Mobalytics 2020 Rewind: Highlights and Lessons Learned

Mobalytics 2020 Rewind: Highlights and Lessons Learned

What a long year, huh? With so many things happening all over the world, I feel that many of you, like me, are relieved to have gaming as a safe home to retreat to. Our favorite shared pastime is technically immune to what’s been happening in the outside world.

If you think about that statement a little more, it has stood the test of time: our virtual haven has always provided us with a place to retreat to, immerse ourselves and wander, or for those of us who are more competitive: with clear goals and feedback towards those goals.

During this pandemic, others have discovered or even re-discovered why gaming is so special, and we are glad to welcome them as gaming continues to tell a different story than my youth: having a mentally stimulating past time is a good thing and not some sort of brain rot my generation of parents would have you believe.

However, I would not say that we are completely unaffected. Before the storm, we were content to just sit home and play. Now somehow, we start to feel the missing things- the lack of options.

If you are like me, or most humans, we find ourselves often egged by our fears: fear of missing out, fear of unforeseen consequences, fear of losing something we once had.

This is the evolutionary survival default state. In our safe world (compared to 10,000 BC!), without constant forced opportunistic thinking and retraining our brain, it can be hard to get out of such cycles.

This doesn’t just happen in life, but everything we do – including our ladder climbing!

Luckily we have been fortunate as a company to be in an industry that people turn to in times like this. Luckily we are also fortunate enough to be already remote from day one, and could easily adapt to the times.

Of course, we have gatherings and in-person meet-ups and board game nights whose absence makes us sad, but for the most part, we are grateful to continue doing what we do.

In a time where our loved ones and many other people may be struggling, it’s a good time to be grateful and do what we can for those who are less fortunate.

And we at Mobalytics are more grateful than ever for the community of amazing people we have built.

If you are on our Discord, you will see some spreading of holiday cheer, and even if you are not we have some cool stuff coming up like a relaunch of our Collector’s Edition for those of you who missed out the first time around!

The last year has been intense for us – we went from a one game company to four games, each with its own set of challenges and player needs.

One day we hope to be in many more games, tackling those challenges as they come with confidence that we can do it.

It hasn’t been easy to give each community the bold innovations and features that we want, but slowly we are getting there and learning more and more about your wants and needs, whether that’s a single game or playing multiple games using our desktop app.

I am excited to say that next year, it will be a year where we start strong and focus on the LoL upcoming season.

All those requests about the clunkiness of our GPI have not gone unnoticed so stay tuned for some action!

P.S. What are you playing this holiday season!? 

To travel even further back in time, check out our 2019 Year in Review video!

In the rest of this article, we’ll talk about everything we released for each game with insights and lessons learned along the way.

If you’re interested in a particular game, just click it below to jump there.

• League of Legends
• Teamight Tactics
• Legends of Runeterra
• Valorant

League of Legends

We are really proud of how far our Desktop App has come this year. Basically, if you aren’t using it – what are you waiting for?

With the Overlay features and the context-sensitive information delivered where you need it and when you need, it’s hard to go back to playing without it!

In 2021, be ready for us to keep making it even more and more difficult for you to play without it!

Everything we released for LoL

• Live Companion
• LoL Overlay
• Tobii Integration
• Scouting Grounds 2020
• Season 11 Items

The Live Companion

We want this to be the ultimate tool to help you before and after your game!

Overall, we basically combined elements from the Pre Game and Post Game and combined them with new elements to create one cohesive experience.

Automatic Build Imports

We’ve recommended builds for a while but we wanted to make it easy for you to get what you needed without having to check the Champion Pages and then copy everything manually.

With a simple click, you can import recommended items, runes, and Summoner Spells, and you can even set them to auto-import if you trust us that much.

Playstyle Badges

If you were a pro player, you’d have a staff of scouts to help you understand the tendencies of the enemy team, and help you understand your own.

Badges aim to quickly highlight these playstyle nuances before and after your game.

In the second half of the year, we also took your advice and tried to make them more understandable with a coloring system.

Matchup-specific Advice

We built a community of champion experts (known as Ascendants) who wrote a ton of advice based on your role’s matchup

For example, if you’re an ADC and Jhin player, you would not only get general advice for Jhin, but you’d also get Jhin vs Ashe, Jhin vs Caitlyn, Jhin vs Jinx, and so on.

Champion Combos

If you’re a fan of fighting games where you go into the training mode to learn combination sequences, you probably enjoyed this one.

We wanted to help new players understand how to learn the crucial mechanics of a champion from their first game, such as how to weave in auto-attacks and order abilities properly.

There’s a lot more to come very soon for combos, so keep an eye out!

Team Comparisons

League, at its core, is an experience designed for 5v5. We know that a lot of you 5-stack with your friends, especially with the arrival of Clash.

This feature is designed to help you quickly understand how the two teams in your match compare, from their power spikes to head to head stats.

The LoL Overlay

This one was a big one and one of our most exciting yet. Our goal for this one was to equip you with the best tools to help you perform optimally within your matches.

We took a lot of inspiration from pro play broadcasts, and we hope you felt that while using the feature.

Player Stats and Insights

We know that there’s a lot of info to take in before a match so this allows you to access all the playstyle badge insights and more from your Live Companion. whenever you need to during your game.

Use it to understand which enemies are less likely to ward, which are on hot/cold streaks, and more.

Game Overview

This one is one of our favorites! First off, you’ll receive useful notifications whenever someone hits a significant level (like 6 for their ultimate) or when they hit a big item power spike (like Trinity Force).

This tab will also quickly see how your team is doing in terms of gold to gold lead (similar to watching a pro game), and you can even see these comparisons on a lane by lane basis.

Matchup Info

Similar to Player Stats and Insights, this tab allows you to access valuable insights for the matchups in every role.

This includes power spikes, ability cooldowns, player vs player stats, and matchup-specific advice

Tobii Integration

This year we joined forces with Tobii to bring new metrics that are measured using an eye-tracking device

The collaboration improved our ability to help players master key skills like map awareness, avoiding tunnel vision, and fight preparation

We even worked with pro teams like Misfits!

Scouting Grounds 2020

For the second year in a row, we worked with Riot as the official data partner of the Honda Scouting Grounds event. The coaches and scouts from LCS teams used our tools to evaluate the upcoming talent of North America

We provided Power Rankings and live stats for the event to help fans follow along.

Overall, the event was a success despite limitations due to COVID.

There’s a ton of promising talent coming up in the scene from this year’s Scouting Grounds – keep an eye out for Niles who will be starting for Golden Guardians!

Season 11 Items

Riot shakes up League of Legends during the Preseason to build up hype for the next year. This year’s major change was a massive revamp to the item shop.

Although there were some items that returned, many were changed or removed in favor of new additions.

Mythic Items add a ton of gamebreaking mechanics that really do change the dynamics of a match compared to past seasons, so we want you to be as prepared as possible as we head toward Season 11.

Teamfight Tactics

Here, we continue the theme of making our Desktop App indispensable for anyone wanting to play.

For TFT we feel like the easy to navigate portions of the guide (which are now super-powered by awesome videos) that can be applied to your game state make it easier than ever to get what you need when you need it.

At the end of the year, we launched our my comps page, which is going to be the first step allowing you to really play TFT your way!

Everything we released for TFT

Launched Set 3 + Set 4

The two TFT Sets for this year were Galaxies and Fates!

For both sets, we created a database of the champions, items, and synergies, and had constant meta recommendations for team comps and champ/item tier lists.

Our goal is to always be your reliable resource that provides the most up-to-date tools to help you stay on top of the TFT meta, so expect us to do the same for future sets!

TFT Overlay

TFT is probably one of the best games for using an Overlay since you have time to think between rounds. This offers us time to provide in-depth insights while you play.

We spent a lot of time thinking about the different things that TFT players need and want most while they’re in-game…questions like what does this item build into? What composition should I build with these units? When should I roll?

Our Item Cheat Sheet makes it easy to quickly see the different item recipes.

You can access all of our recommended meta comps and get in-game tips for each comp such as formations, how to manage your economy, and which items to target at your carousel.

If you have Plus, you can indicate which comps you have and receive recommendations based on those!

Expert Video Guides

For those of you that wanted to go further in learning how to play a comp optimally, we began creating Expert Video guides as a part of Mobalytics Plus.

Now, you’ll get an in-depth lesson from our TFT experts that includes gameplay footage and more.

My Comps

Although many players come to our site for recommendations, we know that part of the fun of TFT is making up your own stuff, so this tool was created for those of you that love to theorycraft

My Comps gives you a way to save your created comps to a library where you can access and edit them.

For those of you that want to tinker with our recommended comps, you can edit those as well.

The best part is that you can import your comps to your Overlay to use them in your game.

To learn more, see our My Comps guide.

Legends of Runeterra

Legends of Runeterra captured our hearts on launch, and we wanted to make something for players that made them feel at home in card games but also brought something new to the table.

Our profiles and stats combined in a way that made this possible. As we continue our journey of iterating this to be perfect, you can bet we will continue to provide enthusiasts with the content that they are looking for.

Everything we released for LoR

Decktracker + In-Game Overlay

We’re proud to have created the first deck tracker/overlay for LoR!

It’s a crucial tool if you’re looking to play optimally as it keeps track of your decklist, all the cards that have been played by you and your opponent, and even gives you probabilities for drawing your remaining cards

The deck tracker is also integrated with your match history in your profile, offering you more ways to track your progress.

Global Leaderboard

Every competitive game needs a leaderboard!

This provides an easy way to find the best players from around the world, track their ups and downs, and even access their profiles if they use our deck tracker (many of them do!).

Player Profiles

One of the cool things about card games is seeing the different identities players form. Some become known for aggro, others control, and a few may be known for playing everything well.

Player profiles allow you to get an inside look at the decks/regions/champions a player uses and their performance/activity with those decks.

If you see something you like, you can even get the code and import it to your library.

Meta Stats

Although you can always get a feel for what is meta based on experience and discussion, it’s always best when you have the stats to back up your hypotheses.

Our goal with Meta Stats was to allow players to easily understand which deck archetypes, cards, and region combinations were performing the best.

At first, our sample size was derived from our Deck Tracker but it has since grown tenfold as we’ve gotten access to a portion of Riot’s total games since they opened up their Match History API.

Mulligans + Advanced Filters

These were additions that were part of the first major update to the Meta Stats.

Mulligans help you master your opening hand with stats to help you understand what to keep and what to reroll.

Advanced filters were created to give you more granularity in exploring our stats, for example, you can now filter by specific ranks (say only Diamond and Master), or by specific regions (like Korea or Europe).

You can even filter by specific time frames (past 3 days vs past week) and sample size thresholds!

Riot Integration

We’re always looking for more ways to make Mobalytics feel like an extension of your game experience. By integrating with Riot’s client, we made it much easier to use our site.

For example, you can now immediately see how many cards are missing from your collection when you’re looking to try out a deck you find in the Deck Library.

Another perk is that you can directly import the decks from your Deck Manager to your game client!

Glimpse Beyond

2020 marked the beginning of our partnership with Glimpse Beyond, a writing team lead by Swim, that’s composed of the top players in LoR including some that have held the #1 spot on the ladder.

We work with them to give you a daily dose of new LoR articles each week, giving insights on the latest decks, tournament reviews, and card reveals.

Valorant

Everyone is super hyped about Valorant, it’s got style and came in guns blazing.

We were a little slow off the start line, but right now with our super high-quality guides and MasterClass with T1, we feel like anyone can come in and learn what they need to do to dominate the game.

On top of that, they can easily check the profiles and other hard numerical information on the site to see where they are in their journey.

Debut of the site

As a brand new game, and probably for many from Riot’s playerbase, the first tactical shooter, we wanted to make as many resources as possible to help new players learn the game.

In our first version we released:

Agents

Here, you can find info on every agent, from their abilities to tips and tricks for each map.

We used a similar format as our LoL Champions page and tier list by assigning difficulties to each agent to help beginners understand how complex they are to learn.

Weapons

Don’t have time to head to the shooting range? Here you’ll find spray patterns, stats, and more for every gun in Valorant.

We’ve been really impressed with the balance of the weapons so far as everything really seems to have a viable time and place.

Maps

Allows you to interact with maps so you can easily study the different sites and areas of interest.

Video Guides

Last but not least were our video guides that provided ability lineups for every agent on every map to help you get the most value out of them.

Our experts are constantly experimenting and adding more so be sure to check back whenever a new map is released.

Player Profiles

Following a similar pattern as LoL and LoR, we created a player profile to help you learn about yourself and other players.

You’ll be able to find familiar things like daily activity and match history, but also some stats that are unique to Valorant, such as weapon stats, agent stats, and map stats.

T1 Master Class

We’ve worked directly with pro teams before, but usually to help them prepare their pick and bans in an upcoming match or to scout young and upcoming talent in Scouting Grounds.

This was the first time that we worked with pros to create a Master Class to help Mobalytics players improve!

Brax, AZK, and fRoD are big names in the FPS scene so it was awesome collaborating with them to create 29 in-depth Valorant lessons.

Closing Thoughts

Whether you read the whole thing or only tuned in for your favorite game, we appreciate you spending the time with us.

Have an awesome holiday season wherever you are and hold tight, because 2021 is going to be much better.

Good luck, have fun, and see you see you soon.