LOL: The Riot tool to judge the champions is identical to Pollock's paintings

Although you may not read it, I am sure that at some point you have seen a picture of Jackson Pollock. The North American artist has been one of the most important figures of abstract expressionism, and maximum exponent of that style of painting that is commonly called Carrier painting.

The mocks between the nourished group of abstract art atheists over Pollock and the paintings of it, which believe that could make them a child, were legitimated a few years ago by an academic stream that sought to analyze the fractals of the paintings. This lit a software that managed to differentiate the pictures of imitators of those who had actually been made by Pollock.

In this way, we can see it clear that there was a method behind the work of the painter, and even that there was mathematics behind them. Perhaps because of that, it makes sense that many years after the death of Pollock, a graph used by Riot Games to evaluate the status of its League of Legends champions is quite similar. In the end, everything are mathematics.

Breath vs Depth, the key graph of the champions

We are talking about very specific graphics, and that Riot Games has had to use for a while because of the enormous number of characters other than League of Legends. Each individual case is complex to evaluate only with the numbers, but if all these data are ordered, reality becomes much more bearable.

They are the so-called graphics BREADTH VS DEPTH (something like amplitude vs. depth), and represent the number of players who use a champion against the number of games that these users play with them. In this way, we reach a square that can be divided into four large quadrants by the averages of both variables: played by many and very used it would be popular, played by many but a few encounters would light the category affordable, played by few but many games would be niche, and finally played by few and in a few games, I would make an unpopular champion.

The issue is that a champion would be at a certain point of the painting, that is why the graph is usually done to measure trends and use data from several patches. If we join the position of each champion during those patches in which we have measured the popularity of the champions of the two forms mentioned above, we originated a line that talks about its change over time.

Thanks to this, we can frame the champions at different playing points and generate that colored manner that looks so much like the paintings of Jackson Pollock. And the truth is that it is a tremendously useful tool for Riot Games.

The return to the relationship between mathematics and art

All this information was counted first-hand by the Rioter Nathan Beau in the last edition of the Game Developers Conference, during the talk Data Reported Decisions With The Champions of League of Legends (Take of decisions informed about the League of Legends champions).

As Nathan Account, thanks to this type of graphics it is possible to obtain information about the popularity of roles such as ADDS, or visual archetypes such as monsters. This graphic allows you to see how the methane is differently to pick rates and win rates, as well as reviewing the design philosophy of the champions.

But the most interesting thing of all, is that this is even a useful tool for the design itself, since the creators can point to a certain area of ​​the graph before even starting the design proper. If we see that the shooters do not inhabit the area reserved for champions with average popularity at the level of players, but with many games behind their backs, it would be interesting to consider creating one. And in that way, the numbers return to shake hands with the art... just upside down as it happened with Pollock.