champion stats and how they might mislead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkhbqXtNfSc&t=497s

So recently Swim has been delving into the newly released champion stats and talking about how low performing a lot of the new additions have been within this expansion...but is this really the case...I wanted to go in and talk about confirmation bias and how numbers mislead.

So who is the best champ with the highest winrate...Irelia or Azir right

https://lor.mobalytics.gg/stats/cards?rarity=CHAMPION&sortBy=WIN_RATE&sortOrder=DESC

That would be wrong its actually Darius of all things with his tiny 13 percent inclusion rate

Great game solved lets all go home, all jokes aside it just shows us that aggressive champs perform very well right now even the bad ones

Alternatively slow champs are doing poorly TF and Aphelios once top tier are absolutely awful if you only look at their winrate

So what we are really seeing is less an objective way of rating the power level of cards, and more a measure of the meta

Fast is good, slow is bad...great and before fast was bad and slow was good...and around we go

I believe that changing the pace of play through balance and expansions is great for the health of Legends

Pretty soon nerfs will land and control will do far better and all of a sudden we'll see a huge influx of winrates as is always the case.

So don't judge champs on winrates alone its really not informative in the slightest

He makes some good points but I don't think he understand what tier 0 mean or at very least we have different definition. A tier 0 is a top tier deck that has no counters and while very powerful Irelia/Azir has many counters. I mean he did present some of them in video.

When I saw that Video and was slighly shocked that Swim has such a strong confirmation bias that he claims his view of the meta and that his versions of decks are the only right/good ones. 

He uses data from players with the mobalytics client aka his netdecking servants, he literally created his own LoR cosmos where he is the one and only star of the show.

Therefore I absolutely would not take his words as THE right way to look at the meta and I would not stop playing champions because swim says that they are bad. 

Zilean and Malphite are decent champions and the only reason they (especially Malphite) don't shine is that almost every matchup is hyperaggro and that Malphite never gets to the point where he matters and that Zilean is imo the best in P&Z with Chirean Sumpworker and Insightful Investigator (which is a problem because p&z shurima lacks healing options) 

Im terms of my latest brews I am currently working on a LeBlanc Zed build featuring the countless different tricks we currently have in noxus and Ionia to make it really hard for the opponent to remove LeBlanc and Zed and win of cloning Zed and LeBlanc after giving them double attack with Flurry of Fists

Yeah more concerning then the winrates which are on.the high side of normal is the playrate of 20% thats a fifth of all games players que into. As such Riot will look at it, the problem is what can you change without destroying their performance in other decks which is pretty average and how do we stop a return to TF Aphelios?

Aphelios took some brutal nerfs, so even if they hit other decks, I doubt that we will see him back at the top. As for Twisted Fate, he still good but not oppressive anymore so I wouldn't mind seeing TF decks being meta again.

More importantly riot don't use mobalytics for their balance, they have their own data.

Looking at champ win rates is pointless most of the time, the only time it matters is when they are at the extremes (really low or really high)

since many people experiment with said champions.

For example although Fizz TF was having the highest win rate in the game a few months ago, TF wasn't in the top 5 (can't remember if he even was in the top 10) cause he was played in worse decks.

Zilean has a low deck building cost (like TF) so his win rate being low is understandable many decks can easily use him, so low performing ones are dragging his win rate down.

Malphite is hard to justify in a very aggressive meta of EZ/Draven and Irelia/Azir.

I wouldn't call Irelia Azir tier 0 (not sure if swim did, yet to watch the video) since it has hard counters: scar grounds, Fiora and Dragons.

He did call it a tier 0 deck, check the "current meta" segment of his video.

Zilean and Malphite are honestly not so bad. I've tried them out, and I didn't feel like "these are the worst champions I've ever played" but they are definitely not the strongest. They might in future metas but not now.

Zilean at least is viable as his deckbuilding cost is so low since he can level himself, and as a low-cost unit with pretty decent stats, he could be slotted in any Shurima deck and would do ok. His level up is impactful, just not game-winning. So, of course, there are probably better alternatives, but these are the things you sacrifice for versatility.

Malphite, on the other hand, has one of the highest deckbuilding costs in the game. Playing him as a finisher isn't bad, it's easily counterable and sometimes won't end the game on the spot, but it gets the job done. The issue is that he literally doesn't do anything when you don't level him up, making him NECESSARY to level up. So you have to build around him and summon 12+ Mana of Landmarks. You have to make a pretty subpar deck since most Landmarks don't really give you tempo, and you don't get enough slots to put it other good reactive cards. That's what I feel every time I play Yasuo Malphite. Your gameplan is your only gameplan, you can't win any other way. If you don't draw Landmarks/Yasuo/Malphite, you're screwed.

Tldr; it's not the champs, it's their decks.

Quote From DoubleSummon

I wouldn't call Irelia Azir tier 0 (not sure if swim did, yet to watch the video) since it has hard counters: scar grounds, Fiora and Dragons.

Actually, in the hands of a skilled player, Irelia Azir doesn't really have any hard counters. Even their worst matchups are closer to a 55/45 than a 70/30. 

The trick is that they need to have a build that allows them options (particularly having Homecoming), and they need to have a lot of practice with the deck. But if those things are true, we're actually seeing a deck that can pretty easily steal wins from its worst matchups. Which incidentally sounds a lot like TF/Fizz.

Mono-Fiora is probably the worst matchup in the game for Azir/Irelia, but even in that matchup, the Fiora player has a 13% chance to not draw Fiora (Entreat version) by turn 3, so they are starting with a bare minimum winrate of 13% against their worst matchup because the opponent's deck can just lose to itself. But it's even worse than that for Fiora, because of Homecoming. If the Azir/Irelia player has Homecoming in their deck, and they draw it, AND they use it skillfully, the Fiora player stands a strong chance of losing. Now, obviously, the Fiora deck has ways to respond to a Homecoming, but only if they leave mana open for those responses, and only if they actually draw those responses as well. But the point is this - even against their worst matchup, Azir/Irelia still has a reasonable way to win the game, without even needing to highroll.

I think people are singling out Irelia Azir unfairly if you look at mobalytics the far more concerning issue is that literally 3/4 of the tier list is aggro, punctuated by one or two midrange,  control, and combo decks respectively. That's very limiting in terms of deck variety.

Probably because players find Ire / Az so suffocating that you either play whatever hard counters or lose he’ll even with what I thought would stall that deck I lost. Now that players are refining that deck it’s getting even better. Out of 6 gold games 3 were Az / Ire

dragons / lifesteal and healing you just can’t match their damage output. Blade dance need to cost more mana to start or summon less. Or landmarks need to be changed to first time you attack summon such and such. I

Quote From Nifty129

I think people are singling out Irelia Azir unfairly if you look at mobalytics the far more concerning issue is that literally 3/4 of the tier list is aggro, punctuated by one or two midrange,  control, and combo decks respectively. That's very limiting in terms of deck variety.

But Azir/Irelia is the reason for the lack of variety,  no one plays control because they all have abysmal match up against that deck, even Lissandra/Trundle a deck who can beat Spider, Discard and Nightfall aggro without problem, gets completly destroyed by Azir/Irelia.

Yeah I might need to change my position.

https://lor.mobalytics.gg/stats/regions?src=home-menu

Looking at the most recent region stats Irelia Azir is the only tier 1 deck at 56% winrate and it looks like its forcefully dropped every other deck down which a sign of a hot fix waiting to happen.