League of Legends Esports: A Statistical Look if the LCS is Getting Worse

Los Angeles, California – February 8: — during 2020 LCS Spring Split at the LCS Arena on February 8, 2020 in Los Angeles, California, USA.. (Photo by Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games)

We ran the numbers to see if the level of play in the LCS has actually been worse in Spring 2020 than it was in 2019.

“Yeah, Cloud9 is good, but look at their competition!” That’s a lot of what I have been hearing when people talk about the LCS frontrunners as we enter the back half of the Spring Split.

Cloud9 has been one of the most dominant teams ever in the LCS during their first ten games, but to many, that domination is undercut by the fact that they play in North America. Surprisingly, this sort of doubting didn’t apply quite as harshly to the first dominant LCS team of the franchising era, Team Liquid, who were often held up as a team that should perform well internationally.

To be fair, Liquid did somewhat justify that praise by finishing second at MSI 2019 and the praise for 2020 Cloud9 may be exceeding the hype for those TL teams of year’s past. However, with even players on Cloud9 saying that NA’s level of talent is the weakest it’s been in years, it prompted a question: is NA actually getting worse?

To answer this, I ran data from each of the four major regions – NA, EU, Korea, and China – and compared them split-by-split for 2018 through the present. And, obviously, yes Korea and China’s data this year is compromised by the Coronavirus, but it is still instructive to the analysis of whether NA’s overall level of play is getting worse. I chose to look at three metrics that I think fairly represent how skillful a team (and, by proxy, the league as a whole) is:

1. Average game time. Better teams are able to get leads and close them out quickly, while worse teams struggle to end games. Leagues with shorter average game times indicate a higher level of skill.
2. Gold per minute (“GPM”). While the value of dragons, towers, Rift Herald, Baron, and other objectives change from season to season, the best teams will be the most efficient at gaining gold over the course of the game to maximize their ability to win.
3. Kills. This one is a bit more debatable, but good teams tend to be more aggressive than bad ones. Therefore, teams that fight for objectives and get kills more often are likely to get those objectives and therefore have a better chance to win.

With those metrics in mind, let’s look to see how NA has done over the past two plus years and where they are trending.