r/dataisbeautiful • u/hugorocha • 12h ago
OC Spread of simulated League of Legends draft win probability by rank, from 400,000 ten-champion lobbies per rank [OC]
Public champion tier lists, all 11 rank filters x 5 roles, patch 16.17.1, snapshotted 2026-08-29. 2,765 champion/role/rank entries.
Tools: I built a lobby advisor ( https://shouldidodge.lol ) and this came out of calibrating it. C# to collect the daily snapshot, Python + NumPy for the simulation, matplotlib for the chart.
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u/hugorocha 12h ago
Data: Public champion tier lists, all 11 rank filters x 5 roles, patch 16.17.1, snapshotted 2026-08-29. 2,765 champion/role/rank entries.
Tools: I built a lobby advisor ( https://shouldidodge.lol[https://shouldidodge.lol](https://shouldidodge.lol) ) and this came out of calibrating it. C# to collect the daily snapshot, Python + NumPy for the simulation, matplotlib for the chart.
Method: for each rank I generated 400,000 ten-champion lobbies, drawing one champion per role per team in proportion to that champion's pick rate within its role. Each lobby is scored by converting the ten win rates to log-odds (clamped to [30%, 70%] so a three-game outlier can't dominate), summing allies minus enemies, and squashing the result back through a sigmoid. The output is centred on 50% at every rank and close to normal, so the spread is fully described by one standard deviation - the top panel. The bottom panel is just the share of those lobbies reading 55% or better.
The simulation is the calibration step for a champion-select tool I built (https://shouldidodge.lol); happy to share the raw JSONL if anyone wants to redo it.
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u/hugorocha 12h ago
The high end is a sample-size artifact and it's measurable. Most metric sites doesn't publish game counts, but the smallest denominator reproducing each published win rate to four decimals is a lower bound on them: median 132 games at Emerald, 92 at Grandmaster, 32 at Challenger. 43 of 256 Challenger entries are exact simple fractions like 2/3 or 6/11; 0 of 252 Gold entries are.
Iron is the interesting bar. It's 56% wider than Emerald on slightly better sample sizes (median 141 implied games), so noise doesn't explain it. Splitting by role, it's concentrated in jungle and top - the roles where one player decides the most alone. I don't have a confident explanation.
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u/Keljhan 9h ago
For the iron gap, could it be a large number of smurfs? People who should be higher skill level and have high-level knowledge of the game but intentionally sandbag their LP to continue competing with lower-skilled opponents? Or even just OTPs that lose every game where they don't secure their preferred role?
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u/Koksuvi 7h ago
Iron represents extreme low of the skill spectrum, so I would say it's simply that people who play champions that are least affected by skill perform better. And lower skill champions are more affected by balance changes thus we should expect Iron to be more affected by which champions were picked, which is visible in the graph.
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u/ham_plane 8h ago
Wait, C# for scraping and Python for running simulations? My brother, you have this backwards 😂
(/s, doesn't actually matter if it's running quick enough)
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u/hugorocha 6h ago
Ahah yeah! I'm actually fluent in C# so I started with C# then started using python, I know not the best choice! :) ahaha
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u/staplesuponstaples 6h ago
Awesome project! I did one where I made a classifier to predict outcomes based on draft, so it looks like you went one step further and stratified it by rank to see which ranks are most subsceptible to draft diff.
I wanted to ask how you made your model that calculated the predicted winrate for a draft? I tried a few different models but my best one ended up being a linear regression model.
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u/hugorocha 2h ago
Thanks mate!
It's a kind of a log and odds aggregation model:
The app taakes win rate for the current tier, clamp it to [30%, 70%] (so a 90% win rate from a tiny sample can't dominate), then convert to log-odds. A champion with no stats found contributes 0 (neutral 50%).
Then sum the log-odds of all 5 allies, sum all 5 enemies, and take the difference. Then multiply that net log-odds by a damping factor.
And squash back to a probability with a sigmoid.
So each champion's win rate acts like an independent additive vote (structurally similar to how a naive-Bayes / logistic model would combine independent features).
Separately, the app takes that probability and classifies it into a band plus a percentile, using a Gaussian model whose per-tier standard deviation was measured by me, by simulating 400,000 lobbies per tier, but it's calibration of the output distribution.
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u/staplesuponstaples 1h ago
So this feels more like an aggregate that measures "this team has more meta champs" to me if I understand correctly? And less so, "this specific composition is stronger"?
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u/Kermitnirmit 8h ago
Why is Iron like that? Is it because the team with the “easier” champions has a better outcome vs Challenger where matchups are more important and games are closed out faster?
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u/Koksuvi 8h ago edited 8h ago
In Iron you can expect a low skill expression champions to dominate the winrates, because bad skill would result in bad outcomes for high skill expression champions and low skill dependent champions are highly affected by state of the game - people are bad at using more skill dependent champions, so those that pick low skill high performing champions perform better.
Ironically similar phenomenon occurs on the opposite end at high ranks, where risk of using high skill champion often outweights the advantage from using them resulting in worse performance, thus pulling people into using low risk high performance champs, which are again, heavily dependent on current state.
Basically in both cases people who pick high skill champs make mistakes (though of way different nature and scale) and get punished hard by low skill champs which are aligned with current meta.
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u/A_Bit_Of_Nonsense 4h ago
Its might also just be that iron lobbies end up with more completely unwinnable lobbies not being dodged. You arent getting 4 auto attack champs vs 2 armour scaling champs going through gold lobbies, you might in iron. Even if none of the players know how to punish in those games, they'll just passively win.
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u/BronzeArcher 2h ago
Are win probabilities estimated with the same model for each rank? Or are only the highest level players able to do strongly capitalize on uneven drafts?
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u/hugorocha 2h ago
The same model is used on all ranks.
Funny thing is higher ranks bias the results a lot due to lack of games / variety. For example, Teemo only has 3 games on top in challenger when I pulled the data, from a single player, which makes it hard to make the numbers useful due to the lack of games.
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u/BronzeArcher 2h ago
I guess I’m curious why only 3 games impact the model so much. Is rank an input to the model as well? Or are higher ranked games supersampled in training?
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u/irrelevantusername24 11h ago
League of Legends and other e sports are... kind of nonsense to me after seeing for myself and experiencing for myself how truly inconsistent various connections and Internet configurations are. Like to the point I don't think it's even worth doing - maybe different in other countries, but then that kinda defeats the purpose of the whole online gaming thing - unless it's purely for fun. Because it's almost entirely a random number generator, the only other factor which can influence success is pure numbers - zerging, in certain kinds of games, or more simply everyone targeting one person or spot at a specific time. Other than that? Almost totally random. So sure, there's some "skill" involved, but it has almost nothing to do with the actual game mechanics as the developers intended.
On the other hand, if you're playing to have fun and just goof around - which is what games are for? Sure, that's fine. But don't take shit too seriously. Unless someone comes out with a really great turn based game (or one that has severely limited action rate), like... ironically, Pokèmon - that would be a great online game of skill. But e sports isn't skill, unless the competitors are all in the same building or in a small enough area they may as well be on a LAN.
That said, if our Internet infrastructure wasn't a bunch of "small business owners" scamming the entire populous, maybe things would be different. On that note, I think that is kind of the idea behind PSN and XBOX... but, again from direct experience, I have seen that playing on PC has far less latency and weird lag spikes than playing on the antitrust paywalled networks.
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u/Restory 11h ago
In most developed countries, internet is incredibly fast nowadays and stable if you use an Ethernet. If league online is just a rng, you shouldn’t have a hard time getting challenger rank but we both know you couldn’t ever do that.
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u/irrelevantusername24 10h ago
I apologize I did simplify a bit, you bring up a good point. There is some base level of familiarity of the game, the game mechanics, and the maps on which you play that does effect things. After that, which is purely a time sink, the only other major factor is time spent and ability to coordinate.
And you're right, I wouldn't waste my time on another game like that. My game is Elder Scrolls Online which combines all the prepubescent toxicity of mid 2000s Call of Duty lobbies that LoL thrives on as well as fantastic story telling, voice acting and beautiful world building. LoL is like a minigame within ESO.
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u/Restory 10h ago
You’re honestly just completely wrong on this. I don’t play league or any MOBA but the skill ceiling is very high. Any competitive activity is a time sink if you want to get good at it, but having met many degen league players, sinking time doesn’t guarantee you’ll be good. It goes way beyond base level familiarity & basic mechanics. The mechanics and timings are incredibly difficult to master.
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u/irrelevantusername24 10h ago edited 10h ago
I would bet a lot of money I don't have that any person who is a "high rank" player in any game lives close to the game servers or otherwise has a much higher than typical network configuration between them and the servers. It isn't so much that they're good, it's that they have access to better resources - like time, for example - than everyone they are playing against. Trust me I know this for a fact because I have experienced different network configurations and it doesn't matter how good your are if your connection - whether your ISP or the network beyond them - is terrible. And that effects those who are supposedly "good" because they are able to face a lot of people who are effectively handicapped. And since it is a team game, any team that has more players with a good connection and the amount of time to practice is going to be apparently head and shoulders above everyone else.
Which is hilariously a good metaphor for literally everything. The important factors, in order of importance:
Resources
Support/teammates
random chance
avoiding negative random chance
skill
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u/Vengeful111 9h ago
You are just wrong why are you so adamant to argue here. League servers in Europe are located in Germany.
Guess what, some of the most successfull players in EU are from France, Spain, Romania, Slovenia, Turkey, Greece.
They are so far away from the server, it doesnt matter.
Also top tier events are obviously on LAN servers meaning they all have 0 ping.
League takes an incredible amount of knowledge mechanics and simple competitiveness
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u/Restory 10h ago
Why do yap about what you have no idea about. Unless you’re in a remote part of the world, you will live close enough to a game servers, where it will have limited impact compared to skill.
Plus skill level can overcome ping. I’ve reached ascendant rank (top 5%) on NA valorant servers playing from Europe lmao.
You are legit posting drivel to cope with the fact you aren’t good at gaming.
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u/irrelevantusername24 10h ago
Depending on how the game is coded - I don't have familiarity with Valorant either - then playing with shit ping can actually cause you to have an advantage. Why? Because you're used to compensating for that, everyone else isn't. So especially if you're a no life player, then yeah that checks out. When a random person who does nothing but play the game shows up but is rubberbanding everywhere, then the average player is gonna get rekt ez
This is also another example of the "good metaphor for literally everything". A person who is "high status" in the current regime is not going to happily accept they are the beneficiary of mostly random chance
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u/Restory 10h ago
I do not no life the game, don’t even play it anymore. It’s not even in my top ten most played games. You’ve gone from saying ping is the most important thing, to that it’s an advantage to have higher ping. I wouldn’t have been used to compensating, the majority of my time I spent was playing on EU servers. Valorant has some of the most stable servers of any FPS game I’ve played with 128 tick servers, you don’t get that in CS for example. People rubber banding everywhere wouldn’t make it out of iron, players on high stable ping don’t rubber band. Average players also aren’t in ascendant rank. You genuinely have no idea how any of this stuff works, I don’t know why you write so much bs about it.
These games require skill that you simply don’t have, so instead you cope. Your small American ego can’t handle it.
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u/irrelevantusername24 10h ago
me: gives plenty of valid reasons to question whether your skill is actually skill in an attempt to force enable your humility
you: stupid american why such a big ego
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u/Restory 10h ago
You did not give a single valid reason, just pure cope. It’s okay to be bad at games, your ego should be able to handle that.
If I played league and sunk a lot of time into it, id probably reach slightly above average at best. I’m too old to learn these sort of games now and I’d never be able to pick up the required skill level (which is high).
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u/shanghaipat 10h ago
Move to China, everybody has fast and stable internet here ;-)
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u/Restory 10h ago
This guy is terrible at gaming and would rather blame his connection lmao.
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u/Dart345 10h ago
Yeah peak reddit pseudointelligence, saying anyone better than him is better solely because of ping LMAO
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u/Lower-Garbage7652 9h ago
But bro you don't understand bro the good players live close to the servers!
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u/irrelevantusername24 10h ago
I don't think that's true. And it's more the network infrastructure factor. China is far more centralized - as in population density - than the US. That's where the problem lies. Because it isn't so much my connection to my ISP or local data centers, it's that combined, all the people in the game then connecting to Texas (or wherever), are taking many different routes. And it's like death by a thousand cuts, where the casualties are the quality/competitiveness of the game as well as those with worse connections. Which isn't necessarily only people with bad connections, it could be something beyond their own ISP because our Internet here is like, as I said, ten thousand "small business owners" in a trench coat. And they're all optimizing singularly to collect and sell data - but not to the end customers, unless those are other "small business owners"
Like if the games servers are located along one of the coasts here? And everyone playing is on the coast? That's probably going to be mostly fine. But that's not reality. China has one coast, where the vast majority live. And everyone else "doesn't exist" just like me and everyone who doesn't live on the coasts of the US.
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u/mapopriest 7h ago
All tier 1 pro play in League is done on LAN.
League is 99% skill. There is essentially 0 luck involved at any point in the process in both competitive play and casual. Internet connection is a non-issue; the vast majority of players play on sub 100 ping and League doesn't particularly reward fast paced quick reaction time gameplay anyway.
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes 8h ago
You play top lane dont you
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u/irrelevantusername24 8h ago
I play zoomed all the way out, my specialty is metagaming
I don't know what top lane means
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u/SirHawrk 11h ago
I have no idea what this trying to say.