Picking the Right Champions to Win the Game
Gaming is something that keeps inspiring me. I’m amazed by the speed, accuracy, and level of concentration of professional players. It’s impressive how this industry has evolved and grown over just a couple of decades.
Team Liquid commands an imposing presence in the esports world, boasting over 160 professional players across more than 15 different games and a staggering fan base of over 10 million followers on various social media platforms. With more than 75 premier events won, Team Liquid is one of the most successful organizations in competitive gaming.
Team Liquid: Mining rich esports data to help players, managers, and teams compete and win
The game with the highest viewership and extensive fandom is League of Legends. Team Liquid successfully competes with their League of Legends team, which recently won the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) 2024 Spring tournament.
In League of Legends, the goal is to create a strong and balanced team consisting of five characters, called “champions,” in order to outplay and outsmart the opponents during the game by being one step ahead of competition.
Teams participate in a pre-game draft process to select champions before a match. This involves banning and picking champions from a pool of 166 choices to create a strong team.
Champions are the in-game figures controlled by each player. Each champion has particular skills and areas in which they excel. Putting the champions together allows the team to play in various strategic directions to win the match.
After choosing five champions (“pick”), each team is also allowed to remove five champions from the pool (“ban”). Those players cannot be picked by either side. This can be utilized to remove specific parts that would otherwise counter a strategy or hinder the other team from playing their favorite style and/or composition.
Esports teams and their analysts need to prepare for the draft process, as it requires knowledge of the opponent’s favorite picks and strategies. Imagine a five-a-side dodgeball match, but before the match begins, the five players from each team draw their champions from a pool of 166 individual champions.
With bi-weekly updates to the game (“patches”), especially affecting the champions as well as indirectly teams practicing and developing new strategies, competitive League of Legends is an ever-changing game. It creates the need to constantly adapt your draft to a new environment, to analyze both your own and the opposing team’s behavior.
Furthermore, the nature of the draft process and the varying strategies of opponents make accurate predictions difficult. Esports teams have only a week to prepare for the game and gather knowledge about the other team’s favorite champion picks, strengths, and weaknesses.
Previously, Team Liquid coaches prepared draft scenarios based on manual analysis of the opponent team’s draft behaviors and champion preferences. However, the challenge was that manual analysis is done before the draft, with the best potential pick or ban changes based on the decisions of the other team. Additionally, the sheer number of potential matches to choose from and the different strategies employed by opponent teams make manual draft prediction very difficult.
