There’s a post on the forums right now citing the champions that are “mained” by the top 50 players in ranked solo queue. It’s interesting to see what those players use most, but I’m not so sure what sort of conclusions we can reasonably draw from the information.

The most played champions among the top 50 players are Shaco, Pantheon, Kassadin, and Ezreal, each with four players who main the given character. You have to remember, these are just the characters those players play most often. Also, they don’t represent a huge majority over other characters. The original poster said this:

– Only 28 of the game’s 69 champions are represented in the Top 50 as someone’s Main.
– Only 2 tanks, Singed (3) and Alistar (1). I guess if you count Nunu (1) it’s three.
– Only 5 Ranged AD carries… and only 1 of those is high on the list. I guess six if you build AD Ez

The fact that 28 characters out of a possible 50 (remember, only the top 50 players were recorded) are represented actually seems really good. To me, that points to player skill as more important than champion choice, but even that is hard to qualify.

Zileas also posted in the thread, giving overall stats for champion choice. The window between the most played champion and least played champion is surprisingly small. Ashe is played in 3.8 percent of games while the least played champion is .4 percent of all picks. Again, this doesn’t really say much about balance. Riot has said that players over 1200 ELO make up roughly the top 25 percent of the player base. Basically, there are a lot of low-skill players affecting those numbers, players that don’t really factor in to the balance discussion.

Also, among all of this, it’s important to remember that not all champions are free. As Zileas pointed out, it’s not really surprising that Ashe is the number one pick. She’s 450 IP and very easy to play. When you consider the champion rotation and the way that players unlock different champions, it’s tough to say that the number of games played per champion mean a whole lot. It’s probably fair to assume that a crazy OP champion would be purchased right away, at least at the higher tiers, but I don’t know how much that matters to newer players. I would imagine that new players don’t see the full potential of a character very often, particularly if they’re new to the MOBA scene.

There are definitely some interesting stats in the thread, but I don’t think we can take much more from them than that free champion rotations keep more champions in play. Since players have limited access to champions, the free rotation makes us more likely to try someone new when they’re available, which is a good thing. Other than that, all I can say is that I wish Riot made more stats like this available. It’s a really interesting look at the player base and how all the different aspects of the game affect player choice.

First, I’d like to draw your attention to my awesome title for the champions introduced since season one launch who exceed most other champions at taking the solo lane: supermids. The reason I thought it up (I know, I’m so creative) was that I needed a way to talk about Vlad, Kog’Maw, Miss Fortune, etc. without typing that out every time I wanted to talk about the great carries in the game. Enough of that, though. On to the post.

I played two games tonight with a friend with hopes of breaking into the 1600s in ranked solo. I had been playing well all day and things just seemed to be going right. We lost. Both games. Hard. The biggest problem in both cases was our comp. In the first game my buddy was stuck in the mindset of 3s so he banned Singed. No biggie, still 3 bans, but we decided to joke around and ban Eve. That left a few strong toons on the board. Our opponent first picked Warwick so my buddy and I snagged Garen and Miss Fortune. Solid start for the team. Unfortunately, a teammate thought we couldn’t leave Kog’Maw on the board, so he picked him over some CC (Morgana was still available). Our fourth teammate chose Sona and I knew we were in trouble. Our fifth pick: Mordekaiser.

Sure, we had strong toons, but the sum of the parts was virtually nothing. Without crowd control to keep the enemy away from the carries, we got rocked. You can go too far in the other direction, too. For my next game I didn’t ban Amumu because frankly, a lot of people suck with him. The other team first picked Warwick again. I snagged Garen for a buddy and our second player picked Taric. We had said someone should get Amumu, but I was already thinking we were on the verge of being too tanky. With good DPS, though, we should have been fine. Our third player takes Shen and immediately locks him in, even though our fourth had said several times that he was picking Amumu, which he still did, leaving us with 4 tanks, short on damage. I had my friend pick TF in the hopes that we could stun them down. We couldn’t. Our outside lanes were getting worked and it was just a matter of time before our opponents had complete control of the map and we were too short on DPS to burn them down.

Even when the supermids are available, you have to focus on comp over individual toon strength. I asked everyone after the first game if they really thought we had a decent comp. The response was this: “You had Garen and Kog’Maw. Your comp was great.”

Sigh.