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Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

The Dova Meta post is misleading to most players

First off Dova is a great guy, an even better dev and I am so happy to have him around. Additionally, LoR is an extremely well balanced game.

That said, his recent post had a glaring mistake I haven't seen anyone point out yet. You can't compare winrates across decks with vastly different playrates. Why is that? Because decks with high playrates also begin to have their counters played more, which drives their winrate down. When you list the large number of the champions in the game as having a deck with a 50%+ winrate, and go on to claim that means "a player can have success using 74% of the champions that exist in the game right now," you forget this fact! Sure it may be true that one player can have success with Anivia in the meta right now, but if 10-20% of the playerbase starts using that Anivia deck, suddenly lists run one Passage Unearned, or more superfast aggro gets played to go under Anivia or whatever the case may be. That 50% drops to 49%, then 48%... In a way, the meta self stabilizes, and this is why you see that word thrown around after a new release!

What does this all mean? It means that at the highest tiers of play, those "trash" champions may still not be trash (I admit we meta analysts often use hyperbole!), but they certainly don't meaningfully have a positive winrate even if there are enough games to make the sample statistically significant. Thresh Nasus has a 54% winrate after people have spent a lot of time changing their decks to beat it and Anivia (or whoever) scraping 50% in all ranks with a 0.2% playrate isn't just a few percentage points off in terms of winrate in anything but a literal sense.

I hope this has enlightened some players out there who may not have considered all the stats of card games and how they connect. I'm absolutely certain Dova knows everything I've said here, but his positivity maybe got a little the better of him in terms of his phrasing. At least, such is my 2 cents.

Thanks for reading!

  • Dovagedys
    Posted 4 years, 7 months ago (Source)

    As expected from the title - no, no you've misunderstood. At no point in Dova's post does he suggest that anything on the 50%+ winrate list is as good as azir/irelia. Thats not the point he's making. He is not comparing azir-irelia to all the things on that post.

    "a player can have success using 74% of the champions that exist in the game right now,"

    This is literally true.

    Players use 74% of champs to win more games than they lose. This is a fact. That is exactly what this says.

    Do those champs have what it takes to become a new tier 1 deck? No, at least this simple winrate stat alone doesnt suggest this.

    But thats moving the goalposts. What he said was a player can have success with it. And that is categorically true.

    Sure it may be true that one player can have success with Anivia in the meta right now

    Yes that was what his argument was. Also he stated things that are statistically relevant in terms of sample size, so its far from just "one player".

    but they certainly don't meaningfully have a positive winrate

    Did you just say not to compare winrates without context?

    What does this mean? If you are the sort of person who decides whats good or bad based off a couple of % points - then fine.

    If you are the sort of person who wants to play different decks but is blinded by the difference between 51% and 53% as super significant... Go try those other things, they can and do actually work. Yes even at high ranks, yes despite the meta - potentially even because of the meta.

    And thats something to be very clear on - there for sure exists underplayed, hidden OP, undiscovered lists or deck ideas that SHOULD be played far more than they are, that SHOULD be better represented in tier lists / your favourite streamer's opinions. But they arent, caus the community goes "only 50% must be trash" or something equally naive.

    but if 10-20% of the playerbase starts using that Anivia deck, suddenly lists run one Passage Unearned

    So what? Abuse that shit while they dont, and climb with it.

    Thats how i made masters the first time. With a 70% winrate no less. With a deck people dismissed, wasnt on tier lists, low playrate and middling winrate so must be bad.... Still good enough to climb to the highest tiers. And thats for sure not caus im some card game god lmao.

    <3

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