Identifying Symbiotic Relationships Between Champions in League of Legends

• Activity Number: 235 - Statistical Analysis of ESports Data
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, July 29, 2019 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Sports
• Author(s): Michael Schuckers* and Ivan Ramler and Choong-Soo Lee
• Companies: St. Lawrence University and St. Lawrence University and St. Lawrence University
• Keywords: sports; esports; video games; amateur

Abstract

League of Legends (LoL) is a multiplayer online battle arena game where teams of five players compete against each other. Over the years, players have formed a metagaming strategy, consisting of five distinct roles, which has been widely adopted. This study uses logistic regression models to identify symbiotic relationships (such as Mutualism, Commensalism, and Parasitic) between two of the roles: Attack Damage Carries (ADC) and Supports. We use a traditional regression adjusted plus minus player structure for this study. Results from the 2015 LoL North American Ranked Solo season indicate only 5% of observed champion pairs are beneficial to both the ADC and Support and these pairs made up about 13% of matches played. Further, about 28% of pairs had at least one of the ADC of Support be negatively impacted and they made up over 40% of observed matches. Win-rates for Mutualism and Commensalism pairs were substantially higher than the other categories.