Tim Sevenhuysen is the founder and sole developer of Oracle's Elixir and provides a variety of consulting and contracting services throughout the esports industry. He is the former Director of Esports Analytics for 100 Thieves, served as Head of Data Science for Esports One, led Shadow.gg from 2017 to 2019, and was Statistical Consultant for Fnatic in 2015. Follow Tim on Twitter at @TimSevenhuysen.
On August 19, Riot Games announced that the 2015 League of Legends World Championships would be played on patch 5.18. This was literally game-changing, because every competitive region but China had wrapped up its professional play on either 5.14 or 5.15, just before patch 5.16’s “Juggernauts” changes ushered in a sweeping set of item additions and champion reworks, noticeably shifting the metagame.
How will patch 5.18 affect the Worlds landscape? How do teams adapt? Does a brand new meta narrow the gap between top and bottom teams, or widen it? Who will benefit most from patch 5.18, and who will suffer?
Here are some thoughts to chew on as we await the full answers to those questions.
You’re bored of picking winners and losers. We all are. So here are a couple of more interesting questions:
Which champion will have the highest pick+ban rate during the group stage?
Which player will earn the most solo kills during the group stage?
How many wins will the Wildcard teams earn, combined?
Think you can call it right on these and 11 other questions? Think North America can make better predictions than Europe? Go ahead: make your predictions. (And don’t forget to select which region you’re from if you want bragging rights!)
The results will be posted on Wednesday, September 30. Once the group stage is over, I’ll compare your predictions with the actual results, and we’ll see how close we came!
First Blood is a compelling storyline in any game, and I find myself drawn back to exploring it constantly. A while ago, I looked at which players were most active in securing and giving up First Blood. Today I’m exploring the teams angle: which World Championships teams were best at picking up First Blood, how important was it to their success, and what are some other patterns we can spot in what their FBs looked like?
We’ll start by assessing overall First Blood rates and win rates, then move on to FB timings and how many players were usually involved in each team’s FB kills and deaths.
