Luck and skill in professional League of Legends (E-sports)

As professional gaming (e-sports) develops a greater global infrastructure, it will be critical to create league systems in which skill and luck balance to create competitive, exciting, and fair environments. This study uses the most developed e-sport leagues, found in the game League of Legends (LoL), to examine early efforts at crafting such environments. The use of "winning persistence" and Bayesian statistical analyses reveal that best-of-one matches in LoL demonstrate an overall luck-skill ratio similar to professional baseball (MLB) and football (NFL). Best-of-three matches exhibit an understandably higher ratio of skill, similar to professional basketball (NBA). With both match lengths exhibiting viable but significantly different luck-skill ratios, LoL creator, Riot Games has the tools to control how much luck and skill exist in their matches and leagues, setting an important precedent for future leagues and organizations.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Douglas, Cameron (Cameron David)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Anette (Peko) Hosoi.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119960

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/119960