Among players, there is a speculation about League of Legends: Champions that are difficult to play, especially those played as a “main character”, have a higher win rate than other champions and are therefore often nerfed. But is that true?
What is this myth?
- LoL has 164 champions. Some of them, especially the difficult ones, are often played as “main champions”: This is what you call it when a player primarily plays this one champion and specializes in them. In extreme cases one speaks of a “one-trick pony.”
- Players who only play this champion are very good with them and therefore achieve particularly high win rates. Especially “difficult champions” like Yasuo are such “main champions.”
- This leads to the champion’s statistics being very good, they are assessed by Riot Games as “too strong” and then get nerfed.
Balance chief says: Myth about main champs is not true
Is that true? No, that apparently is not true. The LoL developer Matthew Riot Phroxzon
Leung-Harrison says in a video podcast that he has studied this point intensively for a year and a half (via youtube). The man has been the Lead Game Designer
for the Summoner’s Rift team of LoL since December 2021 and is responsible for game balance.
He looked at champions played by people with very high mastery scores, from which it can be assumed that the champion is their “main character”.
For a champion like Yasuo, these “main players” would represent about 15%, who can also handle the champion very well. But even this 15% does not have as much impact on the statistics as players assume:
“Most people in ranked matches are in a low mastery range. 30-40% of the players who play a champ are at 0-15 games with them.”
The developer explains that the influence of main players on their champion’s win rate is balanced out by people who are playing this difficult champion for the first time and fail with them.
The developer says he conducted this research quite thoroughly and there is only one exception for a champ: for Katarina, the win rate through players with high mastery is about 0.4% higher. For Evelynn, it’s roughly 0.1%.
People with 25,000 mastery and above are balanced out by people who fail in their first game with a champion.
The podcasters he speaks with explain the effect:
- A beginner would play against a main character who appears incredibly strong with their champion and wins
- Then the beginners would switch to this champ because they also want to be that strong, but then they can’t get a foothold
How is this discussed? On reddit, people discuss certain champions that were difficult to play in their “release” state but could dominate if a main player mastered them, such as Aurelion Sol or Taliyah. However, these champions were then quickly nerfed by Riot Games.
Such one-trick ponies don’t always have it easy:
