League of Legends Esports: A Statistical Look if the LCS is Getting Worse
By Josh Tyler
It’s All Relative
Well, one final way we can compare ourselves to the rest of the world in terms of relative comparison. That is to say, how much worse were we than the rest of the world in the past, and are we that much worse than them now.
To do this, we’ve calculated the percent difference for each of these stats for NA versus the rest of the world:
Looking at these graphs, we can see that NA very clearly has gotten worse compared to the rest of the world when it comes to aggression and kills, but better in terms of average game time and GPM. We do see marked declines in both of those stats during Spring 2019, but they seem to have rebounded in Spring 2020.
However, since there is such little data from China and Korea this year, I thought it might also be prudent to look at how LCS stacks up against its big brother the LEC. Here is how we have done and trended relative to teams in Europe:
As you can see, it’s a similar story to the worldwide trend in terms of kills (we’ve tended to get far worse compared to Europe) and gold per minute (a big drop relative to Europe in Spring 2019 and then a slight uptick in Summer 2019). However, looking at the average game time, we see a trend that’s actually in line with what we saw from those other graphs.
Relative to Europe, our average game time dropped off dramatically in Summer 2018 and fell further in 2019 (with a slight recovery in Spring). This year we actually improved relative to Europe.