During 2 months, I managed to work on a short data project on League of Legends since I am a big fan of the game and its use of data.
Just as it did with traditional sports, the collection, analysis, and use of all kinds of data is starting to change the way that competitive games are played and understood. Nowadays, as the E-sports became more and more popular, data analyses on E-sports games are also become much more common. Because of the foundations of multiple commercial E-sport Leagues, data analyses is playing a significant role, just like the role they play in NBA and other sport leagues. In this project, the online game League of Legends (LoL), developed by Riot Games in 2009, will be our case study. The main reason is everyone in our group had played and enjoyed the game and would like to bring a more passionate and informed view to this project than they would with another case study. An important aspect was also Riot Games’ API, which allows the public to easily make queries and pull information from their servers. Another great selling point is the fact that League of Legends is one of the most popular modern day E-sports, meaning its balance updates affect people’s lives on a professional level.
As League of Legends is a popular game, there are already a couple of applications that exist in the data analysis sphere. Websites like League of Graphs and MetaSrc collect basic stats and information from the League of Legends API and use it to construct simple analyses like what the most popular champion and what the win rate of two champions when played together are. What these existing applications do not currently do is prediction of a currently ongoing game with all of the features of that game in mind, and that is the hole that our project is attempting to fill.
League of Legends is a Multiplayer Online Battleground Arena (MOBA) style game developed by Riot Games. Each game consists of two teams with 5 players each. Each team starts the game at opposite sides of the arena in a base that contains their Nexus. The goal of each game is to overcome obstacles such as minions, structures and enemy players in order to destroy the enemy Nexus. Each team generally consists of 5 standard positions divided across the map: Top, Middle, Jungle, Attack Damage Carry(ADC)/Marksman and Support. Each player in a match, usually lasting between twenty minutes and an hour, controls a unique champion chosen from a pool of more than a hundred with differing characteristics and abilities. The game boasts 100 million monthly players and a flourishing competitive scene with millions in tournament prize pools as well as online viewers.
