Low-level League of Legends solo queue is all about kills: fight, fight, fight, and every now and then a building might fall, too, when there’s nothing fleshy around to attack.
But higher tiers of play, and especially esports, are all about objectives. Kills are a means to an end: sure, they reward you with a little gold and experience, but it’s far more important to leverage those kills into greater advantages, gaining greater control of the game.
“Kill Efficiency” is my attempt at measuring how well teams use their kills to gain those advantages. Kill Efficiency measures the ratio between a team’s objectives taken and their champion kills. Teams who take a lot of objectives without requiring too many kills will have higher KE (0.90 or above), while teams who score a lot of kills but don’t take that many objectives may have KEs in the 0.70 to 0.89 range.
Key Questions
There are some important choices to be made when defining Kill Efficiency. First, what is an objective? Second, how do we calculate the final number?
Objectives
I define an “objective” as a Tower, Dragon, Baron, Inhibitor, or Nexus.
There are a few potential points of controversy in this definition. First, Barons: It’s easy to argue that a Baron kill is “worth” more than a Tower kill. The reason I don’t give Baron any special treatment is that the main benefit of taking Baron, in my mind, is how much power it gives a team to take Towers. If a team kills Baron but doesn’t turn that Baron buff into multiple Tower kills, they have generally not effectively used their Baron kill, or the champion kills they may have used to secure the Baron in the first place.
Second, Dragons: are they worth the same amount as a Tower, or should they count for more? I can buy into the idea that a Dragon is worth more than an individual Tower, but it’s messy: which Dragon buff is worth how much? Should it matter when in the game the Dragon was taken, or how long the game was? Trying to “fix” the weighting of Dragons in this calculation could be very complicated, and more controversial than just acknowledging that Kill Efficiency somewhat undervalues Dragon control. And at the same time, like the Baron buff, the Dragon buffs are mostly valuable because they help a team push better, rotate better, and siege better, so good Dragon control should generally correlate with good Tower control, helping to push KE higher incidentally.
Third, the Nexus: I include the Nexus as an objective because I think a winning team deserves more credit for winning, and because there should be recognition for ending the game, not just for killing the two Nexus Towers.
Calculation
I’ve chosen to calculate Kill Efficiency based on a ratio of totals. In other words, I sum up all of the objectives taken across the games we’re reviewing, then sum up all of the champion kills, and then divide objectives by kills to produce the ratio.
The possible alternative is to calculate Kill Efficiency separately for each game, then average the ratios. This is an approach I take to many other statistics. In this case, though, that leads to misleading findings, because losses can produce outliers. Think of a game where a team only scored two kills, but managed to eke out four Towers and a Dragon along the way, perhaps while trading those objectives for something else across the map. That might produce a single-game KE of 2.0, 2.5, or even higher, which will drag up the multiple-game averages quite a bit.
The table below lists totals-based Kill Efficiency alongside Average Kill Efficiency. You’ll see that it’s quite common for the average-based KE to be higher than the totals-based KE, especially for teams who took low numbers of objectives per minute.
Based on these findings, I recommend totals-based Kill Efficiency as the more accurate option.
The Sendoff
If you want to see Kill Efficiency in action as part of a team analysis, check out my piece about Gambit Gaming, the most kill-efficient team in Europe.