Mobalytics Insight Analysis: First Objectives vs Win Rate in League of Legends

Welcome to our first Mobalytics Insight Analysis! This is a brand new series that will present in-depth data analysis in a fun and helpful way for you to improve.

We’d like to introduce to you to our Data Scientist, Eric, who recently joined our team. He is the primary writer for this series and architect behind the analyses. Enjoy! 

Overview

The primary goal of a match on Summoner’s Rift is to destroy the enemy Nexus to win the game. Along the way, however, there are other objectives that you can choose to contest. Which objective is the most important to secure first?

For example, let’s take Dragon vs. Towers or Baron vs. Inhibitor. Should you focus on slaying the neutral rift monsters, or make an effort to take down enemy structures instead? General answers float about depending on what tier you are are in such as Bronze, Silver, Challenger, or even Unranked. In this Mobalytics Insight Analysis, we’ll be taking a deep dive into which first objectives or combination of objectives will impact your chances of winning the most with the consideration of different tiers.

Important note: while these objectives do correlate to winning, it does not cause you to win the game. Other contributions to winning the game may or may not influence the ease of capturing these objectives.

Methodology

As expected, first objectives depend on a variety of factors such as team composition like split-pushers, full-tanks, or damage-orientated builds. To combat the variances of meta and off-meta team compositions, we took a randomized recent-average of 2,500 games from Unranked to Challenger (8 tiers) for a grand total of just over 20,000 games to base our study off of. The unranked games (~2,500) were from normal Summoner’s Rift games. The ranked games from Bronze to Challenger (~17,500) were from Solo Queue ranked games.

First Objectives vs. Win Rate Tutorial

Our goal is to present users data and give them the tools necessary so that they can make an impactful decision on how they can improve their gameplay. We know and embrace different decision making, playstyles, and skill-levels of our players. That’s why we chose Tableau as our method of delivering insights. It is simple to filter by tier, objectives, and do comparisons interactively rather than looking at a static infographic.

What is this Infographic and How Can I Use It?

This infographic is an interactive visualization that allows you to custom tailor a scenario that would be relevant to you and compare it to other Tiers to see how different first objectives stack up to affect win rate.

More Information About the Sample Size

Usually, each tier in League of Legends has about a 50% win rate with a small fluctuation of maybe 1 or 2 percent. To normalize the data to make the comparisons between tiers fairer, I took each game and recorded the winning and losing side to have a perfect win/loss ratio no matter my sample size. Thus, giving each tier an exact 50% win rate when all of the conditions are set to “all”.

Playing Around with the Visualization

To teach you how to use the graphs below, let’s go through a few examples. Suppose that I’m in Gold tier and I’m wondering how the progression of first objectives impacts the win rate for games in my tier level. My questions are as follows:

What are the differences between securing first Dragon over first tower, first tower over first Dragon, securing both, and securing none? How will this influence win rate?

First Dragon over First Tower

• Go to the drop-down filters to the right of the visualizations and select “1” for “First Dragon” and “0” for “First Tower”.
• If you did this correctly, you should see that that the win rate is 47%. It’s 3% lower than the total averages so it impacts the win rate adversely in this tier.

First Tower over First Dragon

• In Gold tier, getting first tower over first Dragon leads game to a 54% win rate.

Securing Both Objectives

• In Gold tier, getting first tower and first dragon leads game to a 80% win rate.

Securing Neither Objective

• In Gold tier, not getting first tower and first Dragon leads game to a 21% win rate.

All right, I secured both objectives since it yields that sweet 80% win rate. What if I add either first Baron or first inhibitor on top of that?

First Dragon, First Tower, and First Baron

• Getting these 3 first objectives lead to a 87% win rate. An additional 7% just for adding a first Baron to the first two objectives.

First Dragon, First Tower, and First Inhibitor

• Getting these 3 first objectives lead to a 95% win rate. An additional 15% just for adding a first Inhibitor to the first two objectives.

Favorite Insight

In my opinion, nothing beats the satisfaction of winning a game that is extremelly hard to win. What do I mean by that? How about losing every single first objective. How many games have succeeded despite all odds being against them? Which tier is most likely to pull through in this type of situation? Let’s find out.

No First Objective vs Win Rate

• Set all of the drop-down filters to “0”, click on left-axis “Average Win Rate”, and sort by highest to lowest.
• For the 381 games in Platinum tier that got caught in this situation, 7% of the games prevailed to win their game.

Average First Objectives for Winning Games

Here, we take a look at the average first objective secured for only winning games.

Favorite Insight

If you deselect the “(All)” filter under “Measure Names” on the right of the visualization and select “First Baron”, you could see effects of first Baron on each tier to winning their games. What is most interesting to me is how from Silver to Master tier, all of the percents are above 50%. This implies that securing first Baron is more helpful than not. However, for only Bronze and Challenger tier, it doesn’t seem to be the case. Both percent win rates for getting first Baron is either 50% or under.

Conclusion

These two visualizations should give you a pretty good grasp on how first objectives lead to winning more games. Play around with them, explore, and use them to improve your knowledge of the game. Do you have a favorite insight? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks for reading! We hope you enjoyed our first Mobalytics Insight Analysis. We’d love to hear your thoughts, you can join the discussion on Discord. If you’d like to pick Eric’s brain on this article, you can find him on our server as Eric#9022.