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.
The graphs below chart gold differences over time in LCS teams’ last six games (weeks 6 through 8 of the 2015 Summer Split) and in LCK teams’ last two weeks (weeks 8 and 9 of the 2015 Summer Split).
Note: The timelines only run to 50 minutes, even if a game went longer.
Would it impress you to see a team come back to win after they’d been backed so far into a corner that the odds against them were 32-to-1? What if those odds were 72-to-1?
Now, what if a team made both of those comebacks in back-to-back games?
