League of Legends: LCS Week 1 player power rankings

Bot lane

Next up, we have the AD Carries, who provided the best performing player of anyone in Week 1 (and thus the person leading our initial MVP rankings). It’s probably obvious, but you can guess who it is.

1. Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng (Team Liquid)

You know what always astounds me about Doublelift when looking at his stats? It’s not the incredible consistency with gold accumulation (his 366.77 gold quotient is the best in the LCS through Week 1) or laning prowess (394 gold advantage, 15 CSD, and 360 XP advantage, on average). It’s his vision control.

Doublelift’s 1.57 vision score per minute is the best in the LCS of any player not in the support or jungle role. Heck, his vision score per minute is better than three junglers (Grig, Santorin, and Amazing). The consistent attention to detail is what makes him such a dominant player, and why he deserves to be the frontrunner for MVP after one week.

2. Matthew “Deftly” Chen (Golden Guardians)
3. Noh “Arrow” Dong-hyeon (OpTic Gaming)
4. Zachary “Sneaky” Scuderi (Cloud9)
5. Cody “Cody Sun” Sun (Clutch Gaming)

Cody Sun is an actual enigma. He ends Week 1 with the best laning stats of any ADC (averaging a 42.5 CSD at 10 minutes), but then posts the worst KDA and most deaths of anyone in his position by a massive margin.

6. Trevor “Stixxay” Hayes (CLG)
7. Jason “WildTurtle” Tran (FlyQuest)
8. Jesper “Zven” Svenningsen

Zven is the perfect case study for the issues surrounding traditional KDA ratios and why I have adjusted it to create the, aptly named, adjusted KDA (aKDA). See, the regular KDA is a simple formula of kills+assists/deaths and thus presents the problem that kills and assists are considered equal. This is clearly not the case, as getting a kill is far more valuable than getting an assist (you get more gold, which is why teams tend to funnel kills onto their carries when they can), and getting a solo kill is far more valuable than getting a kill (you’re not splitting gold from the kill).

Thus, aKDA is that same formula, but weighing solo kills twice compared to regular kills, and assists half as much as a regular kill (since you will, at the very least, be splitting the kill credit with one other player). This brings us back to Zven, who had a decent KDA of 6.3, nearly equal to Doublelift. However, this was inflated by him having the second-most assists of any ADC in the LCS, and was towards the bottom half in that position in terms of kills and deaths, giving him an aKDA that is much further below Doublelift’s showing how this raw KDA kind of got inflated by collecting assists.

9.   Lawrence “Lost” Sze Yuy Hui (Echo Fox)
10. Bae “Bang” Jun-sik (100 Thieves)