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

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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) /

NA Versus the World

Since we have pulled this data for each of the four major regions, we can compare the trends from NA and see if any of these changes are anomalies or if LCS teams are simply going along with a general trend. Right off the bat, we see that North America’s GPM trendline is pretty comparable to the rest of the world’s.

Created by Josh Tyler /

We see that NA actually started above EU and even Korea back in 2018, but then slipped below the rest of the world last year and remains behind the pack this year. One key thing to note, though, is that during the previous spring and summer each of the other leagues saw an uptick in their average GPM from Summer 2018. That same uptick did not happen in North America, as the LCS’s average GPM just steadily declined.

However, it is good to notice that the steep decline in GPM from Summer 2019 to this year is not an anomaly, as all the other leagues saw a similar drop this spring. Yes, China and Korea haven’t played as many games, but EU has played a similar sample size and they also saw a significant drop in this statistic.

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The same sort of story is told by the kills per team graph. LCS teams followed the same general trend of summers being bloodier than springs. In fact, NA teams have consistently been more bloodthirsty than Korean teams over the past two years, although they have passed us this year (for both Korea and China, we adjusted their kills per game to be over an 18-game season like LCS and LEC).

Created by Josh Tyler /

Yes, NA is among the lowest teams in terms of kills per game, but we also see that Spring 2019 was a significant turning point for NA. In that split, LCS teams dropped well below EU, and below the worldwide average, in terms of kills per team in the split, similar to how our GPM continued to dip in 2019.

Finally, we go to average game time where we see that, once again, NA is following the trend. Average game time has been on the decline overall in the last two years, with an uptick this year. Surprisingly, though, NA’s uptick from Summer 2019 to Spring 2020 doesn’t appear to be as sharp as those of other regions, especially China and EU

Created by Josh Tyler /

So, although NA games tended to be longer than the other regions, especially in the 2019 season, they’re falling more in line with the rest of the world now. Our current average game time in 2020 is actually faster than the world average, and it’s faster than EU.

While it’s all well and good to look at trends for the last two years, the fact of the matter is that NA still was the worst team in these metrics last year and for GPM and kills is still the worst in 2020. Even if they are following the trend, how can LCS teams say they’re overall better than 2019?

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