is evenly matched.
Basically you've shown that the leader at 12 mins has been winning the game, but it doesn't really do much to prove that leading at 12 mins won them the game.
|
On June 10 2012 07:09 Takkara wrote: Good work on this. I don't say this to cast a shadow on your work, but for the numbers to support the notion that a 10% gold lead at 12min is a predictor of success, you need to adjust for the skill differences in the teams. You're implicitly assuming that each team is evenly matched.
Basically you've shown that the leader at 12 mins has been winning the game, but it doesn't really do much to prove that leading at 12 mins won them the game.
this, the better team is gonna be the better team from minute 1 to minute 35 to minute x... probably about 90% of the time
|
Maybe you could put the tables on Google Docs (guessing you're using Excel?) and post the link here.
|
Yea, it is impossible for me to account for "skill" of a team given that that metric is entirely subjective. You could make the argument seeds are important, but that's odd too. Ultimately, the numbers should work out closer as the brackets progress. But, I'm speculating if they won't. Even split series have shown the snowball effect. It's just a matter of who gets the lead first. In series which go to 3 games, you'd think that the snowball factor wouldn't play as large of a factor though too because the "skill" factor would be more evenly matched.
this, the better team is gonna be the better team from minute 1 to minute 35 to minute x... probably about 90% of the time
No, not necessarily. That just means that the sport you're watching is designed in such a way that any lead is a foregone conclusion. That is a problem for your sport because it is inherently predictable (and therefore boring). In any other sport it's possible to come back from an early deficit through skill and game elements. I'm currently hunting for soccer and basketball statistics for some comparison, but even DOTA functions differently. Gold and xp changes in dota happen very frequently.
Watching any other sport or esport there is give and take. Leads are lost and gained. Like the basketball example above, if a sport becomes that predictable there's something very very wrong.
|
On June 10 2012 07:17 Jaso wrote: Maybe you could put the tables on Google Docs (guessing you're using Excel?) and post the link here.
Ooooh, good idea. I'll try that out!!
|
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 10 2012 07:16 BreakfastBurrito wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 07:09 Takkara wrote: Good work on this. I don't say this to cast a shadow on your work, but for the numbers to support the notion that a 10% gold lead at 12min is a predictor of success, you need to adjust for the skill differences in the teams. You're implicitly assuming that each team is evenly matched.
Basically you've shown that the leader at 12 mins has been winning the game, but it doesn't really do much to prove that leading at 12 mins won them the game. this, the better team is gonna be the better team from minute 1 to minute 35 to minute x... probably about 90% of the time This is arguably a bad thing. Good games do come from teams that are well-matched, but these are relatively infrequent. Far more frequent are lopsided games, and a good spectator game has mechanics allowing those lopsided games to be entertaining.
More frequently in other games (Starcraft for example), the really good matches come from a somewhat lopsided matchup, where the team that is weaker in terms of fundamental skill can create a back-and-forth game through the use of innovative strategies, or good foresight into the "better" team's playstyle. Some of Flash's most entertaining games come from games in which the weaker player (i.e. anyone else) approaches Flash with an innovative early game build, and we see Flash either deflect it with maphack-like game sense, or slowly claw his way back into the game after having an astronomical disadvantage.
A game that is so deterministic, even in scenarios with lopsided matchups signifies a problem. Even lopsided matchups between a clearly stronger and clearly weaker team should produce close or back-and-forth games at least some of the time, due to the "cheese" or "special preparation" factor.
|
On June 10 2012 08:12 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 07:16 BreakfastBurrito wrote:On June 10 2012 07:09 Takkara wrote: Good work on this. I don't say this to cast a shadow on your work, but for the numbers to support the notion that a 10% gold lead at 12min is a predictor of success, you need to adjust for the skill differences in the teams. You're implicitly assuming that each team is evenly matched.
Basically you've shown that the leader at 12 mins has been winning the game, but it doesn't really do much to prove that leading at 12 mins won them the game. this, the better team is gonna be the better team from minute 1 to minute 35 to minute x... probably about 90% of the time This is arguably a bad thing. Good games do come from teams that are well-matched, but these are relatively infrequent. Far more frequent are lopsided games, and a good spectator game has mechanics allowing those lopsided games to be entertaining. More frequently in other games (Starcraft for example), the really good matches come from a somewhat lopsided matchup, where the team that is weaker in terms of fundamental skill can create a back-and-forth game through the use of innovative strategies, or good foresight into the "better" team's playstyle. Some of Flash's most entertaining games come from games in which the weaker player (i.e. anyone else) approaches Flash with an innovative early game build, and we see Flash either deflect it with maphack-like game sense, or slowly claw his way back into the game after having an astronomical disadvantage. A game that is so deterministic, even in scenarios with lopsided matchups signifies a problem. Even lopsided matchups between a clearly stronger and clearly weaker team should produce close or back-and-forth games at least some of the time, due to the "cheese" or "special preparation" factor.
This is exactly my point, and why I set out to compile this info. Much more articulate than i am :-)
|
On June 10 2012 06:38 gtrsrs wrote: that is fantastic information nice work compiling this i think that says a lot for early game comps, way more than anecdotal evidence
Exactly this. Had a pretty exhausting discussion with my friends about exactly this but they still are like "meh so why do early game oriented comps not work so reliably when playing ranked 5's". This OP backs me up, thanks for the work.
So all in all I think one has to remember that this statement is only true for high level coordinated play we are used to see during big events.
On June 10 2012 08:12 TheYango wrote:
A game that is so deterministic, even in scenarios with lopsided matchups signifies a problem. Even lopsided matchups between a clearly stronger and clearly weaker team should produce close or back-and-forth games at least some of the time, due to the "cheese" or "special preparation" factor.
I don't think that's a bad thing, because playing at the very top level is a pro players profession so I don't really see a problem with a small kill lead or dragon advantage influencing the winning chances so early.
Ofc there are some really boring stomps from time to time, but there are also people that love games that are decided by playing "less perfect" than the opponent. This it at least why I watch those tournaments: I want to see what it is like at the very top level where every little advantage like FB, sneaky dragon or outplay counts because this is what I will never experience myself when playing with friends or randoms in solo q.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 10 2012 08:29 little fancy wrote: I don't think that's a bad thing, because playing at the very top level is a pro players profession so I don't really see a problem with a small kill lead or dragon advantage influencing the winning chances so early. By design there's an issue if 2/3 of the average game time is spent only determining 10% of the final outcome.
If 90% of games take 12 minutes to decide, then why should games take longer than 20 minutes? It kills the tension for the spectator when in 90% of games, the latter 2/3 of the game aren't contributing to the final outcome.
On June 10 2012 08:29 little fancy wrote: Ofc there are some really boring stomps from time to time, but there are also people that love games that are decided by playing "less perfect" than the opponent. This it at least why I watch those tournaments: I want to see what it is like at the very top level where every little advantage like FB, sneaky dragon or outplay counts because this is what I will never experience myself when playing with friends or randoms in solo q. It's essentially the WC3 vs BW argument. I understand there's a certain appeal to the "everything hangs on a razor-thin-wire so the first mistake often decides the entire game", but at the same time, you should also recognize how games being astronomically back-and-forth even at the very top level creates a fantastic spectator experience as well.
|
This doesn't apply at all to solo queue though. Basically it's too easy to play with perfect information in LoL, whether due to the map design or how easily the winning team can have vision of the entire map.
|
This information does a better job of explaining why I grew bored of watching competitive LoL very quickly after getting into it, then I ever could.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 10 2012 08:41 zulu_nation8 wrote: This doesn't apply at all to solo queue though. Who gives a shit about solo queue?
|
On June 10 2012 08:44 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 08:41 zulu_nation8 wrote: This doesn't apply at all to solo queue though. Who gives a shit about solo queue?
calm down
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 10 2012 08:46 zulu_nation8 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 08:44 TheYango wrote:On June 10 2012 08:41 zulu_nation8 wrote: This doesn't apply at all to solo queue though. Who gives a shit about solo queue? calm down lol that came out a bit more aggressive than I wanted it to
Can't convey tone of voice on the internet, I guess.
|
Look at the TSM/CLG.eu Game 3. TSM had a 10% gold lead at the 12 min mark and won the game. Did that game feel snowbally? Did that game feel like a foregone conclusion? Did that game feel like CLG.eu had no chance to make a "comeback"? Of course not.
These numbers are impressive in that this has been a tournament of front runners, apparently. They could be completely flukey. They could be incredibly telling. It's hard to know without both more numbers and more analysis on the numbers to filter out the noise.
It's weird though to say things like there is an "issue if 2/3 of the average game time is spent only determining 10% of the final outcome". I don't think these numbers come close to really saying that. LoL has been criticized more in the past for allowing too many comebacks rather than too few. Certainly snowballs happen. But there are plenty of 10% gold games that are not snowballed.
I don't know. I'm having trouble saying things how I want to, but basically I think people are taking these numbers too far if from this they conclude that LoL games are all decided by 12 mins and that therefore it is a terrible spectator sport or in danger. I know that's not what Kronen was going for, and people should understand that these numbers are not sufficient to support that position.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 10 2012 08:54 Takkara wrote: It's weird though to say things like there is an "issue if 2/3 of the average game time is spent only determining 10% of the final outcome". I don't think these numbers come close to really saying that. LoL has been criticized more in the past for allowing too many comebacks rather than too few. Certainly snowballs happen. But there are plenty of 10% gold games that are not snowballed.
It has?
I don't remember that ever being the case.
|
On June 10 2012 08:35 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 08:29 little fancy wrote: I don't think that's a bad thing, because playing at the very top level is a pro players profession so I don't really see a problem with a small kill lead or dragon advantage influencing the winning chances so early. By design there's an issue if 2/3 of the average game time is spent only determining 10% of the final outcome. If 90% of games take 12 minutes to decide, then why should games take longer than 20 minutes? It kills the tension for the spectator when in 90% of games, the latter 2/3 of the game aren't contributing to the final outcome.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think you're wrong and numbers don't lie obviously. Objectively judging, I fully agree with you.
What I tried to say is that this statement is only really true if all players play perfectly which is not always the case (but they come close since this is LoL at its very best [at least it should be ]). This opens rooms for comebacks and interesting drawn out games.
And there is always a subjective individual perspective of each viewer. Some people find a long diversified 45 minute game to be enjoyable to watch when others prefer a 25 minute minute game that ends with a 5:0 score and is decided by many small details. For me it doesn't matter if statistic proves that the winner is often decided by 12 minutes as long as I am entertained.
The design does have its flaws, but there are many more reasons to watch LoL as an e-sport (and if it only is that you want to see your favourite team winning something) which is why I think that this deficit is not necessarily a 'bad' thing regarding the entertaining aspect I get out of watching this.
Hope that made it clear, it's not that easy to express when you're not a native speaker. Cheers!
|
On June 10 2012 08:54 Takkara wrote: Look at the TSM/CLG.eu Game 3. TSM had a 10% gold lead at the 12 min mark and won the game. Did that game feel snowbally? Did that game feel like a foregone conclusion? Did that game feel like CLG.eu had no chance to make a "comeback"? Of course not.
It only "feels" close when you don't know any better.
Once you've been following the game for a while and know this information, you see through the fake feeling of "closeness" very easily.
|
On June 10 2012 08:54 Takkara wrote: Look at the TSM/CLG.eu Game 3. TSM had a 10% gold lead at the 12 min mark and won the game. Did that game feel snowbally? Did that game feel like a foregone conclusion? Did that game feel like CLG.eu had no chance to make a "comeback"? Of course not.
These numbers are impressive in that this has been a tournament of front runners, apparently. They could be completely flukey. They could be incredibly telling. It's hard to know without both more numbers and more analysis on the numbers to filter out the noise.
It's weird though to say things like there is an "issue if 2/3 of the average game time is spent only determining 10% of the final outcome". I don't think these numbers come close to really saying that. LoL has been criticized more in the past for allowing too many comebacks rather than too few. Certainly snowballs happen. But there are plenty of 10% gold games that are not snowballed.
I don't know. I'm having trouble saying things how I want to, but basically I think people are taking these numbers too far if from this they conclude that LoL games are all decided by 12 mins and that therefore it is a terrible spectator sport or in danger. I know that's not what Kronen was going for, and people should understand that these numbers are not sufficient to support that position. Since when??? We're talking about pro games here, not solo q where people do stupid shit 90% of the time every time.
The fact that 90% of games are essentially decided by 12 minutes is a problem. Sure, there's other variables such as skill differentials between the teams, but the fact still remains that 90% of LoL games are extremely predictable and have foregone conclusions when the lead is as small as 10%. 10% in 12 minutes is absolutely nothing. That's 1-2 kills and something like 100 team-wide cs. When you know with 90% certainty that a particular team is going to win within 12 minutes based off of such a small lead that's just ridiculous. This being a problem has nothing to do with whether or not the games themselves are enjoyable imo.
LoL is far far too snowbally when compared to other competitive games. You could probably extend this research and I will bet that the team that gets fb wins a vast majority of the times.
Take the TSM v. CLG.eu series for example. Game 1 was over by 5 minutes with utter domination of every lane and jungle off of those early kills. Game 2 was essentially decided as soon as CLG fb over TSM. Game 3 was only as close as it was because Froggen is easily one of the best LoL players in the world; if it was any other pro in that position, game 3 very likely would've gone the same way as 1 and 2.
|
OP: Statistically speaking, the only fault I find with your data is that you can't just assume equal skill levels. These lopsided stats could just as well (theoretically) be explained by vast differences in skill, where the more skilled team pretty much always wins the game and 90% of the time has a 10% (or more) lead in gold by minute 12. If you could somehow get past this obstacle and show that you're comparing teams which are more or less even in skill, then I'd have no objections.
e.g. if you had stats for a best-of-49 series of LoL games between two teams, where one team wins 25 games and the other team wins 22 games, and in 90% of all of these games the team that was 10% ahead in gold by minute 12 wins, then I'd agree that snowballing is a problem at the skill level of these teams.
|
On June 10 2012 08:54 Takkara wrote: Look at the TSM/CLG.eu Game 3. TSM had a 10% gold lead at the 12 min mark and won the game. Did that game feel snowbally? Did that game feel like a foregone conclusion? Did that game feel like CLG.eu had no chance to make a "comeback"? Of course not.
For the record, if you check the reddit post that game is counted as "tie" or otherwise an even game. TSM did have the 14min lead, but they lost it at 33min due to being outfarmed, and got i back at the 43min teamfight.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 10 2012 09:22 Zato-1 wrote: OP: Statistically speaking, the only fault I find with your data is that you can't just assume equal skill levels. These lopsided stats could just as well (theoretically) be explained by vast differences in skill, where the more skilled team pretty much always wins the game and 90% of the time has a 10% (or more) lead in gold by minute 12. If you could somehow get past this obstacle and show that you're comparing teams which are more or less even in skill, then I'd have no objections.
e.g. if you had stats for a best-of-49 series of LoL games between two teams, where one team wins 25 games and the other team wins 22 games, and in 90% of all of these games the team that was 10% ahead in gold by minute 12 wins, then I'd agree that snowballing is a problem at the skill level of these teams. Even accounting for that, the difference between predicted/actual result should be more than 10%.
Consider this: in a "healthy" game, you want to see diverse and innovative play. Particularly in lopsided matchups, you should expect to see weaker teams prepare innovative strategies and drafts against the stronger teams. Inherently this "cheese factor" should create a divergence of greater than 10%, even if EVERY game is lopsided, because you would expect cheesy/innovative strategies to have significantly better than a 10% winrate.
The fact that there's such a narrow divergence means one of two things: - "Cheese" games result in lopsided results anyway (either they're too successful and the cheesing team wins too often, or they're not successful enough, and the stronger team wins anyway) - Not enough "cheese' games are being played--people are, for whatever reason, always opting for the safe strategies, even in super-lopsided games where cheesing should give them a better shot at winning
Neither of these necessarily signify a problem with the game's design, but they are issues that should be investigated--if people are opting not to play cheesy/innovative strategies, or they're not being successful enough, we should take care to try and understand why this is the case.
|
All I know is that it's far too easy to think these types of "cool" statistics are causal to the result, when it's just an interesting statistic. For example, the NBA playoffs are about to go to the NBA Finals. Did you know that the team that wins game 1 of the NBA finals has won the title over 75% of the time? So, you could watch 1 game out of a potentially 7 game series and know with ~80% certainty who the Champion is.
Does that mean that winning game 1 is actually the most important thing towards winning the NBA Championship? No. Does it mean that having a one-game advantage is insurmountable for the other team? No. It means that good teams usually win the first game, and having to win only 3 more games when your opponent has to win 4 is actually pretty sizable advantage. It's not often that the worse team wins the first game of the NBA Finals, but it doesn't mean that winning game 1 of the NBA Finals is the reason these teams are winning.
So while it's really interesting that the team that was up at the 12 min mark has won 90% of the time, that's really all it is for now, interesting. It's one of those popcorn facts that announcers use to fill time or stat geeks throw around to try to divine the outcomes of games.
|
On June 10 2012 09:22 Zato-1 wrote: OP: Statistically speaking, the only fault I find with your data is that you can't just assume equal skill levels. These lopsided stats could just as well (theoretically) be explained by vast differences in skill, where the more skilled team pretty much always wins the game and 90% of the time has a 10% (or more) lead in gold by minute 12. If you could somehow get past this obstacle and show that you're comparing teams which are more or less even in skill, then I'd have no objections.
e.g. if you had stats for a best-of-49 series of LoL games between two teams, where one team wins 25 games and the other team wins 22 games, and in 90% of all of these games the team that was 10% ahead in gold by minute 12 wins, then I'd agree that snowballing is a problem at the skill level of these teams.
Ultimately you're right. I can't account for skill... yet. We'll see as the tourney progresses though because people eventually will be paired against similar skill levels. Already the games have gotten better, but they're still very lopsided generally.
But to play devil's advocate: Would you say that teams that split a series are evenly matched? What of the snowbally aspects of split series?
|
On June 10 2012 09:48 Takkara wrote: All I know is that it's far too easy to think these types of "cool" statistics are causal to the result, when it's just an interesting statistic. For example, the NBA playoffs are about to go to the NBA Finals. Did you know that the team that wins game 1 of the NBA finals has won the title over 75% of the time? So, you could watch 1 game out of a potentially 7 game series and know with ~80% certainty who the Champion is.
Does that mean that winning game 1 is actually the most important thing towards winning the NBA Championship? No. Does it mean that having a one-game advantage is insurmountable for the other team? No. It means that good teams usually win the first game, and having to win only 3 more games when your opponent has to win 4 is actually pretty sizable advantage. It's not often that the worse team wins the first game of the NBA Finals, but it doesn't mean that winning game 1 of the NBA Finals is the reason these teams are winning.
So while it's really interesting that the team that was up at the 12 min mark has won 90% of the time, that's really all it is for now, interesting. It's one of those popcorn facts that announcers use to fill time or stat geeks throw around to try to divine the outcomes of games.
Interesting... it could also mean that the team that did better during the regular season will win more often than not. Home court advantage is granted to the team that does better during the regular season. You could make the argument then that the inherently better team will have the advantage in Game 1. The 70% mark doesn't surprise nearly as much with that info.
|
For speculation, the snowbally aspect of the game on Day 2 has lowered from deciding 87% of the games down to around 80%. Still very very high, but interesting to note.
|
On June 10 2012 09:56 Kronen wrote: For speculation, the snowbally aspect of the game on Day 2 has lowered from deciding 87% of the games down to around 80%. Still very very high, but interesting to note.
All the things I've said aside, thank you for collecting this information. I am a total stat and factoid geek and love to pour over these things. I appreciate you doing this so we have geeky stats to argue over.
|
On June 10 2012 09:57 Takkara wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 09:56 Kronen wrote: For speculation, the snowbally aspect of the game on Day 2 has lowered from deciding 87% of the games down to around 80%. Still very very high, but interesting to note. All the things I've said aside, thank you for collecting this information. I am a total stat and factoid geek and love to pour over these things. I appreciate you doing this so we have geeky stats to argue over.
yw sir! This has been fun. And it actually makes me more interested in watching LoL too!
|
This actually makes me less interested in watching LoL, all I have to do is tune in to the first 12 minutes of the game and will have a pretty good idea who's going to win. Kinda like catching the last 5 minutes of the playoffs to see if Shaq could make his free throws. Saves time I know
|
On June 10 2012 09:37 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 09:22 Zato-1 wrote: OP: Statistically speaking, the only fault I find with your data is that you can't just assume equal skill levels. These lopsided stats could just as well (theoretically) be explained by vast differences in skill, where the more skilled team pretty much always wins the game and 90% of the time has a 10% (or more) lead in gold by minute 12. If you could somehow get past this obstacle and show that you're comparing teams which are more or less even in skill, then I'd have no objections.
e.g. if you had stats for a best-of-49 series of LoL games between two teams, where one team wins 25 games and the other team wins 22 games, and in 90% of all of these games the team that was 10% ahead in gold by minute 12 wins, then I'd agree that snowballing is a problem at the skill level of these teams. Even accounting for that, the difference between predicted/actual result should be more than 10%. Consider this: in a "healthy" game, you want to see diverse and innovative play. Particularly in lopsided matchups, you should expect to see weaker teams prepare innovative strategies and drafts against the stronger teams. Inherently this "cheese factor" should create a divergence of greater than 10%, even if EVERY game is lopsided, because you would expect cheesy/innovative strategies to have significantly better than a 10% winrate. The fact that there's such a narrow divergence means one of two things: - "Cheese" games result in lopsided results anyway (either they're too successful and the cheesing team wins too often, or they're not successful enough, and the stronger team wins anyway) - Not enough "cheese' games are being played--people are, for whatever reason, always opting for the safe strategies, even in super-lopsided games where cheesing should give them a better shot at winning Neither of these necessarily signify a problem with the game's design, but they are issues that should be investigated--if people are opting not to play cheesy/innovative strategies, or they're not being successful enough, we should take care to try and understand why this is the case. Imagine that you see a lot of games being played between the best korean SC:BW pros vs. the best foreigners at SC:BW. The koreans play economical builds, because they know they'll win the late game; the foreigners play cheesy builds for the same reason. Because they expect the cheesing, koreans manage to win 90% of the games anyway. Then an observation is made: Economical builds win 90% of the games! Clearly economy-focused builds are OP.
^ Wrong conclusion, because there is an alternative explanation for this lopsided statistic (Koreans won 90% of the games because they're better -> skill difference).
On June 10 2012 09:49 Kronen wrote: But to play devil's advocate: Would you say that teams that split a series are evenly matched? What of the snowbally aspects of split series?
If the winning team in a bo3 series doesn't win 2-0, then I daresay that the skill levels are definitely comparable, yes. If your data was composed of all the games from all the series that weren't won 2-0, and the lopsided snowballing winrates persist, then your argument about snowballing in LoL would be bulletproof for the skill level being examined.
|
On June 10 2012 09:57 Takkara wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 09:56 Kronen wrote: For speculation, the snowbally aspect of the game on Day 2 has lowered from deciding 87% of the games down to around 80%. Still very very high, but interesting to note. All the things I've said aside, thank you for collecting this information. I am a total stat and factoid geek and love to pour over these things. I appreciate you doing this so we have geeky stats to argue over.
Got a simpler version. Here's what I PM'd:
It's t-test. Think of it as a more robust z-test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student's_t-test. Basically, I would do it right now if I wasn't busy doing the same thing (research in parallel computing for statistical modeling). But it should be pretty simple. Here is a much simpler version:
1) Take one team at random from each game. . Make a binary variable w=1 if the team won and w=0 if they did not. Make a binary variable l to see whether it had early lead or not (with your criteria) where 1 is the early lead etc. 2) Run the following regression on the data. The equations would just be to regress the model:
w = A + Br + Cl + e
Where we a binary variable of whether the game was won early and r is the round (round 1, round 2, etc.). Whatever program you use should tell you whether B is significant. If it's not, get rid of it. A should be somewhere around .5 since it is the mean chance of winning from your sample (about half the teams should have won).
3) Good, this model controls for round. If you believe that round is a good proxy for skill differential, then this will control for skill differential. Thus now we clearly see the change in the chance of winning given a lead as the coefficient C! Notice the regression already gives your answer for you if you are simply testing for whether a lead gives a win. The normal test on C would be to test if it's 0, that would just be to test if the chance of winning is independent of which team started with a lead (given the skill differential is controlled for). Lets do something stronger here. Instead, do a t-test testing to see if C is statistically greater than .1. That is just saying that yes, we would expect a team with equal skill to have a .1 better chance of winning (you get an early lead of 10% gold but are roughly the same skill, you should have around a 60% chance of winning). To get the t-score, use a program or simply take (C-.1)/(sd / sqrt(n)) where n is the number of data points (this is usually how the equation is shown). Now that is distributed as a T with degrees of freedom n-1, and check a t-table for its probability.
The question is, is that significant? If it is, then it says that roughly equally skilled teams have better than a 60% chance of winning given an early lead of 10% at 12 minutes. Wow, that would shock me.
What one could dispute though is the use of round as a proxy for skill differential, though I'll take it. In most cases, the higher the skill category, the lower the skill variance (this has been tested a lot with Olympic athlete data). So it should net out a good amount of the effect. Another thing one could dispute is that the model testing will be a little off due to the use of the Linear Probability Model instead of going to a Logistic model here. I think that would be overkill since we are just playing with LOL data but if someone wants to use a Logistic, go ahead. If it's highly significant or highly not, it doesn't matter anyways.
|
I thought it was well known that LoL doesn't allow comeback unless major errors. Wasnt there a discussion about dragon on that topic ?
|
Where can I find the results of picks/bans for all games from MLG? Like who was picked, who was banned, and how many times.
|
This would be even more interesting if data was gathered for each individual minute, not just the 12th minute (why was 12 chosen? seems arbitrary).
|
On June 10 2012 13:05 ocelotter wrote: This would be even more interesting if data was gathered for each individual minute, not just the 12th minute (why was 12 chosen? seems arbitrary). 12 min was a completely arbitrary choice on my part. The rationale being that by 12min the early game is usually over, and the game usually isn't halfway done as the average game is over 25min.
To answer your question data is gathered at 12min and every single minute after. I note all lead changes after that point in time up until the end of the game.
Something I'm considering if really get serious about data crunching (if I get some help and guidance to do it properly) would be to take flat percentile gold disparity checks every 3minutes on the dot and chart the overall progression. That could prove interesting. But for right now, given that I'm away from a computer traveling for the next 3 days, it's going to be a struggle to get the last day of benchmarks up regardless.... Ugh.
|
On June 10 2012 08:55 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 08:54 Takkara wrote: It's weird though to say things like there is an "issue if 2/3 of the average game time is spent only determining 10% of the final outcome". I don't think these numbers come close to really saying that. LoL has been criticized more in the past for allowing too many comebacks rather than too few. Certainly snowballs happen. But there are plenty of 10% gold games that are not snowballed.
It has? I don't remember that ever being the case. Well I dunno about criticism, but there have been a lot of balance changes both increasing and decreasing the amount of snowballing. LoL was originally designed with ~30 minute games in mind (for 5v5), and the amount of snowballing is one way to affect the average game time. Increase - introduction of snowball items, spell/buff/elixir scaling (incl. Nasus/Veigar/Sion's infinite scaling), scaling towers/creep stats, lower death penalties on stacks, lowering maximum kill streak bounties, Decrease - kill streak bounties, diminishing returns on repeat kills, delayed spawns on epic monsters etc Basically when games were lasting too long, adding more snowballing could shorten them -- there are probably other ways to augment game length than snowballing (the only ones I can think of revolve around map objectives) to be explored.
edit (misunderstood Takkara's post): I guess the thesis should be tweaked, since the correlation is still just between a lead and a victory. One way to try factoring out skill differences would be to chart the extended matchups between two teams (such as only analyzing CLG vs TSM over multiple tournaments) to get a "skill ratio" between the two, and apply that to the number of games decided at 12 minutes, however recent player swaps would still augment that data.
|
you would have to filter out the skill differences of the teams playing, because those corrupt your data, they lead it in a way that your theory is supported! If a team is more skilled, it will lead at minute 12 because of skillful play and then continue to get advantages and win becuse of skillful play. This will corrupt all your data in a way that your thesis is supported.
Since there is high chance that 2 teams out of all those invited into MLG possess significantly different skill, data ís probably not useable to prove your thesis.
those statisics, imo, are only useable to try to prove non-snowballing. For the opposite you cant really make a statement.
you would need a lot of statistical magics to repair the data, the endresult would have a lot of cases and a lot of % statements
|
15-2-1
That is the score (from your Reddit post as best I could work it out - it was a bit hard to follow? Maybe I'm just really tired but it seemed odd to me...) consider just games with Bo3 fully played out (ie a 2-1 score).
That is an even bigger disparity than before? (Ignoring ties). Definitely makes a strong case for snowballing in LoL in my opinion. And sort of debunks the 'more skilled' team winning issue people are having.
|
On June 12 2012 01:28 LaNague wrote: you would have to filter out the skill differences of the teams playing, because those corrupt your data, they lead it in a way that your theory is supported! If a team is more skilled, it will lead at minute 12 because of skillful play and then continue to get advantages and win becuse of skillful play. This will corrupt all your data in a way that your thesis is supported.
Since there is high chance that 2 teams out of all those invited into MLG possess significantly different skill, data ís probably not useable to prove your thesis.
those statisics, imo, are only useable to try to prove non-snowballing. For the opposite you cant really make a statement.
you would need a lot of statistical magics to repair the data, the endresult would have a lot of cases and a lot of % statements
??? You just need a good skill proxy and control for it.
|
On June 12 2012 02:16 rackdude wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2012 01:28 LaNague wrote: you would have to filter out the skill differences of the teams playing, because those corrupt your data, they lead it in a way that your theory is supported! If a team is more skilled, it will lead at minute 12 because of skillful play and then continue to get advantages and win becuse of skillful play. This will corrupt all your data in a way that your thesis is supported.
Since there is high chance that 2 teams out of all those invited into MLG possess significantly different skill, data ís probably not useable to prove your thesis.
those statisics, imo, are only useable to try to prove non-snowballing. For the opposite you cant really make a statement.
you would need a lot of statistical magics to repair the data, the endresult would have a lot of cases and a lot of % statements ??? You just need a good skill proxy and control for it. But analyzing a single tournament (or even tournaments at all) is misleading because some teams will appear more often in the data set. A team that plays in such a way that supports the hypothesis (i.e. taking a lead and keeping it until victory) will skew the data, because winning ensures both staying in the sample and more supportive data : \
|
How did you come up with the 12 minute control? Just to trying to chime in some constructive criticism.
Because it's so arbitrary, there can be any point in the game where this happens; and actually, I think if you analyze and cherry-pick certain points of time, you might find information that contradicts this.
For this to be truly valuable, I think you might need to collect gold information throughtout the entire game, perhaps in 1-minute increments. Then analyze for how long the lead was kept, and cross-analyze what points of time intersect.
Great initiative though
|
On June 10 2012 09:37 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 09:22 Zato-1 wrote: OP: Statistically speaking, the only fault I find with your data is that you can't just assume equal skill levels. These lopsided stats could just as well (theoretically) be explained by vast differences in skill, where the more skilled team pretty much always wins the game and 90% of the time has a 10% (or more) lead in gold by minute 12. If you could somehow get past this obstacle and show that you're comparing teams which are more or less even in skill, then I'd have no objections.
e.g. if you had stats for a best-of-49 series of LoL games between two teams, where one team wins 25 games and the other team wins 22 games, and in 90% of all of these games the team that was 10% ahead in gold by minute 12 wins, then I'd agree that snowballing is a problem at the skill level of these teams. Even accounting for that, the difference between predicted/actual result should be more than 10%. Consider this: in a "healthy" game, you want to see diverse and innovative play. Particularly in lopsided matchups, you should expect to see weaker teams prepare innovative strategies and drafts against the stronger teams. Inherently this "cheese factor" should create a divergence of greater than 10%, even if EVERY game is lopsided, because you would expect cheesy/innovative strategies to have significantly better than a 10% winrate. The fact that there's such a narrow divergence means one of two things: - "Cheese" games result in lopsided results anyway (either they're too successful and the cheesing team wins too often, or they're not successful enough, and the stronger team wins anyway) - Not enough "cheese' games are being played--people are, for whatever reason, always opting for the safe strategies, even in super-lopsided games where cheesing should give them a better shot at winning Neither of these necessarily signify a problem with the game's design, but they are issues that should be investigated--if people are opting not to play cheesy/innovative strategies, or they're not being successful enough, we should take care to try and understand why this is the case.
You're missing something.
A very narrow divergence could also mean that it's comparatively easy to not make big mistakes. Basically (yes, sorry, I'm bringing the whole skill-ceiling thing into this again to some degree) what those numbers can mean is that once a team is ahead it's very hard to give up that lead.
Whoever is - even slightly - ahead has a very easy time exploiting that lead while the enemy team has a very hard time coming back. The small advantages that slight lead creates are "too big" from a design perspective to allow comebacks.
I don't consider the cheese explanation valid because that should be something that evens out in the long run (not neccessarily over one tournament, but certainly over one year) due to the fact that cheese > greedy play > safe play > cheese. If these don't even out (or aren't used) it's again either a design problem or people are plain and simply too dumb to do it properly. I'd bet on design though when it comes to League. =P
|
The main problem with LoL in comparison to sports, is that getting an advantage in lol translates to getting an advantage later on.
in basketball/soccer/hockey etc etc. getting a point doesn't make it so you're more likely to get a point later on.
major fixes to snowballing is going to be making EXTREMELY strong midgame items for cheap. For example a haunting guise that costs half of what it costs now, or ionic spark getting its price reduced, and buffing 5gp10 item stats to make them cost effective.
|
we don't need statistics for that. everyone knows snowball exists. I think the root of the problem is items>>>>experience. Once one team gets core items its impossible for other team stop them unless they have same items.
I think riot needs to rework some of the item-gold stuff. Make items very expensive or reward with less gold champion kills and more gold for jungle mobs. Or they should outright nerf all items by 30% I guess.
|
I don't know the game all that well in terms of the competitive setting, but does this also affect DotA play as well? Or is there something inherent to DotA that prevents this kind of snowball-y play? If not, then it's a problem of the genre, not design.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 12 2012 04:25 WaveofShadow wrote: I don't know the game all that well in terms of the competitive setting, but does this also affect DotA play as well? Or is there something inherent to DotA that prevents this kind of snowball-y play? If not, then it's a problem of the genre, not design. DotA has certain common issues, but there are also distinct mechanics that contribute to make the game much less snowball-y than LoL, such as: - TP scrolls, buybacks, and SC/WC3 high-ground mechanics creating a stronger defender's advantage, allowing the losing team more possibilities to come back - significant tradeoff between gold-efficiency and slot-efficiency on items--small midgame items are often much more cost-effective than their lategame counterparts, allowing room for a team that's behind on gold to make timing-based plays, exploiting the buildup on larger items - limited wards and Smoke of Deceit, meaning that if a team has an advantage, they can't ward up the entire map and have absolute map dominance
|
On June 12 2012 05:15 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2012 04:25 WaveofShadow wrote: I don't know the game all that well in terms of the competitive setting, but does this also affect DotA play as well? Or is there something inherent to DotA that prevents this kind of snowball-y play? If not, then it's a problem of the genre, not design. DotA has certain common issues, but there are also distinct mechanics that contribute to make the game much less snowball-y than LoL, such as: - TP scrolls, buybacks, and SC/WC3 high-ground mechanics creating a stronger defender's advantage, allowing the losing team more possibilities to come back - significant tradeoff between gold-efficiency and slot-efficiency on items--small midgame items are often much more cost-effective than their lategame counterparts, allowing room for a team that's behind on gold to make timing-based plays, exploiting the buildup on larger items - limited wards and Smoke of Deceit, meaning that if a team has an advantage, they can't ward up the entire map and have absolute map dominance
You missed the most important thing in my eyes, which is the ability to prevent the carry from reaching their next item by killing them and taking their gold away.
If you kill the AD carry in LoL, ya that's great, but he still has the same amount of money, and is barely behind in when he will get that next big item. Where in DotA you can bring a carry saving for radiance (3800 takes a while to get) down a LOT of gold by taking them out repeatedly preventing them from snowballing even if they got some advantage early.
|
but aren't carries in dota like 10 times more powerful than carries in lol anyway?
|
On June 12 2012 02:42 r.Evo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 09:37 TheYango wrote:On June 10 2012 09:22 Zato-1 wrote: OP: Statistically speaking, the only fault I find with your data is that you can't just assume equal skill levels. These lopsided stats could just as well (theoretically) be explained by vast differences in skill, where the more skilled team pretty much always wins the game and 90% of the time has a 10% (or more) lead in gold by minute 12. If you could somehow get past this obstacle and show that you're comparing teams which are more or less even in skill, then I'd have no objections.
e.g. if you had stats for a best-of-49 series of LoL games between two teams, where one team wins 25 games and the other team wins 22 games, and in 90% of all of these games the team that was 10% ahead in gold by minute 12 wins, then I'd agree that snowballing is a problem at the skill level of these teams. Even accounting for that, the difference between predicted/actual result should be more than 10%. Consider this: in a "healthy" game, you want to see diverse and innovative play. Particularly in lopsided matchups, you should expect to see weaker teams prepare innovative strategies and drafts against the stronger teams. Inherently this "cheese factor" should create a divergence of greater than 10%, even if EVERY game is lopsided, because you would expect cheesy/innovative strategies to have significantly better than a 10% winrate. The fact that there's such a narrow divergence means one of two things: - "Cheese" games result in lopsided results anyway (either they're too successful and the cheesing team wins too often, or they're not successful enough, and the stronger team wins anyway) - Not enough "cheese' games are being played--people are, for whatever reason, always opting for the safe strategies, even in super-lopsided games where cheesing should give them a better shot at winning Neither of these necessarily signify a problem with the game's design, but they are issues that should be investigated--if people are opting not to play cheesy/innovative strategies, or they're not being successful enough, we should take care to try and understand why this is the case. You're missing something. A very narrow divergence could also mean that it's comparatively easy to not make big mistakes. Basically (yes, sorry, I'm bringing the whole skill-ceiling thing into this again to some degree) what those numbers can mean is that once a team is ahead it's very hard to give up that lead. Whoever is - even slightly - ahead has a very easy time exploiting that lead while the enemy team has a very hard time coming back. The small advantages that slight lead creates are "too big" from a design perspective to allow comebacks. I don't consider the cheese explanation valid because that should be something that evens out in the long run (not neccessarily over one tournament, but certainly over one year) due to the fact that cheese > greedy play > safe play > cheese. If these don't even out (or aren't used) it's again either a design problem or people are plain and simply too dumb to do it properly. I'd bet on design though when it comes to League. =P
I don't know what your argument is?
The OP is correct, there is something strange about these results. A lead at 12 mins (basically the 1/3 or 1/4 mark in the game) should not be translating to much into victories. This is because the longer the game goes on the more randomness should be smoothed out. 12 Minutes is basically just reflecting the laning phase. A stronger team should win even if it modestly lost in the laning phase.
Look at this win probability chart for the super bowl.
http://live.advancednflstats.com/
What the OP is saying is, if the NFL was LOL, if at halftime the pats are winning 10-9 they have a 90% chance of winning. That shouldn't make sense.
|
On June 10 2012 08:44 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2012 08:41 zulu_nation8 wrote: This doesn't apply at all to solo queue though. Who gives a shit about solo queue?
Ranked Solo Q is the farthest the majority of players will ever see in LoL, including myself. Therefore Solo Q is very important to us.
|
In my opinion the best way to deal with this would be to introduce many more Doran-like items that are really really strong for their cost but are slot-inefficient.
It might not be enough but it'd be a step in the right direction
|
Wow; for TL I would've expected a better understanding of stats.
"The team that takes as little as a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes wins over 90% of the time"
The key word is in bold. What that means is the stats take into account HUGE advantages at 12 minutes too. That means you cannot infer that if a team is up 10% they will win 90% of the time!!! You would have to take stats for teams up exactly 10% and no more to find the expected win percentage.
|
On June 10 2012 07:34 Kronen wrote:Yea, it is impossible for me to account for "skill" of a team given that that metric is entirely subjective. You could make the argument seeds are important, but that's odd too. Ultimately, the numbers should work out closer as the brackets progress. But, I'm speculating if they won't. Even split series have shown the snowball effect. It's just a matter of who gets the lead first. In series which go to 3 games, you'd think that the snowball factor wouldn't play as large of a factor though too because the "skill" factor would be more evenly matched. Show nested quote +this, the better team is gonna be the better team from minute 1 to minute 35 to minute x... probably about 90% of the time No, not necessarily. That just means that the sport you're watching is designed in such a way that any lead is a foregone conclusion. That is a problem for your sport because it is inherently predictable (and therefore boring). In any other sport it's possible to come back from an early deficit through skill and game elements. I'm currently hunting for soccer and basketball statistics for some comparison, but even DOTA functions differently. Gold and xp changes in dota happen very frequently. Watching any other sport or esport there is give and take. Leads are lost and gained. Like the basketball example above, if a sport becomes that predictable there's something very very wrong.
Yeah but in basketball you can't buy items that make you faster and stronger with the baskets you make. The answer is in the title- snowballing. The better team gains a lead at the beginning and will always be ahead in items So I agree with your sentiment of "not necessarily" and think your reasoning is solid, but I still believe that the better team is just going to outfarm, outbuy, and ultimately outplay their opponents most of the time
I could also, be wrong. There are champions that can't farm against certain others (a mid kassadin getting denied a lot) or bad matchups or one player underperforming which represent a number of cases where a lead can either be blown or a comeback made, or a win despite having less gold. There are so many champs being played by so many gamers it's hard to map it out (imo) from just raw data but i think by and large the better team just knows how to farm more. Sorry I know I sort of carry on and don't make clear points all of the time but thanks for reading
|
On June 12 2012 05:45 Klive5ive wrote: Wow; for TL I would've expected a better understanding of stats.
"The team that takes as little as a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes wins over 90% of the time"
The key word is in bold. What that means is the stats take into account HUGE advantages at 12 minutes too. That means you cannot infer that if a team is up 10% they will win 90% of the time!!! You would have to take stats for teams up exactly 10% and no more to find the expected win percentage.
No, you're putting words in the OP's mouth(as did others).
If any team takes a lead by 12min, they are much much more likely to win said game. The game is setup in such a way that any early lead is basically insurmountable except by human error and throwing a game with sub-standard play.
That is his original statement; the statistics support that going down to 'as little as a 10% lead at 12 minutes.'
Obviously some of that 90% win rate is easily predictable(a huge early game lead), but that ANY lead of 10% or more leads to a win 90% of the time, including games which are part of a competitive series(as shown by someone else), is staggering, even if the 'only 10%' wins are a fairly small number of said victories. Any way you slice it, it means that comebacks, large and small, are not happening.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 12 2012 05:24 N3rV[Green] wrote: You missed the most important thing in my eyes, which is the ability to prevent the carry from reaching their next item by killing them and taking their gold away.
If you kill the AD carry in LoL, ya that's great, but he still has the same amount of money, and is barely behind in when he will get that next big item. Where in DotA you can bring a carry saving for radiance (3800 takes a while to get) down a LOT of gold by taking them out repeatedly preventing them from snowballing even if they got some advantage early. There's actually 2 separate issues here:
1) The gold differential that arises from kills. I don't consider the fact that you're *losing* gold to be significant (and in the grand scheme of things, you only lose 30xLevel gold per death in DotA--the creeps lost while you're dead are much more significant than the actual gold loss). What matters is the gold differential that is created between the killer and the victim--which translates into laning advantage when the victim comes back to lane. It's ironic that while LoL advertises the fact that you don't lose gold on death to be less punishing, the relative gold differential created by a kill in LoL is actually MORE than in DotA, particularly when measured in number of creeps.
2) The large timing window where a carry is simply banking gold towards a large item. As you mentioned this phase can take on the order of 3k-5k gold to save. This also ties into slot-efficiency, as oftentimes, a carry will fill out their slots on middle-tier teamfighting items, and then use their midgame teamfighting efficiency from those items to try and carry them over the large gap where they're saving for a big item.
Such timings are much harder to exploit in LoL, though they still do exist. The main thing is that comparably large items like NLR and BF are often completed during laning phase.
On June 12 2012 05:44 Shikyo wrote: In my opinion the best way to deal with this would be to introduce many more Doran-like items that are really really strong for their cost but are slot-inefficient.
It might not be enough but it'd be a step in the right direction I agree.
Such small cost-effective, slot-ineffective items would also help support itemization a lot, particularly if design space using item actives is explored.
|
Netherlands45349 Posts
Yango I lu
Don't forget that Dota has grossly ''overpowerd'' abilities on very long cooldowns, something that LoL doesn't have which allows teams to take fights even though they are behind on items or when aquiring a single item(Blink Dagger on Sand King/Earthshaker) but that is a core design idea I believe, so its not going to change.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 12 2012 06:11 Kipsate wrote: Yango I lu
Don't forget that Dota has grossly ''overpowerd'' abilities on very long cooldowns, something that LoL doesn't have which allows teams to take fights even though they are behind on items or when aquiring a single item(Blink Dagger on Sand King/Earthshaker) but that is a core design idea I believe, so its not going to change. I have a long PM that I sent to someone actually explaining all these points. Wasn't going to copy-paste it here because I figured it wouldn't be interesting to everyone, but it seems everyone brought up all the individual points separately anyway. -_-
And I still think Medallion would be the easiest item ever to port from DotA. Great utility, right pricing range, easy to rescale armor/MR shred numbers to whats appropriate for LoL, useful for lots of different roles. It's like the perfect item active for them to port, but they still haven't done it.
|
Say that blue picked up a double kill with top and jungler each getting kills invading the first red buff of the red team after both jungler's started at blue buff. At 12 minutes the 10% gold advantage is in Blue's favor 16.5k - 13.5k, and the current gold values are Blue AD 3.5k, Blue mid 3.5k, blue support 2k, blue jungle 3.5k, blue top 4k. Red team is the same gold for mid, ad, and support, so that leaves a total of 4.5k split between jungle and top lane. So before looking at the experience differences in the 4 champions, how do you expect red top/jungle to control top lane with 4.5k gold between them, when blue top/jungle has 7.5k gold between them? You're going to have to bring the mid lane up to top and hope for a gank that leads to a 3k gold swing.
Not only is there a big gold difference in that senario, but their is probably a level difference as well. Leading to timings where the lane that is already behind has to either surrender gold and experience further, or they're just going to die and lose more gold and experience.
Another way to get to this magic 10% gold advantage, is every lane is getting out farmed in a 0 kill game. 45 cs to every 55cs in every lane, or two lanes and jungle are the same, but one lane is like 25 cs - 75 cs. If you have a 3-1 cs advantage that's absolute lane domination, and in a solo lane, it can easily allow you to carry your team to victory. I actually don't find this surprising at all actually. If I get a 3:1 cs advantage in a solo lane, I expect to be able to carry that game 90% of the time. If we're all out farming the enemy by 10%, I expect to be able to win that 90%. If the enemy jungler is 3-0-2, and the score is 0-5 in 12 minutes, I think we're going to have to play a 40 maybe even 60+ minute game if we're going hope to come back.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 12 2012 06:14 Sabin010 wrote: Say that blue picked up a double kill with top and jungler each getting kills invading the first red buff of the red team after both jungler's started at blue buff. At 12 minutes the 10% gold advantage is in Blue's favor 16.5k - 13.5k, and the current gold values are Blue AD 3.5k, Blue mid 3.5k, blue support 2k, blue jungle 3.5k, blue top 4k. Red team is the same gold for mid, ad, and support, so that leaves a total of 4.5k split between jungle and top lane. So before looking at the experience differences in the 4 champions, how do you expect red top/jungle to control top lane with 4.5k gold between them, when blue top/jungle has 7.5k gold between them? You're going to have to bring the mid lane up to top and hope for a gank that leads to a 3k gold swing.
Not only is there a big gold difference in that senario, but their is probably a level difference as well. Leading to timings where the lane that is already behind has to either surrender gold and experience further, or they're just going to die and lose more gold and experience.
Another way to get to this magic 10% gold advantage, is every lane is getting out farmed in a 0 kill game. 45 cs to every 55cs in every lane, or two lanes and jungle are the same, but one lane is like 25 cs - 75 cs. If you have a 3-1 cs advantage that's absolute lane domination, and in a solo lane, it can easily allow you to carry your team to victory. I actually don't find this surprising at all actually. If I get a 3:1 cs advantage in a solo lane, I expect to be able to carry that game 90% of the time. If we're all out farming the enemy by 10%, I expect to be able to win that 90%. If the enemy jungler is 3-0-2, and the score is 0-5 in 12 minutes, I think we're going to have to play a 40 maybe even 60+ minute game if we're going hope to come back. The problem is that this leaves no room for error for teams that are inherently oriented toward one phase of the game or another. If lategame-oriented teams that are intentionally picked with weaker early-games are not sustainable with only a 10% gold disadvantage, then that has potential ramifications in terms of champion draft diversity.
|
On June 12 2012 06:05 red_ wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2012 05:45 Klive5ive wrote: Wow; for TL I would've expected a better understanding of stats.
"The team that takes as little as a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes wins over 90% of the time"
The key word is in bold. What that means is the stats take into account HUGE advantages at 12 minutes too. That means you cannot infer that if a team is up 10% they will win 90% of the time!!! You would have to take stats for teams up exactly 10% and no more to find the expected win percentage. No, you're putting words in the OP's mouth(as did others). How can I be putting words in his mouth when I'm quoting him? I'll just leave this here...... "Imagine watching game 7 tonight and seeing the Celtics go up 45-40 late in the second quarter and being able to say with 90% certainty that they are going to the finals."
If you read the "evidence" it gets even worse. Right at the top: Fnatic v TSM.evo GM2---------TSM.evo---------TSM.evo-----------lead taken at 15:40 So he decided to take the reading at 15 minutes 40 instead? He does this again in the notes later on. Moving the lead to another time.
I know I'm being pedantic but this is a pretty clear example of bad statistics. Stats used badly to justify a conclusion that has already been decided.
The title should say "The leader in gold at 12min wins over 90% of the time (as long as you ignore close games)"
|
so obvious.
12 min is end of laning phase. Winner of laningphase has more gold, and thus with a decent team makeup and won lanes the upper hand.
|
What i would like to know is, dose this also happen in DOTA? if not this will be a big drawback for LoL as a e-sport vs DOTA. Let see the average LoL game is ~30min, this would mean that after around a 3rd of the game you already know who will most likely win. In SC its rare in the pro scene that after a 3rd of total game time you can tell who will win.
|
Works the same in Starcraft. If you are behind, make smart moves and force mistakes from your opponent.
|
On June 12 2012 07:03 Goozen wrote: What i would like to know is, dose this also happen in DOTA? if not this will be a big drawback for LoL as a e-sport vs DOTA. Let see the average LoL game is ~30min, this would mean that after around a 3rd of the game you already know who will most likely win. In SC its rare in the pro scene that after a 3rd of total game time you can tell who will win. It still happens in dota but not as much. Dota is more diverse in the meta/items so you can't really tell who's gonna win unless they have the lead and a better mid game/late game comp on top of that. There's mid game items and late game items as well. Take my anecdotal evidence for what you will, but snowballing happens a LOT more often in league of legends, and it's not always due to one team playing better all the way through.
|
On June 12 2012 07:03 Goozen wrote: What i would like to know is, dose this also happen in DOTA? if not this will be a big drawback for LoL as a e-sport vs DOTA. Let see the average LoL game is ~30min, this would mean that after around a 3rd of the game you already know who will most likely win. In SC its rare in the pro scene that after a 3rd of total game time you can tell who will win.
People have outlined the differences of Dota to LoL in this thread so I suggest just paging through. I think one thing no one has mentioned is the pick/ban phase. I think LoL would benefit from switching to a dota style system with the 2 bans after first 3 picks. Feels like currently people can't really deviate from the norm since they don't know what the opponent is doing when they banning so can't actually do anything other than guess. We might see some more interesting things than protect the Kog with this I think.
EDIT:
On June 12 2012 07:29 Itsmedudeman wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2012 07:03 Goozen wrote: What i would like to know is, dose this also happen in DOTA? if not this will be a big drawback for LoL as a e-sport vs DOTA. Let see the average LoL game is ~30min, this would mean that after around a 3rd of the game you already know who will most likely win. In SC its rare in the pro scene that after a 3rd of total game time you can tell who will win. It still happens in dota but not as much. Dota is more diverse in the meta/items so you can't really tell who's gonna win unless they have the lead and a better mid game/late game comp on top of that. There's mid game items and late game items as well. Take my anecdotal evidence for what you will, but snowballing happens a LOT more often in league of legends, and it's not always due to one team playing better all the way through.
I think the problem is also that in Dota you can get teams that peak at different stages of the game so while one team might be winning earlier they also peak earlier so if they can't gain a lead that wins them the game they other team still has a chance when they themselves peak. Not sure if what I mentioned above might allow LoL to gain a similar system.
One thing I noted in this weekend is that even when teams are so far ahead games still drag on for every long even though the outcome never seemed to change unless you Dignitas going for baron. I'm not sure if this is an issue of the players not knowing exactly how to finish off a game or the way LoL works. Feels like without items("Aura actives") that extend to creeps games go on for far longer than they should.
|
Thanks for putting all this info up. While I've (and many others I'm sure) have semi-assumed this. It's nice to have some data.
And it is sad to be honest. Especially with the statistics being as highly skewed as they are. Like someone said. Pretty much 2/3rds of the game is being played knowing no matter how hard you try, you pretty much can't win and are just playing out of sheer desperation. Which is why when a team is up 1-0 and it gets to a bad point. You almost always see a 25-30 minute surrender. Because they know the game just isn't worth trying since they aren't in desperation to win.
Riot did make a step in the right direction allowing for more exp to be gotten from higher level champions. But it doesn't seem enough. I constantly find myself turning games off because you can clearly see the outcome of the game. And it's boring as hell to watch a team who is already ahead just win teamfights with ease and secure every global objective and then teamfight some more and win easily.
I think this really needs to be worked on to allow teams to not be as punished for small mistakes. But that's just my opinion.
|
On June 12 2012 07:35 Numy wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2012 07:03 Goozen wrote: What i would like to know is, dose this also happen in DOTA? if not this will be a big drawback for LoL as a e-sport vs DOTA. Let see the average LoL game is ~30min, this would mean that after around a 3rd of the game you already know who will most likely win. In SC its rare in the pro scene that after a 3rd of total game time you can tell who will win. People have outlined the differences of Dota to LoL in this thread so I suggest just paging through. I think one thing no one has mentioned is the pick/ban phase. I think LoL would benefit from switching to a dota style system with the 2 bans after first 3 picks. Feels like currently people can't really deviate from the norm since they don't know what the opponent is doing when they banning so can't actually do anything other than guess. We might see some more interesting things than protect the Kog with this I think. EDIT: Show nested quote +On June 12 2012 07:29 Itsmedudeman wrote:On June 12 2012 07:03 Goozen wrote: What i would like to know is, dose this also happen in DOTA? if not this will be a big drawback for LoL as a e-sport vs DOTA. Let see the average LoL game is ~30min, this would mean that after around a 3rd of the game you already know who will most likely win. In SC its rare in the pro scene that after a 3rd of total game time you can tell who will win. It still happens in dota but not as much. Dota is more diverse in the meta/items so you can't really tell who's gonna win unless they have the lead and a better mid game/late game comp on top of that. There's mid game items and late game items as well. Take my anecdotal evidence for what you will, but snowballing happens a LOT more often in league of legends, and it's not always due to one team playing better all the way through. I think the problem is also that in Dota you can get teams that peak at different stages of the game so while one team might be winning earlier they also peak earlier so if they can't gain a lead that wins them the game they other team still has a chance when they themselves peak. Not sure if what I mentioned above might allow LoL to gain a similar system. I'd also like to point out baron. Baron is the easiest way to make a comeback, but also the easiest way for a leading team to close it out. If a team has an edge and they grab baron the game is pretty much over. I'll give a suggestion but I know riot will never implement this into the game. When's the last time they made a drastic change to try and alter the game? What they COULD do is have baron follow the team out if they engage. Obviously I don't really know what would happen if that were changed. Could it make the game worse? Yes. It could make it so team fights don't happen for a very long time, but we won't know how the game would change after 4-5 months, but for now, entire games are decided at baron.
|
In terms of basic design I feel that Riot purposely evens out the scaling all over the place as long as I can remember. The argument being that strong late- and strong earlygame champs are "unfun" means everyone and their mom scales the same basically.
While champions still scale differently the differences between them (think Cait vs Vayne) are too small to make them actually shine in their respective strong phases. I feel that strengths during certain time frames add more variety, allow for more complex strategies and therefor make the game more fun in the long run.
The question is whether balancing around what top teams can do with this is okay, even if it makes the random solo q dude cry on the forums about "imbalance" because he doesn't understand the underlying concepts.
|
On June 12 2012 06:26 Klive5ive wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2012 06:05 red_ wrote:On June 12 2012 05:45 Klive5ive wrote: Wow; for TL I would've expected a better understanding of stats.
"The team that takes as little as a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes wins over 90% of the time"
The key word is in bold. What that means is the stats take into account HUGE advantages at 12 minutes too. That means you cannot infer that if a team is up 10% they will win 90% of the time!!! You would have to take stats for teams up exactly 10% and no more to find the expected win percentage. No, you're putting words in the OP's mouth(as did others). How can I be putting words in his mouth when I'm quoting him? I'll just leave this here...... "Imagine watching game 7 tonight and seeing the Celtics go up 45-40 late in the second quarter and being able to say with 90% certainty that they are going to the finals." If you read the "evidence" it gets even worse. Right at the top: Fnatic v TSM.evo GM2---------TSM.evo---------TSM.evo-----------lead taken at 15:40 So he decided to take the reading at 15 minutes 40 instead? He does this again in the notes later on. Moving the lead to another time. I know I'm being pedantic but this is a pretty clear example of bad statistics. Stats used badly to justify a conclusion that has already been decided. The title should say "The leader in gold at 12min wins over 90% of the time (as long as you ignore close games)"
Only smart guy here lol. Throw out the games where team has 20%+ lead. If you find that too arbitrary, find the times a team has come back from gold deficit.
|
On June 12 2012 12:21 r.Evo wrote: In terms of basic design I feel that Riot purposely evens out the scaling all over the place as long as I can remember. The argument being that strong late- and strong earlygame champs are "unfun" means everyone and their mom scales the same basically.
While champions still scale differently the differences between them (think Cait vs Vayne) are too small to make them actually shine in their respective strong phases. I feel that strengths during certain time frames add more variety, allow for more complex strategies and therefor make the game more fun in the long run.
The question is whether balancing around what top teams can do with this is okay, even if it makes the random solo q dude cry on the forums about "imbalance" because he doesn't understand the underlying concepts. Well, you CAN abuse strong earlygame champs in LoL, you just have to tailor your whole team towards it. But you can't really abuse strong lategame champs with weak earlygame. Those champs just aren't strong enough lategame to offset their earlygame disadvantages. Let's see, who's weak early these days? Nasus: he's also a joke during lategame if he didn't get to keep up in farm with everyone. Poppy: At least until now it doesn't seem like people are solid enough with her to make her consistently strong early. But she definitely is strong lategame... So yeah Poppy might actually work. Anivia would be one of these strong lategame champs, but she happens to be strong all game long.
Meh, champs really seem to streamlined these days, can hardly find any champs who have a distinctive lategame powercurve... Poppy definitely is the best example, and you can clearly see how strong she is if she doesn't get shut down completely. But apparently people hate her for being inherently powerful lategame.
Also, at best you can fit 1 of these weak early, strong late champs into your team. Any more and you will get crushed by an earlygame team. You could blame Dragon + Buffs + the way top lane works for that I guess.
|
1) Cause and effect:
The OP has presented data which shows that a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes leads in 90% of the cases to win for the leading team. People here interpret this in a way which indicates that the rest of the game is "meaningless". You could also interpret this in way that the stronger team will manage to pull ahead early and this shows.
2) What about the other games?
90% is an impressive number but how many games show such a clear advantage after 12 minutes? So what is the total number of games which show a clear advantage after 12 minutes and how many are about even? So how much percentage of the total games are decided by 12 minutes?
3) The better team looks better X)
In any sport that you are familiar with you have a good idea about the likely outcome after some time into the game. 12 minutes is a quarter of a "regular" lol game. In soccer I for example will also have a very clear idea, which team will most likely win after around 22 minutes. Doesn't mean I can't enjoy the the remaining 68 minutes.
4) Dota
In Dota the gold graph is only half the story because XP/Lvl are also very important. Furthermore buybacks/TPs/"Lost gold" are not taken into account. You could improve that by showing a graph which shows the total gold value of the team, which would be all items+saved gold. The gold graph in dota tells you how well a team is farming not how well they are doing overall.
Conclusion)
The gold graph is a meaningful tool to asses which team is in the lead. It also seems to indicate that comebacks in lol are difficult. I think everybody here knows that and hopefully they will try to change that (if they can).
The gold graph is a symptom of that, not the problem. Cause and Effect
|
Eh, throw out any data of shitty teams playing real pros. MRN will typically have a 10%+ gold deficit to TSM at 12 minutes of any game they play. I'm not just shitting on MRN, but they're a pretty good example of the types of matches that are predetermined before the matches are played.
In what world would Redact, or Wolf Pack ever beat TSM, M5, etc?
|
On June 12 2012 06:26 Klive5ive wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2012 06:05 red_ wrote:On June 12 2012 05:45 Klive5ive wrote: Wow; for TL I would've expected a better understanding of stats.
"The team that takes as little as a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes wins over 90% of the time"
The key word is in bold. What that means is the stats take into account HUGE advantages at 12 minutes too. That means you cannot infer that if a team is up 10% they will win 90% of the time!!! You would have to take stats for teams up exactly 10% and no more to find the expected win percentage. No, you're putting words in the OP's mouth(as did others). How can I be putting words in his mouth when I'm quoting him? I'll just leave this here...... "Imagine watching game 7 tonight and seeing the Celtics go up 45-40 late in the second quarter and being able to say with 90% certainty that they are going to the finals." If you read the "evidence" it gets even worse. Right at the top: Fnatic v TSM.evo GM2---------TSM.evo---------TSM.evo-----------lead taken at 15:40 So he decided to take the reading at 15 minutes 40 instead? He does this again in the notes later on. Moving the lead to another time. I know I'm being pedantic but this is a pretty clear example of bad statistics. Stats used badly to justify a conclusion that has already been decided. The title should say "The leader in gold at 12min wins over 90% of the time (as long as you ignore close games)"
Glad I'm not the only one who looked at the stats and decided he manipulated the hell out of them.
Hmm... this close game with two really good teams goes against my thesis... better mark it down as a tie. Dafuq...
|
Awesome post!
I've been getting more into playing and watching LoL myself, and I was also feeling the drag of the late game.
I have seen some cool back and fourth in tourney play based on Ninja baron kills, but many of the games do seem to be a slow grind.
I wonder, is the data available to do a similar study of Dominion? That game mode seems very fast paced and dynamic, I wonder why we don't see pro play there?
|
On June 12 2012 22:45 BlueSpace wrote: 1) Cause and effect:
The OP has presented data which shows that a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes leads in 90% of the cases to win for the leading team. People here interpret this in a way which indicates that the rest of the game is "meaningless". You could also interpret this in way that the stronger team will manage to pull ahead early and this shows.
This is...false.
Randomness decreases as gametime increases. It also decreases as the number of decisions a team, as a whole, makes. The problem? Early game is the part of the game where teams make the fewest real decisions. In reality, a few (think 3-4) are turning the outcome of the game.
Particularly in pro games. Last hitting is pretty standard, so that isn't going to be a huge advantage (unless you got a kill, which is what probably happened to create this lead 1 kill, or 2), team comp could be giving you an advantage (your jungler could be faster), but usually its a bunch of RNG and highly guess-y things determining who has the lead at this point. Good examples of what I'm saying:
A successful or failed invade; a successful gank, perhaps 2; a countergank, or bait bottom.
Most of these are based on where the jungler is, and are very dependent on the fog of war, and getting good ward placement at this point in the game is nearly impossible. So, not only are you determining the outcome of the game during a small portion of the game, you are also determining the outcome during the period of the game that is most fundamentally random.
Thats why you see so many safe picks in pro games, particularly top and mid.
|
OP back from a long and boring business trip here and collecting some notes from those criticisms both constructive and otherwise in the backlog.
First thing's first: I am not a statistician. My mother is, oddly enough, but I am definitely far far from it. I welcome all helpful instructions on how to go about pursuing and collating this information. Rackdude in particular has been very very helpful getting me a rough outline of equations that will account for skill.
Next thing next: Perhaps my thesis was unclear. 12 minutes was an arbitrary choice of time to end the early game. IF the gold earned disparity was within the (ridiculously low) 10% tolerance at 12 minutes, I would note the time that the disparity diverged past the 10% point, hence the "lead taken at 14:30.... lead taken at 18min" comments. My secondary implied thesis was that the decisive, game-changing lead is taken BEFORE half the game is even complete. Therefore, the point in which the lead was taken should be AFTER half the game is done to be considered a tie... That secondary circumstance is awfully convoluted and confusing, so I am thinking of removing that stipulation completely, or clarifying it somehow. But to people looking at the date and being like, "a TIE!? WTF? what is a tie omgooses!"... ties and losses are what I was hoping for. They represent even or back-and-forth, and therefore interesting game.
Something that interests me further (particularly if I can get the VODs for reference in the future) would be to go back and take hard benchmarks of gold disparity at either every minute mark (oh my god the work!) or every 3 minutes. Were I to do this, I would definitely gameplan with a statistician as to how to incorporate this information efficiently. Sitting down with an old-fashioned just to watch LoL and take benchmarks is not my idea of a relaxing afternoon. Given that there are currently 10 series archived on the MLG site, going back and re-referencing might be impossible.
Basically, I began this because something seemed pretty predictable about watching LoL in a way that I don't often see in other pro e-sports. Thank you all for helping me in the pursuit of answers to this question! I welcome your help in trying to polish an end result for all this information (if there can be something that would hold up to scrutiny). In the coming days, this thread and whatever PMs you all want to send will be my primary resource for cleaning this information. I respond to and welcome any and all PMs so keep them coming! + Show Spoiler + even those wonderful "LOL NOOB. Thanks for proving the better team wins 90% of the time" ones
|
MLG spring finals game 5 shows how money isnt as important as good gameplay. TSM was leading by a big margin until they screwed up 1-2 teamfights and CLG got the first Baron. Up until the 26 minute mark TSM was leading by a solid amount in kills (6 vs 3), towers (5 vs 2) and with a 7k gold advantage (40k vs 33k). Then Jax got killed twice and it simply spiralled down from that. A big contributing factor might also be the fact that Soraka on TSM got two of those kills and she doesnt scale as well as a more offensive focused champion does, thus part of the money advantage was not as well invested as it could have been.
So the deciding factor isnt really money but rather NOT screwing up. Obviously "knowing how to play well" will lead to a decent gold / kill advantage, but at low level of play the gameplay isnt that much "on the knife's edge" as with these top teams and the items really get important. A very important part of "not screwing up" is communication and teamwork. Being a solo-killer will only get you so far, but if you manage to set up traps and synergies with other champions you will be able to get your kills much easier. So another aspect to not screwing up is actually champion selection for the synergy aspects.
|
On June 13 2012 07:15 Kronen wrote: OP back from a long and boring business trip here and collecting some notes from those criticisms both constructive and otherwise in the backlog.
First thing's first: I am not a statistician. My mother is, oddly enough, but I am definitely far far from it. I welcome all helpful instructions on how to go about pursuing and collating this information. Rackdude in particular has been very very helpful getting me a rough outline of equations that will account for skill.
Why don't you show your mother this and see what she thinks of this sentence:
"Imagine watching game 7 tonight and seeing the Celtics go up 45-40 late in the second quarter and being able to say with 90% certainty that they are going to the finals." - You still haven't listened to what we're saying. This is just straight up wrong.
You don't need an equation for skill, you need to take results properly. If you actually wrote down the exact score for every match at 12 minutes, regardless of whether it's close or not, that would be a good start. I'd happily sort your data out from there. At the moment though it's impossible to say anything since you've ignored close games.
|
On June 13 2012 17:56 Klive5ive wrote: I'd happily sort your data out from there. At the moment though it's impossible to say anything since you've ignored close games.
Excellent! I will be sorting the games available on the MLG site today by taking percentile difference in gold at every 3minute mark and will gladly take you up on your offer to sort data.
I'll keep you posted! As far as organizing the backlog of previous games, if someone has access to VODs for all the games, feel free to recompile that info.
On June 13 2012 15:54 Rabiator wrote: MLG spring finals game 5 shows how money isnt as important as good gameplay. ... So the deciding factor isnt really money but rather NOT screwing up. Obviously "knowing how to play well" will lead to a decent gold / kill advantage, but at low level of play the gameplay isnt that much "on the knife's edge" as with these top teams and the items really get important. A very important part of "not screwing up" is communication and teamwork.
The problems with this is that it's quite hard to chart "not screwing up". Umm, in some of the games I have noted rationale for a team coming from the early deficit (see DAY 1, CLG.NA vs everyone they played). But in an effort away from speculation and subjective analysis of gameplay I'm trying to steer away from that.
|
Good job Kronen. We all appreciate your hard work. Now comes the hard part, analyzing what this means. Is the gold number the cause of snowballing, or is that gold statistic the result of snowballing.
Just as an example, lets say a team catches on to this number and starts doing whatever they can to get a 10% or higher gold lead early on. Will that increase their chances of winning to 90% or not? This is a very testable hypothesis and I surely hope that some team catches on and tests this out.
|
On June 14 2012 01:57 hacpee wrote: Good job Kronen. We all appreciate your hard work. Now comes the hard part, analyzing what this means. Is the gold number the cause of snowballing, or is that gold statistic the result of snowballing.
Just as an example, lets say a team catches on to this number and starts doing whatever they can to get a 10% or higher gold lead early on. Will that increase their chances of winning to 90% or not? This is a very testable hypothesis and I surely hope that some team catches on and tests this out.
Thank you for the kind words... This helps alleviate the stress the fricking MLG player is causing.... I can't force the damn thing into a fullscreen mode that will stay open and I can't pull the game out and maximize it on monitor #2. Also.... I cant' scroll to exact timestamps on the player... so I usually have to sit and watch 30secs to a minute of gameplay to get to the exact time I need to collect information... Super fuckign annoying. And this says nothing of the times it randomly becomes unmuted and I have to listen to Phreak talk.... uuuggh... margarita time IMO...
here's the link to the spreadsheet: LoL VOD benchmarks Please give me suggestions if you think there's a better way to chart this info.
|
anyone have any information why the fucking MLG player occasioanlly goes to complete illegible shit sporadically? It's so fuckign bad I can't read text. Reloading occasionally helps the problem but not consistently.
|
On June 14 2012 01:57 hacpee wrote: Good job Kronen. We all appreciate your hard work. Now comes the hard part, analyzing what this means. Is the gold number the cause of snowballing, or is that gold statistic the result of snowballing.
Just as an example, lets say a team catches on to this number and starts doing whatever they can to get a 10% or higher gold lead early on. Will that increase their chances of winning to 90% or not? This is a very testable hypothesis and I surely hope that some team catches on and tests this out.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Clearly every team already tries to have a gold advantage, why would you *not* try to do so? Gold is used as a proxy variable for "success" here; it's easy to measure and interpret, and it takes into account many different factors that would be bothersome to analyze independently (e.g. kills, stolen buffs, towers, etc.).
The "snowballing" is due to the simple fact that performing well (gaining gold) gives you an advantage later in the game (improved itemization). I don't think anybody who has played the game will dispute that having more gold increases your chance to win. If this were not the case, last hitting would be completely useless. The only question is how easy it is to overcome an early disadvantage, and that is not a question of cause and effect, it is a question of constant factors (i.e., cost and gold efficiency of items).
I also don't see how your proposition tests any meaningful hypothesis. The statistics Kronen gave are just that, statistics; they are observations he made. There is no new causal link being proposed here. if your team can gain a significant gold advantage early -- while aiming for a "standard" team composition, as all the teams in the data set did -- there's a good chance that your team is actually playing better than the other team. That was the conclusion drawn from the observations. The only surprising part was how high the correlation between early gold leads and the game outcome was; the idea that teams with a gold lead are more likely to win is not surprising.
If you are trying to suggest that gold itself is the cause for the teams winning the game, that is a completely different hypothesis from what you are proposing to test.
To test that, arrange random matches, ask both teams to play normally *except that one team has to forfeit a certain number of last hits* until the gold discrepancy becomes large enough. Remove this requirement after that point and see how the game plays out. (You could even repeat the games with the role of the gold-forfeiting team reversed, though that isn't statistically kosher given that games aren't independent. But it's a starting point.)
That would tell you whether gold was the *reason* the teams won that often -- or whether other factors are in play, e.g. better teams using their skill advantage to gain a gold advantage. (I'm simplifying here, but it'd go in the right direction towards answering that question.)
Also, there is absolutely nothing in the data that suggests that having a *10%* gold advantage gives you a *90%* chance to win. The data does not suggest that, I suggest you reread the original statement (and some of the replies) if you believe it does. There were no numbers provided for the win rate given a 10% gold advantage. The choice of 10% was an arbitrary cut-off.
|
On June 14 2012 04:55 bmn wrote:Show nested quote +On June 14 2012 01:57 hacpee wrote: Good job Kronen. We all appreciate your hard work. Now comes the hard part, analyzing what this means. Is the gold number the cause of snowballing, or is that gold statistic the result of snowballing.
Just as an example, lets say a team catches on to this number and starts doing whatever they can to get a 10% or higher gold lead early on. Will that increase their chances of winning to 90% or not? This is a very testable hypothesis and I surely hope that some team catches on and tests this out. I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Clearly every team already tries to have a gold advantage, why would you *not* try to do so? Gold is used as a proxy variable for "success" here; it's easy to measure and interpret, and it takes into account many different factors that would be bothersome to analyze independently (e.g. kills, stolen buffs, towers, etc.). The "snowballing" is due to the simple fact that performing well (gaining gold) gives you an advantage later in the game (improved itemization). I don't think anybody who has played the game will dispute that having more gold increases your chance to win. If this were not the case, last hitting would be completely useless. The only question is how easy it is to overcome an early disadvantage, and that is not a question of cause and effect, it is a question of constant factors (i.e., cost and gold efficiency of items). I also don't see how your proposition tests any meaningful hypothesis. The statistics Kronen gave are just that, statistics; they are observations he made. There is no new causal link being proposed here. if your team can gain a significant gold advantage early -- while aiming for a "standard" team composition, as all the teams in the data set did -- there's a good chance that your team is actually playing better than the other team. That was the conclusion drawn from the observations. The only surprising part was how high the correlation between early gold leads and the game outcome was; the idea that teams with a gold lead are more likely to win is not surprising. If you are trying to suggest that gold itself is the cause for the teams winning the game, that is a completely different hypothesis from what you are proposing to test. To test that, arrange random matches, ask both teams to play normally *except that one team has to forfeit a certain number of last hits* until the gold discrepancy becomes large enough. Remove this requirement after that point and see how the game plays out. (You could even repeat the games with the role of the gold-forfeiting team reversed, though that isn't statistically kosher given that games aren't independent. But it's a starting point.) That would tell you whether gold was the *reason* the teams won that often -- or whether other factors are in play, e.g. better teams using their skill advantage to gain a gold advantage. (I'm simplifying here, but it'd go in the right direction towards answering that question.) Also, there is absolutely nothing in the data that suggests that having a *10%* gold advantage gives you a *90%* chance to win. The data does not suggest that, I suggest you reread the original statement (and some of the replies) if you believe it does. There were no numbers provided for the win rate given a 10% gold advantage. The choice of 10% was an arbitrary cut-off.
None of this addresses the main problem, which is that the first 12 minutes of a game are the most inherently random minutes of a game because of the inability of players to have good ward coverage.
Thus the snowballyness causes 2 other things that (IMO) make the game less fun overall. 1. Forces players to play overly safe. 2. Eliminates several champions from the "viable" pool because of inability to "play it safe" (Rammus is a great example).
|
The crunch for winners bracket rounds 2 and 3 are up on the spreadsheet... time for a break.
|
On June 14 2012 06:43 cLutZ wrote:
None of this addresses the main problem, which is that the first 12 minutes of a game are the most inherently random minutes of a game because of the inability of players to have good ward coverage.
Thus the snowballyness causes 2 other things that (IMO) make the game less fun overall. 1. Forces players to play overly safe. 2. Eliminates several champions from the "viable" pool because of inability to "play it safe" (Rammus is a great example).
My post did intentionally not try to make any statements on how balance should be or what should be changed, I was just commenting on what I see as a misunderstanding of what the observations do and do not actually say. Trying to mix general opinion on how a game should or should not be with incorrect conclusions drawn from statistical observations only makes things worse.
But if you insist: - I don't really see why people consider the fundamental "snowball" property a problem. It is a core element of what DotA/LoL-style games are: Being ahead allows you to buy more/better stuff, giving you an advantage for future engagements. - How easy it is or is not to recover from an early disadvantage is something I can't comment on. I haven't played DotA, so I can't draw those comparisons. I'm also not at a level of play where relatively small gold disadvantages feel stifling, and the OP's statistics in isolation say very little about this question, which was my main point.
You say that the snowballing "forces players to play overly safe", but I don't see how that is the case at all. If the game tends to snowball, your incentive to take a lead early is larger, not smaller. It increases both the penalty for bad moves and the reward for good moves.
Perhaps early combat is too random in LoL, which would indeed act as an incentive for better players to play more passively. Perhaps wards are too cheap, perhaps the jungler's location is too predictable -- but those are separate, unrelated issues to whether the game snowballs or not.
|
Would be cool to have a more controlled data set. I would use only the seeded teams (since you'd expected games involving non-seeded teams to be one-sided) and I would only count games where one team was 10% or more ahead by the 12 minute mark (you use a sliding scale where you sometimes include games where there was less of a lead or the lead was established later in the game).
LoL definitely has a few problems that can lead to snowballing, such as oracle's elixir helping you stay ahead, but I feel it's nowhere near as bad as your initial reading of the data seems to suggest.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 14 2012 06:43 cLutZ wrote: 1. Forces players to play overly safe
I disagree with this.
What makes players play overly safe in LoL is that the cost of playing safe is simply too low compared to the rewards for taking risks. It's relatively easy and cheap to ward up your lane against ganks, and there are comparatively few methods for bypassing wards when ganking (most of them are either invis heroes that aren't viable in competitive play, or long-cooldown global/semi-global ultimates that a professional player can easily keep track of the the cooldowns for). On top of this, when you feel you are at risk in lane, you can often just sit at your tower, and wait for the creep wave to get to you. If the creep pressure is even or pushing toward you, you lose minimal farm waiting out the danger.
This is different from DotA, where you cannot play "safe". The reason for this is that it's simply not possible to play safe. Your team is limited on wards, so you cannot cover all the entrances to 1 lane, without having a deficit of wards for the other 2 lanes. Furthermore even with wards, your lane is not safe. There are many more invisibility/global/semi-global/just-plain-long-range abilities that are capable of ganking you past wards, and particularly when reduced night-time vision is involved, there are just a lot of ways that you can be initiated on from further than you can see (e.g. night time vision for most heroes is 900, Blink/Blink-like abilities typically can be cast up to 1200 range). There's also Smoke of Deceit, which just lets any enemy ganker bypass wards with a consumable. At the same time, you can't just camp your tower in the face of these threats, due to the absolutely suffocating lane control allowing your opponent to freely deny creeps allows--he can aggressively pull the lane back to his side.
The best comparison I can make is--consider the level of threat you feel when Nocturne or TF is 6. Now consider that all 10 players feel that risk 95% of the time during the laning phase in DotA. It's simply not possible to "play it safe" then, because you would be sitting at your tower, not get a point of XP or gold, and the creep wave would never come back to you. In this scenario, you HAVE to take risks to get gold/XP. This is where the interesting decision-making happens--taking intelligent risks and getting away with it, vs. taking unintelligent risks and getting punished for it.
|
On June 14 2012 08:28 DanielZKlein wrote: Would be cool to have a more controlled data set. I would use only the seeded teams (since you'd expected games involving non-seeded teams to be one-sided) and I would only count games where one team was 10% or more ahead by the 12 minute mark (you use a sliding scale where you sometimes include games where there was less of a lead or the lead was established later in the game).
No, this is *not* a controlled data set. You still don't control for the most important question: Whether the teams won because they were better, and having more gold being a side effect of being better, or whether the gold advantage was essentially unrelated to skill and that advantage caused them to win. And I'd guess (but that's just intuition) that the games where one team is much more skilled than the other are *more* useful for answering the question, not less useful (see explanation in parentheses below).
You want to control the data by creating a situation where either team is arbitrarily assigned a gold advantage and then plays it out from there. Since you can't just load save games and resume, there's no obvious easy way to do it, but you could fake it to some degree if you have teams willing to cooperate.
But as long as you just take games and observe without any way of controlling for skill, I don't see how you would be able to answer the important question mentioned earlier.
(You could probably try to answer the question if you had some giant repository of saved games played under controlled circumstances with many repeated team matchups without player/team changes; e.g. if teams spammed serious scrim games all day long and you had access to the outcomes. That way you could try to separately estimate "team skill" for a specific game a priori. But barring that, which doesn't seem realistic, I see no practical and meaningful way to do this: How well a team plays is a very unpredictable measure; every team's quality of play varies greatly from game to game, and even more so if you don't know the enemy's skill (different styles clashing; different team compositions also matter; etc.).
In fact, only looking at games where two roughly evenly matched teams play only makes things worse. If the teams are roughly evenly matched, you can't even make a guess on who should win a priori -- and if two teams are evenly matched, it's completely expected that the one with an early advantage wins; there's no way of getting useful information from the game outcome no matter which team had the initial advantage. If one team is clearly much worse than the other, and if the worse team has an early gold advantage, that is the kind of game where the predicted outcome between the two hypotheses (skill is paramount vs gold advantage is paramount) will differ, so those games will yield useful information. But even then, you'd need a lot of games to average out stuff like teams just having a bad day, etc.)
LoL definitely has a few problems that can lead to snowballing, such as oracle's elixir helping you stay ahead, but I feel it's nowhere near as bad as your initial reading of the data seems to suggest.
Snowballing is not a problem, it is a vital component of LoL and similar games!
Snowballing is the only reason there is any value in doing anything for gold, including last hitting, dragon, feeding kills to ad carry instead of support, and so on. It's not a problem, it's the whole basis of why the gameplay is as it is.
Removing snowballing completely trivial: Everyone starts at level 18 and gains an equal amount of gold over time, kills grant no experience or gold, and there are no jungle buffs. This would be boring as hell, but you'd solve the "problem".
Snowballing needs to be there to make it interesting (IMO): It greatly increases the stakes during the laning phase and it rewards high-level (and aggressive) play.
There may be a problem in the extent to which comebacks are difficult. That's a completely different game design question, a very important question, but a different one. As TheYango pointed out, there are many reasons DotA differs from LoL as to whether it pays off to play safe or not, but it's not because of the existence of snowballing.
|
New benchmarks are up! Wooo!
Chart of crunch can be found here and the subsequent quickie version with the percentile info and a clunky chart can be found here.
All of the VODs benchmarks are up except for the Finals. The most interesting statistic is that in all but 1 circumstance, the team that wins is never behind by more than 7%. I repeat, in the current subset of information, if a team falls behind by more than 7% (even less than my inital 10% supposition), chances are greatly increased that you're going lose. The only exception is a mystifying game Dignitas and CLG NA. Need to study that one more. But it's really really interesting.
On June 14 2012 10:50 bmn wrote: Snowballing is not a problem, it is a vital component of LoL and similar games!
Snowballing is the only reason there is any value in doing anything for gold, including last hitting, dragon, feeding kills to ad carry instead of support, and so on. It's not a problem, it's the whole basis of why the gameplay is as it is.
Removing snowballing completely trivial: Everyone starts at level 18 and gains an equal amount of gold over time, kills grant no experience or gold, and there are no jungle buffs. This would be boring as hell, but you'd solve the "problem".
There may be a problem in the extent to which comebacks are difficult. That's a completely different game design question, a very important question, but a different one. As TheYango pointed out, there are many reasons DotA differs from LoL as to whether it pays off to play safe or not, but it's not because of the existence of snowballing.
Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other. I'm treating snowballing as the mechanism that causes comebacks to be all but non-existent in LoL. Your saying "Snowballing is the only reason there is any value in doing anything for gold," makes me thinkg you're mistaking snowballing for just general good intelligent play. But let me clarify... I'm here because I find LoL too predictable and I wanted to see if there's math that can back up (or squash undeniably) my feelings. Having a game in which it is nigh on impossible to come back is a problem.
I'm not here to speculate on what causes the problem or how to fix it. I'm just trying to benchmark games and see if the problem exists and how it develops.
|
I'm curious about what happens when you throw out all the 2-0 series as "one team was TOO much better than the other team, and is obviously going to win before the game is even started"
The core of the issue is not that we're interested in how likely a comeback is when one team is significantly worse than another. We need to look at what happens when the teams are at least reasonably close in skill. TSM is always going to stomp a team that is far worse than they are, even within the first 12 minutes. It might happen that they botch early game and make a comeback, but that requires them to somehow lose the early game against a significantly worse team - it's not going to happen often.
That phenomenon isn't exclusive to LoL either - It's not very interesting when you have the #1 team in any sport stomping some of the lower teams in teh league, and leading by a huge margin halfway through the game (I love you Cubbies, but I'm looking at you here.) TSM vs CLG comebacks are what make watching LoL interesting, and those are not limited to 10% of games between top teams. Need to measure more against even teams. While we can't necessarily rate skill numerically, we CAN say where it's "roughly even", such as comparing numbers in matchups where the teams have relatively even win/loss rate against each other.
|
On June 14 2012 14:01 sylverfyre wrote: I'm curious about what happens when you throw out all the 2-0 series as "one team was TOO much better than the other team, and is obviously going to win before the game is even started"
The core of the issue is not that we're interested in how likely a comeback is when one team is significantly worse than another. We need to look at what happens when the teams are at least reasonably close in skill. TSM is always going to stomp a team that is far worse than they are, even within the first 12 minutes. It might happen that they botch early game and make a comeback, but that requires them to somehow lose the early game against a significantly worse team - it's not going to happen often.
That phenomenon isn't exclusive to LoL either - It's not very interesting when you have the #1 team in any sport stomping some of the lower teams in teh league, and leading by a huge margin halfway through the game (I love you Cubbies, but I'm looking at you here.) TSM vs CLG comebacks are what make watching LoL interesting, and those are not limited to 10% of games between top teams. Need to measure more against even teams. While we can't necessarily rate skill numerically, we CAN say where it's "roughly even", such as comparing numbers in matchups where the teams have relatively even win/loss rate against each other.
Now you're trying to figure out how to skew the numbers. =P
Take the top 5 for a specific tournament, only count games they played vs each other, do that for a time period of one year. That'd be as close as you could get to "even skill" while maintaining a somewhat healthy sample size.
|
On June 14 2012 10:50 bmn wrote: In fact, only looking at games where two roughly evenly matched teams play only makes things worse. If the teams are roughly evenly matched, you can't even make a guess on who should win a priori -- and if two teams are evenly matched, it's completely expected that the one with an early advantage wins; there's no way of getting useful information from the game outcome no matter which team had the initial advantage. I feel like you missed something here. Perhaps you assumed perfect play (or perfectly equally flawed play) from both evenly matched teams?
If two teams are evenly matched and one team manages to get a 10% gold lead, then that means there is a fluctuation of gold of at least 10% in a game between two evenly matched teams. Therefore, it should be reasonable to assume that the fluctuation of gold should fluctuate back to the losing team a certain percentage of the time and will sometimes result in a comeback. There is also the possibility of winning a game with a gold deficit. Either way, a team with a 10% gold deficit should sometimes be able to beat a team of equal skill. The % they should be able to do that is subjective to viewer opinions, but should be somewhere between 0 and 50% non-inclusive.
To many of the other responders, yes, the testing methodology is flawed. A more controlled environment or a formula adjusting for team skill would almost definitely result in less than the 90% win rate of this testing methodology. However, the final number is not the key component of this test. The testing methodology does exactly what it needs to do in a very simplistic and easily repeatable way: it gives us a number by which we can compare to future events.
What we have here is not a purely statistical endeavor. Instead, we have a mixture of statistics and viewer opinion. The viewer opinion is that there are too few comebacks. When combining the data and the viewer opinion, there is a feeling that a 90% win rate based on this test is too high. You can claim the data to be flawed in many ways, but this data is repeatable and will tell you something important when compared to future tests using the same methodology and similar circumstances. If Riot chooses to implement a new feature or make changes to the game to create less snowballing effect, it should show up by using the same test at a future MLG. If it doesn't, then it probably means that whatever they implemented did not lower the snowballing effect by a significant amount.
|
2 tournaments are coming up this weekend GESL and Dreamhack. Enough data to test this hypothesis. I generally agree, when a team is down early in gold it will snowball hard since there is a lack of hard cc like in dota.
|
On June 13 2012 02:03 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2012 22:45 BlueSpace wrote: 1) Cause and effect:
The OP has presented data which shows that a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes leads in 90% of the cases to win for the leading team. People here interpret this in a way which indicates that the rest of the game is "meaningless". You could also interpret this in way that the stronger team will manage to pull ahead early and this shows.
This is...false. Randomness decreases as gametime increases. It also decreases as the number of decisions a team, as a whole, makes. The problem? Early game is the part of the game where teams make the fewest real decisions. In reality, a few (think 3-4) are turning the outcome of the game. Particularly in pro games. Last hitting is pretty standard, so that isn't going to be a huge advantage (unless you got a kill, which is what probably happened to create this lead 1 kill, or 2), team comp could be giving you an advantage (your jungler could be faster), but usually its a bunch of RNG and highly guess-y things determining who has the lead at this point. Good examples of what I'm saying: A successful or failed invade; a successful gank, perhaps 2; a countergank, or bait bottom. Most of these are based on where the jungler is, and are very dependent on the fog of war, and getting good ward placement at this point in the game is nearly impossible. So, not only are you determining the outcome of the game during a small portion of the game, you are also determining the outcome during the period of the game that is most fundamentally random. Thats why you see so many safe picks in pro games, particularly top and mid.
1) The game start is not random at all. Everything including buffs are fixed at the game start. You have zero randomness at the beginning of the game, therefor randomness has to increase as the game progresses and cannot constantly decrease.
2) Last hitting at pro level is only standard in so far, that when left alone everybody is pretty perfect at it. In reality you have the enemy jungler and the enemy laner to worry about. The ability to last hit is not entirely decided inside the game but heavily influenced by the picks and bans prior to game start. Getting outpicked will lead to a bad lane matchup which in turn will lead to less CS as the enemy laner can harass more effectively. There is nothing random about that.
3) Jungling is not random. The jungler does not randomly run around the map and ganks lanes. He can't because he will fall behind in farm. Positioning of the jungler is usually quite well understood and there are specific timings for ganks. Pro players know when a lvl 2 gank might happen for example. The counter is to not overextend. Not Random...
4) Ward placement in the early game is not hard. Everybody is in their lane. You know from where the enemy jungler will come and all towers are up. Warding late game is much harder since you might be down several towers and at any given time several people might be missing from their lanes and lurking in the bushes, waiting to attack you. Again no randomness...
I don't want to say that there is no luck involved in LoL, but there is no inherent randomness to the early game it is as skill and comp based as any other part of the game.
|
Please get your wording right. There is no such thing as "randomness" in a game like League, SC, DotA or Poker. The closest you can get to "random" is stuff like crit chance and that isn't really random either.
The amount of variables which lead to results increases over a certain amount of time and will then decrease again towards the end. In practice, certain actions from the enemy are more likely than others (it's almost impossible to truly randomize your actions in a game like Poker, it is literally impossible to do so in a game of League) - whoever reads the limited amount of information he has better will make more sound decisions.
Ingame you don't fight the actual actions of the enemy, you fight against a possible range of actions (simply because you can't know what anyone else will do next but you can try to guess it based on the information you have).
|
On June 14 2012 14:23 r.Evo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 14 2012 14:01 sylverfyre wrote: I'm curious about what happens when you throw out all the 2-0 series as "one team was TOO much better than the other team, and is obviously going to win before the game is even started"
The core of the issue is not that we're interested in how likely a comeback is when one team is significantly worse than another. We need to look at what happens when the teams are at least reasonably close in skill. TSM is always going to stomp a team that is far worse than they are, even within the first 12 minutes. It might happen that they botch early game and make a comeback, but that requires them to somehow lose the early game against a significantly worse team - it's not going to happen often.
That phenomenon isn't exclusive to LoL either - It's not very interesting when you have the #1 team in any sport stomping some of the lower teams in teh league, and leading by a huge margin halfway through the game (I love you Cubbies, but I'm looking at you here.) TSM vs CLG comebacks are what make watching LoL interesting, and those are not limited to 10% of games between top teams. Need to measure more against even teams. While we can't necessarily rate skill numerically, we CAN say where it's "roughly even", such as comparing numbers in matchups where the teams have relatively even win/loss rate against each other. Now you're trying to figure out how to skew the numbers. =P Take the top 5 for a specific tournament, only count games they played vs each other, do that for a time period of one year. That'd be as close as you could get to "even skill" while maintaining a somewhat healthy sample size. No, I'm trying to look at a subset of the data that throws out the clutter where you have one team absolutely stomping 50% gold lead in under 20 minutes because they outclass the other so badly it's not even funny. It's the equivalent of having a pro team vs an amateur team in any other sport- if they DIDN'T absolutely crush the opposition, you'd be impressed by the amateur team's ability to up up a fight - but if you put it into the dataset the same way, you're giving it the same weight as a TSM vs CLG game, when one is obviously meaningful to the "snowballing 2 strong" conclusion and the other is not.
On June 14 2012 18:15 r.Evo wrote: Please get your wording right. There is no such thing as "randomness" in a game like League, SC, DotA or Poker. The closest you can get to "random" is stuff like crit chance and that isn't really random either.
The amount of variables which lead to results increases over a certain amount of time and will then decrease again towards the end. In practice, certain actions from the enemy are more likely than others (it's almost impossible to truly randomize your actions in a game like Poker, it is literally impossible to do so in a game of League) - whoever reads the limited amount of information he has better will make more sound decisions.
Ingame you don't fight the actual actions of the enemy, you fight against a possible range of actions (simply because you can't know what anyone else will do next but you can try to guess it based on the information you have). Get your own wording right before you call people out. Yes, there's randomness in poker. There is in DotA too. Critting and phage-proccing in LoL are basically the only random events, but it's still random. And whenever you're making decisions based off of incomplete information, (All games described) you can basically treat
The difference is, a smart player can narrow down the possible outcomes of a random/unknown event (in poker, think of pinning your opponent on a particular range of hands) and often prepare for or at least EXPECT the remaining possible [random or simply unknown] possibilities.
|
The "randomness" you're describing doesn't exist if you look at the decisionmaking process. And that is the process which matters. The actual outcome has a very slight random element but that's not what we're talking about.
The "random factor" you're talking about is plain and simple ones inability to narrow down the possibilites due to limited information. Not sure why you call me out on that when I even wrote myself that crit chance is as close as you can get to something random. As close as you can get, because it is not random.
Both DotA and League of Legends use a pseudo-random distribution for crit-chance, here's an explanation of the old DotA one, not sure what changed lately: http://www.dotastrategy.com/forum/ftopic18287.html ... LoL uses a similar, modified, system but it's also not really random.
The difference is, a smart player can narrow down the possible outcomes of a random/unknown event (in poker, think of pinning your opponent on a particular range of hands) and often prepare for or at least EXPECT the remaining possible [random or simply unknown] possibilities. What you're describing is not about random events. The good player understands the possibilites that are out there, narrows the opponents behaviour down to ranges and then makes a profitable decision based on those ranges. That eliminates the random factor in the long run completely. Yes, completely.
Sure, it can happen that a certain player makes a huge misclick which ends up with him in a clever spot no one involved thought about before which then leads to an unaccounted kill. But that isn't about randomness in the design of the game.
An actual example for randomness via design would be Chaos Knight from DotA. =P
|
On June 14 2012 17:44 BlueSpace wrote:Show nested quote +On June 13 2012 02:03 cLutZ wrote:On June 12 2012 22:45 BlueSpace wrote: 1) Cause and effect:
The OP has presented data which shows that a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes leads in 90% of the cases to win for the leading team. People here interpret this in a way which indicates that the rest of the game is "meaningless". You could also interpret this in way that the stronger team will manage to pull ahead early and this shows.
This is...false. Randomness decreases as gametime increases. It also decreases as the number of decisions a team, as a whole, makes. The problem? Early game is the part of the game where teams make the fewest real decisions. In reality, a few (think 3-4) are turning the outcome of the game. Particularly in pro games. Last hitting is pretty standard, so that isn't going to be a huge advantage (unless you got a kill, which is what probably happened to create this lead 1 kill, or 2), team comp could be giving you an advantage (your jungler could be faster), but usually its a bunch of RNG and highly guess-y things determining who has the lead at this point. Good examples of what I'm saying: A successful or failed invade; a successful gank, perhaps 2; a countergank, or bait bottom. Most of these are based on where the jungler is, and are very dependent on the fog of war, and getting good ward placement at this point in the game is nearly impossible. So, not only are you determining the outcome of the game during a small portion of the game, you are also determining the outcome during the period of the game that is most fundamentally random. Thats why you see so many safe picks in pro games, particularly top and mid. 1) The game start is not random at all. Everything including buffs are fixed at the game start. You have zero randomness at the beginning of the game, therefor randomness has to increase as the game progresses and cannot constantly decrease. 2) Last hitting at pro level is only standard in so far, that when left alone everybody is pretty perfect at it. In reality you have the enemy jungler and the enemy laner to worry about. The ability to last hit is not entirely decided inside the game but heavily influenced by the picks and bans prior to game start. Getting outpicked will lead to a bad lane matchup which in turn will lead to less CS as the enemy laner can harass more effectively. There is nothing random about that. 3) Jungling is not random. The jungler does not randomly run around the map and ganks lanes. He can't because he will fall behind in farm. Positioning of the jungler is usually quite well understood and there are specific timings for ganks. Pro players know when a lvl 2 gank might happen for example. The counter is to not overextend. Not Random... 4) Ward placement in the early game is not hard. Everybody is in their lane. You know from where the enemy jungler will come and all towers are up. Warding late game is much harder since you might be down several towers and at any given time several people might be missing from their lanes and lurking in the bushes, waiting to attack you. Again no randomness... I don't want to say that there is no luck involved in LoL, but there is no inherent randomness to the early game it is as skill and comp based as any other part of the game.
Random was, of course, the wrong word to use. What I should have said is "uncertainty". 1. True. 2. Not relevant to this, except to the point that this reinforces my point that the snowballiness of the game significantly reduces the number of viable champions and team compositions. 3. Again, not random, uncertainty. You can't control where the jungler is, and, particularly top lane, can't have enough wards to protect itself. 4. Warding late game is easier because you have more gold and you are grouped as a team so warding is less necessary.
You are basically saying that caution=skill. And in the laning phase that is almost entirely correct. Janna throwing a tornado into a bush, even if no one is there, is better off wasting both the mana and the CD than not and saving it for an aggressive play. I'm saying that this means a bunch of other things that are bad. DO you remember when M5 was super dominant with their jungle Alistar stuff? Guess what, it was based on this basic principle: get an early kill or 2 = win game.
On June 14 2012 23:29 r.Evo wrote:The "randomness" you're describing doesn't exist if you look at the decisionmaking process. And that is the process which matters. The actual outcome has a very slight random element but that's not what we're talking about. The "random factor" you're talking about is plain and simple ones inability to narrow down the possibilites due to limited information. Not sure why you call me out on that when I even wrote myself that crit chance is as close as you can get to something random. As close as you can get, because it is not random. Both DotA and League of Legends use a pseudo-random distribution for crit-chance, here's an explanation of the old DotA one, not sure what changed lately: http://www.dotastrategy.com/forum/ftopic18287.html ... LoL uses a similar, modified, system but it's also not really random. Show nested quote +The difference is, a smart player can narrow down the possible outcomes of a random/unknown event (in poker, think of pinning your opponent on a particular range of hands) and often prepare for or at least EXPECT the remaining possible [random or simply unknown] possibilities. What you're describing is not about random events. The good player understands the possibilites that are out there, narrows the opponents behaviour down to ranges and then makes a profitable decision based on those ranges. That eliminates the random factor in the long run completely. Yes, completely.Sure, it can happen that a certain player makes a huge misclick which ends up with him in a clever spot no one involved thought about before which then leads to an unaccounted kill. But that isn't about randomness in the design of the game.An actual example for randomness via design would be Chaos Knight from DotA. =P
I underlined the important portion of your text. IN THE LONG RUN. Let us assume that the entire game = the long run. 12 minutes is certainly NOT the long run. What the stats say, however, is if you are making decisions that are risky, but very profitable in theory, you will likely lose.
------
The overall point is, the game needs to be structured in such a way that the sum of the decisions throughout the game is reflected in the final result. Right now, it appears to have a model where that is less likely, and rather the decisions in the beginning of the game have more weight than those later.
|
This is a fundamental game design problem. If you want to avoid it, you need to have kills and towers to not give any gameplay advantage, and points instead like in sports. the whole concept of farming makes this impossible, as competitive farming is all about getting a comparitive advantage. lol would need to be made into a purely PvP game based on score then
|
On June 15 2012 05:16 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On June 14 2012 17:44 BlueSpace wrote:On June 13 2012 02:03 cLutZ wrote:On June 12 2012 22:45 BlueSpace wrote: 1) Cause and effect:
The OP has presented data which shows that a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes leads in 90% of the cases to win for the leading team. People here interpret this in a way which indicates that the rest of the game is "meaningless". You could also interpret this in way that the stronger team will manage to pull ahead early and this shows.
This is...false. Randomness decreases as gametime increases. It also decreases as the number of decisions a team, as a whole, makes. The problem? Early game is the part of the game where teams make the fewest real decisions. In reality, a few (think 3-4) are turning the outcome of the game. Particularly in pro games. Last hitting is pretty standard, so that isn't going to be a huge advantage (unless you got a kill, which is what probably happened to create this lead 1 kill, or 2), team comp could be giving you an advantage (your jungler could be faster), but usually its a bunch of RNG and highly guess-y things determining who has the lead at this point. Good examples of what I'm saying: A successful or failed invade; a successful gank, perhaps 2; a countergank, or bait bottom. Most of these are based on where the jungler is, and are very dependent on the fog of war, and getting good ward placement at this point in the game is nearly impossible. So, not only are you determining the outcome of the game during a small portion of the game, you are also determining the outcome during the period of the game that is most fundamentally random. Thats why you see so many safe picks in pro games, particularly top and mid. 1) The game start is not random at all. Everything including buffs are fixed at the game start. You have zero randomness at the beginning of the game, therefor randomness has to increase as the game progresses and cannot constantly decrease. 2) Last hitting at pro level is only standard in so far, that when left alone everybody is pretty perfect at it. In reality you have the enemy jungler and the enemy laner to worry about. The ability to last hit is not entirely decided inside the game but heavily influenced by the picks and bans prior to game start. Getting outpicked will lead to a bad lane matchup which in turn will lead to less CS as the enemy laner can harass more effectively. There is nothing random about that. 3) Jungling is not random. The jungler does not randomly run around the map and ganks lanes. He can't because he will fall behind in farm. Positioning of the jungler is usually quite well understood and there are specific timings for ganks. Pro players know when a lvl 2 gank might happen for example. The counter is to not overextend. Not Random... 4) Ward placement in the early game is not hard. Everybody is in their lane. You know from where the enemy jungler will come and all towers are up. Warding late game is much harder since you might be down several towers and at any given time several people might be missing from their lanes and lurking in the bushes, waiting to attack you. Again no randomness... I don't want to say that there is no luck involved in LoL, but there is no inherent randomness to the early game it is as skill and comp based as any other part of the game. Random was, of course, the wrong word to use. What I should have said is "uncertainty". 1. True. 2. Not relevant to this, except to the point that this reinforces my point that the snowballiness of the game significantly reduces the number of viable champions and team compositions. 3. Again, not random, uncertainty. You can't control where the jungler is, and, particularly top lane, can't have enough wards to protect itself. 4. Warding late game is easier because you have more gold and you are grouped as a team so warding is less necessary. You are basically saying that caution=skill. And in the laning phase that is almost entirely correct. Janna throwing a tornado into a bush, even if no one is there, is better off wasting both the mana and the CD than not and saving it for an aggressive play. I'm saying that this means a bunch of other things that are bad. DO you remember when M5 was super dominant with their jungle Alistar stuff? Guess what, it was based on this basic principle: get an early kill or 2 = win game. Show nested quote +On June 14 2012 23:29 r.Evo wrote:The "randomness" you're describing doesn't exist if you look at the decisionmaking process. And that is the process which matters. The actual outcome has a very slight random element but that's not what we're talking about. The "random factor" you're talking about is plain and simple ones inability to narrow down the possibilites due to limited information. Not sure why you call me out on that when I even wrote myself that crit chance is as close as you can get to something random. As close as you can get, because it is not random. Both DotA and League of Legends use a pseudo-random distribution for crit-chance, here's an explanation of the old DotA one, not sure what changed lately: http://www.dotastrategy.com/forum/ftopic18287.html ... LoL uses a similar, modified, system but it's also not really random. The difference is, a smart player can narrow down the possible outcomes of a random/unknown event (in poker, think of pinning your opponent on a particular range of hands) and often prepare for or at least EXPECT the remaining possible [random or simply unknown] possibilities. What you're describing is not about random events. The good player understands the possibilites that are out there, narrows the opponents behaviour down to ranges and then makes a profitable decision based on those ranges. That eliminates the random factor in the long run completely. Yes, completely.Sure, it can happen that a certain player makes a huge misclick which ends up with him in a clever spot no one involved thought about before which then leads to an unaccounted kill. But that isn't about randomness in the design of the game.An actual example for randomness via design would be Chaos Knight from DotA. =P I underlined the important portion of your text. IN THE LONG RUN. Let us assume that the entire game = the long run. 12 minutes is certainly NOT the long run. What the stats say, however, is if you are making decisions that are risky, but very profitable in theory, you will likely lose. ------ The overall point is, the game needs to be structured in such a way that the sum of the decisions throughout the game is reflected in the final result. Right now, it appears to have a model where that is less likely, and rather the decisions in the beginning of the game have more weight than those later. The problem is, this WILL NOT HAPPEN. Why? Because THAT DOESNT SELL. Look at the games that have become the most popular. They are all farming games. Farming/grinding to get a comparitive advantage over an enemy. CS, WoW, CoD(rank farming), LoL, Farmville. ALL the most popular games these days are about farming. And farming is in all its implementations snowbally: the winning farmer becomes better than the losing farmer. Why is this always made snowbally? because non-snowbally farming IS NOT FUN. There is little motivation to win(get a kill, etc) if you know your opponent will gain just as much from it as you do.
In short, If a game has farming in it(as popular modern games do), it will be snowbally. Thats all there is to it. You would need to have like an ARAM with gold only from timer to make it linear
|
On June 15 2012 07:38 brolaf wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2012 05:16 cLutZ wrote:On June 14 2012 17:44 BlueSpace wrote:On June 13 2012 02:03 cLutZ wrote:On June 12 2012 22:45 BlueSpace wrote: 1) Cause and effect:
The OP has presented data which shows that a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes leads in 90% of the cases to win for the leading team. People here interpret this in a way which indicates that the rest of the game is "meaningless". You could also interpret this in way that the stronger team will manage to pull ahead early and this shows.
This is...false. Randomness decreases as gametime increases. It also decreases as the number of decisions a team, as a whole, makes. The problem? Early game is the part of the game where teams make the fewest real decisions. In reality, a few (think 3-4) are turning the outcome of the game. Particularly in pro games. Last hitting is pretty standard, so that isn't going to be a huge advantage (unless you got a kill, which is what probably happened to create this lead 1 kill, or 2), team comp could be giving you an advantage (your jungler could be faster), but usually its a bunch of RNG and highly guess-y things determining who has the lead at this point. Good examples of what I'm saying: A successful or failed invade; a successful gank, perhaps 2; a countergank, or bait bottom. Most of these are based on where the jungler is, and are very dependent on the fog of war, and getting good ward placement at this point in the game is nearly impossible. So, not only are you determining the outcome of the game during a small portion of the game, you are also determining the outcome during the period of the game that is most fundamentally random. Thats why you see so many safe picks in pro games, particularly top and mid. 1) The game start is not random at all. Everything including buffs are fixed at the game start. You have zero randomness at the beginning of the game, therefor randomness has to increase as the game progresses and cannot constantly decrease. 2) Last hitting at pro level is only standard in so far, that when left alone everybody is pretty perfect at it. In reality you have the enemy jungler and the enemy laner to worry about. The ability to last hit is not entirely decided inside the game but heavily influenced by the picks and bans prior to game start. Getting outpicked will lead to a bad lane matchup which in turn will lead to less CS as the enemy laner can harass more effectively. There is nothing random about that. 3) Jungling is not random. The jungler does not randomly run around the map and ganks lanes. He can't because he will fall behind in farm. Positioning of the jungler is usually quite well understood and there are specific timings for ganks. Pro players know when a lvl 2 gank might happen for example. The counter is to not overextend. Not Random... 4) Ward placement in the early game is not hard. Everybody is in their lane. You know from where the enemy jungler will come and all towers are up. Warding late game is much harder since you might be down several towers and at any given time several people might be missing from their lanes and lurking in the bushes, waiting to attack you. Again no randomness... I don't want to say that there is no luck involved in LoL, but there is no inherent randomness to the early game it is as skill and comp based as any other part of the game. Random was, of course, the wrong word to use. What I should have said is "uncertainty". 1. True. 2. Not relevant to this, except to the point that this reinforces my point that the snowballiness of the game significantly reduces the number of viable champions and team compositions. 3. Again, not random, uncertainty. You can't control where the jungler is, and, particularly top lane, can't have enough wards to protect itself. 4. Warding late game is easier because you have more gold and you are grouped as a team so warding is less necessary. You are basically saying that caution=skill. And in the laning phase that is almost entirely correct. Janna throwing a tornado into a bush, even if no one is there, is better off wasting both the mana and the CD than not and saving it for an aggressive play. I'm saying that this means a bunch of other things that are bad. DO you remember when M5 was super dominant with their jungle Alistar stuff? Guess what, it was based on this basic principle: get an early kill or 2 = win game. On June 14 2012 23:29 r.Evo wrote:The "randomness" you're describing doesn't exist if you look at the decisionmaking process. And that is the process which matters. The actual outcome has a very slight random element but that's not what we're talking about. The "random factor" you're talking about is plain and simple ones inability to narrow down the possibilites due to limited information. Not sure why you call me out on that when I even wrote myself that crit chance is as close as you can get to something random. As close as you can get, because it is not random. Both DotA and League of Legends use a pseudo-random distribution for crit-chance, here's an explanation of the old DotA one, not sure what changed lately: http://www.dotastrategy.com/forum/ftopic18287.html ... LoL uses a similar, modified, system but it's also not really random. The difference is, a smart player can narrow down the possible outcomes of a random/unknown event (in poker, think of pinning your opponent on a particular range of hands) and often prepare for or at least EXPECT the remaining possible [random or simply unknown] possibilities. What you're describing is not about random events. The good player understands the possibilites that are out there, narrows the opponents behaviour down to ranges and then makes a profitable decision based on those ranges. That eliminates the random factor in the long run completely. Yes, completely.Sure, it can happen that a certain player makes a huge misclick which ends up with him in a clever spot no one involved thought about before which then leads to an unaccounted kill. But that isn't about randomness in the design of the game.An actual example for randomness via design would be Chaos Knight from DotA. =P I underlined the important portion of your text. IN THE LONG RUN. Let us assume that the entire game = the long run. 12 minutes is certainly NOT the long run. What the stats say, however, is if you are making decisions that are risky, but very profitable in theory, you will likely lose. ------ The overall point is, the game needs to be structured in such a way that the sum of the decisions throughout the game is reflected in the final result. Right now, it appears to have a model where that is less likely, and rather the decisions in the beginning of the game have more weight than those later. The problem is, this WILL NOT HAPPEN. Why? Because THAT DOESNT SELL. Look at the games that have become the most popular. They are all farming games. Farming/grinding to get a comparitive advantage over an enemy. CS, WoW, CoD(rank farming), LoL, Farmville. ALL the most popular games these days are about farming. And farming is in all its implementations snowbally: the winning farmer becomes better than the losing farmer. Why is this always made snowbally? because non-snowbally farming IS NOT FUN. There is little motivation to win(get a kill, etc) if you know your opponent will gain just as much from it as you do. In short, If a game has farming in it(as popular modern games do), it will be snowbally. Thats all there is to it. You would need to have like an ARAM with gold only from timer to make it linear
You listed a bunch of games where 1 death from time to time in a PVP enviroment doesn't affect the next encounter. In WoW and CoD (I have never played farmville) your advantage happens before it all starts, this is basically like Runes/Levels/Character unlocking in LoL.
|
On June 14 2012 12:33 Kronen wrote: Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other. I'm treating snowballing as the mechanism that causes comebacks to be all but non-existent in LoL. Your saying "Snowballing is the only reason there is any value in doing anything for gold," makes me thinkg you're mistaking snowballing for just general good intelligent play. But let me clarify... I'm here because I find LoL too predictable and I wanted to see if there's math that can back up (or squash undeniably) my feelings. Having a game in which it is nigh on impossible to come back is a problem.
I'm not here to speculate on what causes the problem or how to fix it. I'm just trying to benchmark games and see if the problem exists and how it develops.
I understand snowballing to refer to the fact that once you have an advantage, it becomes (substantially) easier for you to gain future advantages, and this in a way that is explicitly intended by the game design. I believe this is the way the word is generally used by this community and in this context. (The examples about soccer players not being able to use points to buy faster shoes is in the same vein.)
Like a small snowball that may end up gradually growing into an avalanche, the term is used to describe that you can exploit a small advantage to continuously increase the advantage you have. Top lane is a typical example of this: In many matchups that are fairly even, giving up first blood to your top lane opponent means you have very little chance of regaining control of your lane without help from your jungler. AD carries are the most extreme example: feed the AD carry and you lose, because AD carries build AD, AS, and crit, which all scale multiplicatively, so they snowball (i.e. scale with gold) very hard.
Gold is the obvious reason for snowballing, but to a lesser degree the experience system causes the same (XP advantage in lane helps you win more fights). But XP caps out much sooner than gold/items, and it's much harder to deny XP than to deny last hits. And they actually changed XP gains from kills in a way that counteracts snowballing.
Whether comebacks or not are easy is not is an entirely separate question. Comebacks are easy if you allow a team to hold on to advantages by playing very conservatively, regardless of whether snowballing is allowed or not. (If snowballing happened extremely easily, comebacks would be very hard, but a ~10% gold advantage by itself really doesn't make your team that much stronger in terms of raw statistics.)
Yango pointed out ways which make it very easy to play conservatively in LoL, and that sounds like a much more likely culprit to me. If you can hold on to a small but constant advantage, you don't need any snowballing to happen, you just ride the game out carefully. That is also what people seem to lament -- that games are long and boring once the initial advantage has been secured by a team. If the game makes it easy to avoid confrontations/ganks/etc., you offer the more skilled team fewer opportunities to actually apply their skill advantage.
|
On June 15 2012 08:20 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2012 07:38 brolaf wrote:On June 15 2012 05:16 cLutZ wrote:On June 14 2012 17:44 BlueSpace wrote:On June 13 2012 02:03 cLutZ wrote:On June 12 2012 22:45 BlueSpace wrote: 1) Cause and effect:
The OP has presented data which shows that a 10% gold lead by 12 minutes leads in 90% of the cases to win for the leading team. People here interpret this in a way which indicates that the rest of the game is "meaningless". You could also interpret this in way that the stronger team will manage to pull ahead early and this shows.
This is...false. Randomness decreases as gametime increases. It also decreases as the number of decisions a team, as a whole, makes. The problem? Early game is the part of the game where teams make the fewest real decisions. In reality, a few (think 3-4) are turning the outcome of the game. Particularly in pro games. Last hitting is pretty standard, so that isn't going to be a huge advantage (unless you got a kill, which is what probably happened to create this lead 1 kill, or 2), team comp could be giving you an advantage (your jungler could be faster), but usually its a bunch of RNG and highly guess-y things determining who has the lead at this point. Good examples of what I'm saying: A successful or failed invade; a successful gank, perhaps 2; a countergank, or bait bottom. Most of these are based on where the jungler is, and are very dependent on the fog of war, and getting good ward placement at this point in the game is nearly impossible. So, not only are you determining the outcome of the game during a small portion of the game, you are also determining the outcome during the period of the game that is most fundamentally random. Thats why you see so many safe picks in pro games, particularly top and mid. 1) The game start is not random at all. Everything including buffs are fixed at the game start. You have zero randomness at the beginning of the game, therefor randomness has to increase as the game progresses and cannot constantly decrease. 2) Last hitting at pro level is only standard in so far, that when left alone everybody is pretty perfect at it. In reality you have the enemy jungler and the enemy laner to worry about. The ability to last hit is not entirely decided inside the game but heavily influenced by the picks and bans prior to game start. Getting outpicked will lead to a bad lane matchup which in turn will lead to less CS as the enemy laner can harass more effectively. There is nothing random about that. 3) Jungling is not random. The jungler does not randomly run around the map and ganks lanes. He can't because he will fall behind in farm. Positioning of the jungler is usually quite well understood and there are specific timings for ganks. Pro players know when a lvl 2 gank might happen for example. The counter is to not overextend. Not Random... 4) Ward placement in the early game is not hard. Everybody is in their lane. You know from where the enemy jungler will come and all towers are up. Warding late game is much harder since you might be down several towers and at any given time several people might be missing from their lanes and lurking in the bushes, waiting to attack you. Again no randomness... I don't want to say that there is no luck involved in LoL, but there is no inherent randomness to the early game it is as skill and comp based as any other part of the game. Random was, of course, the wrong word to use. What I should have said is "uncertainty". 1. True. 2. Not relevant to this, except to the point that this reinforces my point that the snowballiness of the game significantly reduces the number of viable champions and team compositions. 3. Again, not random, uncertainty. You can't control where the jungler is, and, particularly top lane, can't have enough wards to protect itself. 4. Warding late game is easier because you have more gold and you are grouped as a team so warding is less necessary. You are basically saying that caution=skill. And in the laning phase that is almost entirely correct. Janna throwing a tornado into a bush, even if no one is there, is better off wasting both the mana and the CD than not and saving it for an aggressive play. I'm saying that this means a bunch of other things that are bad. DO you remember when M5 was super dominant with their jungle Alistar stuff? Guess what, it was based on this basic principle: get an early kill or 2 = win game. On June 14 2012 23:29 r.Evo wrote:The "randomness" you're describing doesn't exist if you look at the decisionmaking process. And that is the process which matters. The actual outcome has a very slight random element but that's not what we're talking about. The "random factor" you're talking about is plain and simple ones inability to narrow down the possibilites due to limited information. Not sure why you call me out on that when I even wrote myself that crit chance is as close as you can get to something random. As close as you can get, because it is not random. Both DotA and League of Legends use a pseudo-random distribution for crit-chance, here's an explanation of the old DotA one, not sure what changed lately: http://www.dotastrategy.com/forum/ftopic18287.html ... LoL uses a similar, modified, system but it's also not really random. The difference is, a smart player can narrow down the possible outcomes of a random/unknown event (in poker, think of pinning your opponent on a particular range of hands) and often prepare for or at least EXPECT the remaining possible [random or simply unknown] possibilities. What you're describing is not about random events. The good player understands the possibilites that are out there, narrows the opponents behaviour down to ranges and then makes a profitable decision based on those ranges. That eliminates the random factor in the long run completely. Yes, completely.Sure, it can happen that a certain player makes a huge misclick which ends up with him in a clever spot no one involved thought about before which then leads to an unaccounted kill. But that isn't about randomness in the design of the game.An actual example for randomness via design would be Chaos Knight from DotA. =P I underlined the important portion of your text. IN THE LONG RUN. Let us assume that the entire game = the long run. 12 minutes is certainly NOT the long run. What the stats say, however, is if you are making decisions that are risky, but very profitable in theory, you will likely lose. ------ The overall point is, the game needs to be structured in such a way that the sum of the decisions throughout the game is reflected in the final result. Right now, it appears to have a model where that is less likely, and rather the decisions in the beginning of the game have more weight than those later. The problem is, this WILL NOT HAPPEN. Why? Because THAT DOESNT SELL. Look at the games that have become the most popular. They are all farming games. Farming/grinding to get a comparitive advantage over an enemy. CS, WoW, CoD(rank farming), LoL, Farmville. ALL the most popular games these days are about farming. And farming is in all its implementations snowbally: the winning farmer becomes better than the losing farmer. Why is this always made snowbally? because non-snowbally farming IS NOT FUN. There is little motivation to win(get a kill, etc) if you know your opponent will gain just as much from it as you do. In short, If a game has farming in it(as popular modern games do), it will be snowbally. Thats all there is to it. You would need to have like an ARAM with gold only from timer to make it linear You listed a bunch of games where 1 death from time to time in a PVP enviroment doesn't affect the next encounter. In WoW and CoD (I have never played farmville) your advantage happens before it all starts, this is basically like Runes/Levels/Character unlocking in LoL. yeah but in wow what youre fighting for is rating,and the better your rating the easier it is to get, so the ultimate scoresheet is subject to snowballing dynamics
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 15 2012 07:31 brolaf wrote: This is a fundamental game design problem. If you want to avoid it, you need to have kills and towers to not give any gameplay advantage, and points instead like in sports. the whole concept of farming makes this impossible, as competitive farming is all about getting a comparitive advantage. lol would need to be made into a purely PvP game based on score then It's a matter of degrees.
Some amount of snowballing is an issue endemic to the genre. But even within the genre, comebacks are much more common and the game less snowbally in something like DotA.
There are certain factors in LoL that exacerbate this issue.
|
Has anyone else considered that the more expensive items in LoL are more cost efficient than the cheaper items?
In dota and hon, the more expensive items are MUCH less cost efficient than the cheaper items. Completing more expensive items is really only good because you only have 6 slots, and because of the active effects of the items.
I think that might have something to do with why games are more snowbally in LoL than in dota.
In other words, when a team is slightly ahead in dota, the extra gold they have is partially getting sunk into things like recipes and combining 2 items with no increase in stat/gold efficiency.
In LoL, however, the extra gold that they use to buy an item makes the gold that they previously spent more efficient, giving them a larger advantage than you might see by just comparing gold earned
|
There's a lot of stuff to wade through here, but one point I did not see addressed is that teams that are better will tend to exert their superior play by the 12 minute mark of any game. One thing to note from MLG is that there were really only like 6 teams out of 19 (?) that had an actual shot at winning it. That means you had a lot of instances where bad teams would go up against clearly better ones and get wrecked.
I think a more interesting exercise would be to just look at teams that were "close" in terms of skill. For example, only look at series that went to three games. (It's a crude way to restrict the data, but it makes sense to me.)
The point is, instead of thinking, "The teams that are up early tend to end up winning, therefore comebacks are very difficult," you can look at the same data and think, "Most of the time, the better team (ie, the one that wins) will tend to show their superior skill even in the first 12 minutes." So the low rate of comebacks is more a sign that the game has such a steep curve that the superior teams will show their superior ability very early on in the game.
Personally, I think both interpretations are valid. Better teams tend to take early advantages, and they tend to hold those advantages throughout the game in part because they're just better.
|
I cannot help but feel that the claims of 'snowballing' are inherent to this genre. There are no alternate objectives, no economy vs military vs tech, nothing other than plain old gold, which means when you have an advantage, it is always an absolute advantage instead of an overall (aggregate) advantage.
Until there are ways of sacrificing in one area to hopefully gain a larger advantage in another area, snowballing will always be a problem.
|
The new statistic is much more meaningful. 7% gold lead = almost no chance of comeback? I can't think that is healthy. If lack of comeback mechanism, so be it, but games need to be shorter in that case.
|
On June 15 2012 14:15 GeorgeForeman wrote: Personally, I think both interpretations are valid. Better teams tend to take early advantages, and they tend to hold those advantages throughout the game in part because they're just better.
So what you're saying is that everything is working as intended?!
|
The issue whether the statist ics are due to snowballing or to one team being much better than the other should be able to be mostly addressed by looking at bo3 series that went the full three games (or bo5 equivalent). This should at least mostly assure that teams are fairly evenly matched.
|
On June 15 2012 14:15 GeorgeForeman wrote: There's a lot of stuff to wade through here, but one point I did not see addressed is that teams that are better will tend to exert their superior play by the 12 minute mark of any game. One thing to note from MLG is that there were really only like 6 teams out of 19 (?) that had an actual shot at winning it. That means you had a lot of instances where bad teams would go up against clearly better ones and get wrecked.
I think a more interesting exercise would be to just look at teams that were "close" in terms of skill. For example, only look at series that went to three games. (It's a crude way to restrict the data, but it makes sense to me.)
The point is, instead of thinking, "The teams that are up early tend to end up winning, therefore comebacks are very difficult," you can look at the same data and think, "Most of the time, the better team (ie, the one that wins) will tend to show their superior skill even in the first 12 minutes." So the low rate of comebacks is more a sign that the game has such a steep curve that the superior teams will show their superior ability very early on in the game.
Personally, I think both interpretations are valid. Better teams tend to take early advantages, and they tend to hold those advantages throughout the game in part because they're just better.
The problem is that in series that go 2:1, the rule still holds true.
Even the team that only ends up getting 1 win (i.e. the worse team) will have this 12 minute advantage in this game and end up winning. That means even if the other team is better in general, if it is behind early by just a kill or two, there is barely any chance for a comeback.
A solution would be to make the cheaper early game items a lot more cost efficient than the lategame items, so even if you are behind in gold, you are not (simplified) half as strong as the opponent but instead ~75% as strong.
Another option would be to let skills scale better with XP and to reduce the AP/AD rates instead, so instead of for example 200+0.5 AP it would be 400+0.25 AP, items would still give a significant advantage but the difference would not be as big as it is now.
|
Can we all agree that Smoke of Deceit would make LoL far more exciting?
|
most arguments do not deny that the OP has a point. the temporal balance is sort out of wack where there is an overemphasis on the first 12 minutes, that a certain advantage in the early game is too hard to come back from. This is consistent with teams that are evenly balanced. That when one establishes and early advantage, there are no comeback mechanisms.
This means most games are decided in laning phase instead of team fights where it should be decided according to most people.
|
On June 15 2012 18:07 Phanekim wrote: most arguments do not deny that the OP has a point. the temporal balance is sort out of wack where there is an overemphasis on the first 12 minutes, that a certain advantage in the early game is too hard to come back from. This is consistent with teams that are evenly balanced. That when one establishes and early advantage, there are no comeback mechanisms.
This means most games are decided in laning phase instead of team fights where it should be decided according to most people.
I don't have a problem with the game being decided in laning phase, but a 5-10% advantage in gold should not lead to a 90% winrate. If it would lead to a winrate of 67-75% then it would be perfectly fine. Early kills should give an advantage, not the win.
If Riot wants the early advantage to lead to a win then the lategame should be even stronger so the game doesn't last 45 minutes even if it was already decided 30 minutes ago.
|
On June 15 2012 17:51 1ntrigue wrote:Can we all agree that Smoke of Deceit would make LoL far more exciting?
Hells yeah.
Smoke is boss mode. Would add a lot more jungle pressure to high level play.
I also wouldn't mind limiting the amount of wards that can be on the map at any given time as well... but thats just me.
|
Interesting, would be very cool to see similar stats for Dota 2 and compare, since I'm a strong believer that snowballing is far less of a factor in dota 2, but it hard to say without clear data.
|
On June 15 2012 17:41 Morfildur wrote: [ The problem is that in series that go 2:1, the rule still holds true.
Even the team that only ends up getting 1 win (i.e. the worse team) will have this 12 minute advantage in this game and end up winning. That means even if the other team is better in general, if it is behind early by just a kill or two, there is barely any chance for a comeback.
A solution would be to make the cheaper early game items a lot more cost efficient than the lategame items, so even if you are behind in gold, you are not (simplified) half as strong as the opponent but instead ~75% as strong.
Another option would be to let skills scale better with XP and to reduce the AP/AD rates instead, so instead of for example 200+0.5 AP it would be 400+0.25 AP, items would still give a significant advantage but the difference would not be as big as it is now.
I have to disagree with you here. Scaling is not the problem, in fact, harder scaling allows for bigger comebacks.
Here are a few suggestions: -allow for more ganks (smoke of deceit and ward restriction, buff the red buff again) -allow carries to carry harder, this can cause frequent comebacks. For example: Team B is stomping Team A with numerous ganks, but meanwhile Team A's carry is last hitting like a chinese rice farmer. 30 minutes in the game, Team B is ahead in total gold and exp, but team A's carry has several core items. Team A's carry proceeds to rip the whole team apart (with back up from his team ofcourse). Team A pushes and wins.
Now there is a problem with letting items scale too hard, if you do this it promotes passive play style (farming instead of pushing or ganking). To fix this you need ganks to be viable, for example by making carries lose gold on death or by giving the killer a lot of gold for the kill or/and giving more gold for assists.
These two suggestions seem to contradict each other, but the goal is to allow for a more dynamic playstyle. You can shut down a farmer heavy team by ganking. You can shutdown an early game team by succesfuly letting your carry farm.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 15 2012 13:58 jeparie wrote: Has anyone else considered that the more expensive items in LoL are more cost efficient than the cheaper items?
In dota and hon, the more expensive items are MUCH less cost efficient than the cheaper items. Completing more expensive items is really only good because you only have 6 slots, and because of the active effects of the items.
I think that might have something to do with why games are more snowbally in LoL than in dota.
In other words, when a team is slightly ahead in dota, the extra gold they have is partially getting sunk into things like recipes and combining 2 items with no increase in stat/gold efficiency.
In LoL, however, the extra gold that they use to buy an item makes the gold that they previously spent more efficient, giving them a larger advantage than you might see by just comparing gold earned This is actually a key point. Ironically, the following post missed this:
On June 15 2012 14:42 Kaneh wrote: I cannot help but feel that the claims of 'snowballing' are inherent to this genre. There are no alternate objectives, no economy vs military vs tech, nothing other than plain old gold, which means when you have an advantage, it is always an absolute advantage instead of an overall (aggregate) advantage.
Until there are ways of sacrificing in one area to hopefully gain a larger advantage in another area, snowballing will always be a problem. In DotA there is enormous tradeoff between gold-efficiency and slot-efficiency. Items that are gold-efficient are generally very slot-inefficient and vice-versa. Because of this tradeoff, you cannot snowball a gold advantage into an immediate further advantage--because either you spend that gold on gold-efficient items, and cap out on items quickly (allowing the enemy to come back while you're saving toward something that you're going to sell an item to get), or you spend that gold on slot-efficient items, allowing the enemy to come back using gold-efficient items and forcing a fight.
|
Hey guys! Back for a little. Sorry I haven't updated in a day or so.
My motivation for completing this project (the phase 2 of the project that involves benchmarks at every 3min) has waned somewhat. My wife sat me down and made me realize I had been spending 10-15 hours over the course of the extended weekend (around the business trip) and it had really cut into just general family life. The only reason I realized it is because it cut off my SC2 playing completely (I didn't spend my damn bonus pool before the season lock... grrr).
I'll get the 3min benchmarks up for the finals games today and compile some new looking charts, but after that I'll wait for the full VOD listing which is expected on the 18th.
On the 18th, if someone would be interested in helping compile the stats for the full tourney I would lloooove it. I'm envision myself having trouble compiling all that information solo.
|
On June 15 2012 17:41 Morfildur wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2012 14:15 GeorgeForeman wrote: There's a lot of stuff to wade through here, but one point I did not see addressed is that teams that are better will tend to exert their superior play by the 12 minute mark of any game. One thing to note from MLG is that there were really only like 6 teams out of 19 (?) that had an actual shot at winning it. That means you had a lot of instances where bad teams would go up against clearly better ones and get wrecked.
I think a more interesting exercise would be to just look at teams that were "close" in terms of skill. For example, only look at series that went to three games. (It's a crude way to restrict the data, but it makes sense to me.)
The point is, instead of thinking, "The teams that are up early tend to end up winning, therefore comebacks are very difficult," you can look at the same data and think, "Most of the time, the better team (ie, the one that wins) will tend to show their superior skill even in the first 12 minutes." So the low rate of comebacks is more a sign that the game has such a steep curve that the superior teams will show their superior ability very early on in the game.
Personally, I think both interpretations are valid. Better teams tend to take early advantages, and they tend to hold those advantages throughout the game in part because they're just better. The problem is that in series that go 2:1, the rule still holds true. Even the team that only ends up getting 1 win (i.e. the worse team) will have this 12 minute advantage in this game and end up winning. That means even if the other team is better in general, if it is behind early by just a kill or two, there is barely any chance for a comeback. A solution would be to make the cheaper early game items a lot more cost efficient than the lategame items, so even if you are behind in gold, you are not (simplified) half as strong as the opponent but instead ~75% as strong. Another option would be to let skills scale better with XP and to reduce the AP/AD rates instead, so instead of for example 200+0.5 AP it would be 400+0.25 AP, items would still give a significant advantage but the difference would not be as big as it is now. Based on what? Looking through the games he's charted, there were only 2 games from series that went 3 that were close after 12 minutes. No combacks in either of them, but both went long. One was from the TSM/CLG.eu series, and that game was back and forth the whole time and came down to a 50 minute team fight. Hard to say that was a "snowball" game.
Anyhow, my point is that the sample of elite teams playing eachother in games that are close after the early game is very limited, so drawing general conclusions about how well the game can snowball is questionable. And I don't think the CLG.na series vs. Dig and TSM are in yet, and I can remember at least a few combacks out of those 9 games....
|
I was really into LoL and loved the community here but after playing a little dota, watching a pro game of LoL was really bizarre to me because the teamfights are literally scheduled by dragon and baron and whoever wins the first fight wins the game. Also it's hilarious that top laners can literally ignore the rest of the map for 20 minutes. Maybe the metagame has changed since the last game i watched, i sure hope so.
edit: i think it's also interesting that in dota a team can be ahead in towers but behind in kills, or ahead in kills but behind in cs, or ahead in cs but behind in gold (so a heavier distribution of gold towards your carry but your other guys are underfarmed because they were in a trilane) and you can even be far ahead in gold but behind in xp. in general, in LoL teams are either behind or ahead. its true that you can be behind in towers and ahead in kills. however in general kills, map control, cs, gold and xp are all strongly correlated, which the OP uses as the entire base of his idea. Doing a study like this in dota would make zero sense because there is no single metric which you can use to determine success. additionally, one team could have simply picked more carries than the other one.
|
A 10% advantage in LoL is not the same as a similar lead in Basketball. Leads in sports do not grant the team in the lead additional athletic prowess. Imagine if a basketball team was 10% faster after grabbing that lead, it'd be much harder to come back against that. It's my least favorite part of MOBAs as a spectator.
Basketball would be less interesting if Miami's triple carry setup was farmed and no teams have a chance against them even though Lebron repeatedly blows his ults in the fourth quarter.
|
If snowballing is a problem in LoL what would the solution be?
I think something along the lines of more gold efficent items, but slot inefficent, would help. Something like a Tier 2 Doran's Item that builds from nothing and builds into nothing. So grabbing one of them would grant a nice power boost immediately but would quickly fall off as teams keep farming. Teams that lose a big fight and fall behind in gold could all buy one of these to even out the playing field giving them a 50-50 chance in the next team fight rather than relying on the other team to throw the game.
The only issue with this is preventing the teams who get ahead from buying the items and rofl-stomping for the win. I suggest reducing the sell value of these items to less than 50%, maybe like 30% or lower, so if the team ahead already buys them the losing team would have to play defensive and farm past the effectiveness of the item. It's something I would at least like to see placed in the beta testing.
|
On June 18 2012 04:10 Ghost-z wrote: If snowballing is a problem in LoL what would the solution be?
I think something along the lines of more gold efficent items, but slot inefficent, would help. Yes, that would help. But the most important thing would be reducing tower damage by a whole lot, because as it is, if you are within range of tower + flash you are guaranteed 100% safe until 30 minutes or so.
|
United States47024 Posts
On June 18 2012 09:26 Attakijing wrote:Show nested quote +On June 18 2012 04:10 Ghost-z wrote: If snowballing is a problem in LoL what would the solution be?
I think something along the lines of more gold efficent items, but slot inefficent, would help. Yes, that would help. But the most important thing would be reducing tower damage by a whole lot, because as it is, if you are within range of tower + flash you are guaranteed 100% safe until 30 minutes or so. That's actually much less of a big deal than people make it out to be.
Sure in DotA, towers don't hit as hard, but you have TP scrolls. Towers might hit harder in LoL, but you can't have 2 other players instantly appear on the tower when you're diving.
Strong defender's advantage actually works to curb snowballing, not aid it, because it gives the defending team room to maneuver without instantly losing the game.
|
On June 18 2012 10:04 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On June 18 2012 09:26 Attakijing wrote:On June 18 2012 04:10 Ghost-z wrote: If snowballing is a problem in LoL what would the solution be?
I think something along the lines of more gold efficent items, but slot inefficent, would help. Yes, that would help. But the most important thing would be reducing tower damage by a whole lot, because as it is, if you are within range of tower + flash you are guaranteed 100% safe until 30 minutes or so. That's actually much less of a big deal than people make it out to be. Sure in DotA, towers don't hit as hard, but you have TP scrolls. Towers might hit harder in LoL, but you can't have 2 other players instantly appear on the tower when you're diving. Strong defender's advantage actually works to curb snowballing, not aid it, because it gives the defending team room to maneuver without instantly losing the game. Well I don't know... I imagine that if towers did less than a quarter as much damage in early game, like in dota, it would allow really dynamic strategy like in dota, just because there would always be an opportunity for everyone to be ganked at all times. As it is now, like I said, top lane can literally ignore the other two lanes and tp in for dragon, and bot lane can (and needs to) just farm, for the first 20 minutes of every game.
A big difference is that harassing is a way bigger deal in LoL because it's the only way to be aggressive. In LoL, if some level 1 teamfight goes really well and your carry gets 2 or 3 kills, you can have an advantage 3 minutes into the game and then use it to harass the other guy out of lane, and the lanes are so set in place that it's pretty much gg at that point.
I'm probably wrong about a lot of this stuff because I was never that into high level LoL play. And maybe it's gotten more interesting since i switched to dota?
|
This is just sad. Seriously, if you are 90% sure to win with a lead by 12 minute, that's horribly sad for LoL.
|
On June 18 2012 18:51 Unleashing wrote: This is just sad. Seriously, if you are 90% sure to win with a lead by 12 minute, that's horribly sad for LoL.
It would be fine if games didn't take an additional 30 minutes to end despite that, lol.
|
On June 18 2012 04:10 Ghost-z wrote: If snowballing is a problem in LoL what would the solution be?
I think something along the lines of more gold efficent items, but slot inefficent, would help. Something like a Tier 2 Doran's Item that builds from nothing and builds into nothing. So grabbing one of them would grant a nice power boost immediately but would quickly fall off as teams keep farming. Teams that lose a big fight and fall behind in gold could all buy one of these to even out the playing field giving them a 50-50 chance in the next team fight rather than relying on the other team to throw the game.
The only issue with this is preventing the teams who get ahead from buying the items and rofl-stomping for the win. I suggest reducing the sell value of these items to less than 50%, maybe like 30% or lower, so if the team ahead already buys them the losing team would have to play defensive and farm past the effectiveness of the item. It's something I would at least like to see placed in the beta testing.
What i think they need is more game changing items (BKB syle) as it is now the items are nice but very dull and very few items (maybe only zonyas) can make a big difference to the game.
|
Watch some CLG.eu games. They probably win 50% of the games they are behind in. Yesterday they won one against m5 were they were 29000 behind in gold. Thats way too much actually, so that it makes me wonder if LoL is not snowbally enough. Because whats the point of winning early and mid game if you still lose in the end?[
|
On June 18 2012 18:51 Unleashing wrote: This is just sad. Seriously, if you are 90% sure to win with a lead by 12 minute, that's horribly sad for LoL.
Almost every pro game I watch tells a different story. DH and CLG.eu is behind early on very often and still manages to win. The same for M5 vs. curse.eu in the beginning.
The big points are: - where does the gold advantage come from? better farming or kills or global objectives? - who gets the lions share of the gold? damage dealer, tank or support? - is the other team hindered in their progression through that gain in gold? by being dead or having their jungle mobs stolen
Gold often enough represents a level advantage and that is an advantage in power which turns into a general advantage on the battlefield. This only creates a snowballing effect if the losing team doesnt have the skill to capitalize on the winning teams mistakes or is unable to outmaneuver the leading team. It is NOT a systematic problem of the game. Gold doesnt matter as much as enemies making mistakes, placing smart wards, good teamplay and a good champion selection does.
The really clutch encounters happen after 15 minutes or so, when you are dead for a much longer time than in the beginning. Only then will a team have a decent opportuninty to capitalize on your mistakes. Gold can give a team an advantage, but it doesnt give anyone an autowin in a fight.
|
On June 16 2012 23:25 SaturnAttack wrote: A 10% advantage in LoL is not the same as a similar lead in Basketball. Leads in sports do not grant the team in the lead additional athletic prowess. Imagine if a basketball team was 10% faster after grabbing that lead, it'd be much harder to come back against that. It's my least favorite part of MOBAs as a spectator.
Basketball would be less interesting if Miami's triple carry setup was farmed and no teams have a chance against them even though Lebron repeatedly blows his ults in the fourth quarter. If in basketball there were teams of such a high skill gap like in LoL games playing against each other (NBA teams against amateur teams) we would easily see a similar 90% statistic.
|
On June 18 2012 21:00 Redox wrote: Watch some CLG.eu games. They probably win 50% of the games they are behind in. Yesterday they won one against m5 were they were 29000 behind in gold. Thats way too much actually, so that it makes me wonder if LoL is not snowbally enough. Because whats the point of winning early and mid game if you still lose in the end?[
but keep in mind, it was an incredible job turtling by CLG:
-wave clearing: anivia's ult, trist + range + explosive shot, made it incredibly difficult to push into a tower with their team there. anivia's wall also makes engaging into the choke extremely risky.
-as a result of this, anivia and trist had perfectly good farm. even if m5 were that much gold ahead, anivia had nearly 500 cs if i remember correctly, and trist had a full IE/PD/LW/BT build; thats all the damage output you need haha.
-double shurelias. this one is overlooked, i think - teams snowball by pushing an advantage. if they couldn't by taking towers, they would have to do it by forcing fights at dragon/baron. the double shurelias helped CLG make sure they could disengage from an unfavorable fight and then still have a second shurelias to turn and reengage in their favor - even if they're down gold.
so, from their champions and waveclearing abilities, to their ability to avoid getting caught and engage on their own terms, they were able to stall a snowball and turn it around. this requires incredible coordination and good choices (in game and in buying items), which i think is a very good thing to have.
|
It was amazing watching that game. M5 had baron and the center base tower was below half and they still felt that they couldn't push it.
|
On June 18 2012 21:00 Redox wrote: Watch some CLG.eu games. They probably win 50% of the games they are behind in. Yesterday they won one against m5 were they were 29000 behind in gold. Thats way too much actually, so that it makes me wonder if LoL is not snowbally enough. Because whats the point of winning early and mid game if you still lose in the end?[ At some point the gold difference doesn't mean anything. Trist and Anivia had items, irelia had her core items, alistar & soraka barely need items. At that point M5's team suffered from a poorly formed comp that had poor sieging ability, poor initiation, and they were against a team who had great initiation/counter initiation and CLG had a perfectly well-farmed carry with WAY more range than their own carry (YellowPete never really got shut down in lane - it wasn't until all the team objectives were adding up for Corki that he was behind) and thanks to soraka+alistar they had the sustain to withstand the mediocre poking that Corki could give (Karthus poke puts him dangerously close to get trapped by anivia wall or stun, vlad has no long range poke, lee sin only has half of Q), plus a summonerheal+wish to handle a pre-fight karthus Ulti to try and chunk them down.
I honestly feel like M5 should have done something drastic to handle that situation, like having karthus suicide in and die on top of the turret to prevent CLG from protecting it.
|
On June 12 2012 06:11 Kipsate wrote: Yango I lu
Don't forget that Dota has grossly ''overpowerd'' abilities on very long cooldowns, something that LoL doesn't have which allows teams to take fights even though they are behind on items or when aquiring a single item(Blink Dagger on Sand King/Earthshaker) but that is a core design idea I believe, so its not going to change.
I agree that the LoL design tends to avoid Dota-esque "overpowered" abilities, but Fiddlestick's Ult is good example of this concept. A well-placed fiddle ult can turn a game around
|
On June 21 2012 11:02 oddsprout wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2012 06:11 Kipsate wrote: Yango I lu
Don't forget that Dota has grossly ''overpowerd'' abilities on very long cooldowns, something that LoL doesn't have which allows teams to take fights even though they are behind on items or when aquiring a single item(Blink Dagger on Sand King/Earthshaker) but that is a core design idea I believe, so its not going to change. I agree that the LoL design tends to avoid Dota-esque "overpowered" abilities, but Fiddlestick's Ult is good example of this concept. A well-placed fiddle ult can turn a game around
I'm currently on a dota spree again, but I feel more and more like the design around being "overpowered" leads to way more "FUCK YOU BITCHES I WILL CARRY YOU ALL 1n5 NO MATTER WHAT"-moments. Like especially in pubs you can be a 0-4 SK, then you hit lvl 11, get dagger and get that perfect ulti off for a wipe and comeback.
To get similar results in League I feel I have to really dominate my lane, meaning 5+ kills and top farm on the map.
However, despite all that there is only one change I'd love to see Riot implement in terms of balance: Buff midgame items to hell and back, introduce more powerful "support items" (Urn and Mek are great things to steal) and stop trying to make everything upgradeable into something else.
A build with like phage, hexdrinker, brutalizer, aegis, boots should RAPE any similar amount of gold used towards "end game items" 1n1. I really, really believe a key balance and "anti-snowball" design revolves around cost-efficiency vs slot-efficiency.
|
It's come to my attention that someone has re-posted this in LoLreddit. Feel free to take whatever you want from this math!
If someone would like to continue this study (or something similar) please feel free to PM me and you can have access to the google docs.
I'm sorry for tiring of this study. I basically got all the information I needed out of it. That being: I find LoL as an observer sport and a "competitive e-sport" painfully slow, repetitive and ultimately boring. As a cool casual game to chill out while drinking beer on vent with friends, it's awesome. Climbing an elo system that is roughly equivalent to SC2 4v4 within a game structure that nerfs characters ability to carry my team 1v5... not so much. I tire also because (say whatever you like) the skill curve isn't infinite and as compared to SC2 is very opaque. This is made worse by lack of replays. The game itself doesn't present such a colossal technical challenge. As far as observing LoL, my general feelings were inflamed by watching so many games and getting similar feedback throughout the study. So while I feel bad not following through, it just came to a point where I was enjoying no aspect of the process and it was impinging on my family life.
At any rate, good luck and let me know if you want the docs.
|
|
|
|