Even through all of the events they put out, Riot just keeps on giving.
Previously, one of Riot’s metrics they used to rank their pro players was damage per minute, but what if there was a metric that considered game mechanics, like the positioning of enemy players relative to the player we’re taking the metric for, and the potential damage they could put out? Well, Riot did it with vision score, and now they’ve created a new metric they call “Damage Rating”.
Riot’s example of how damage rating is a better metric than plain damage per minute was Rekkles. If you don’t know Rekkles, he’s the current ADC for the top team in the EU LCS, Fnatic. However, he’s ranked fifth on the damage per minute scale compared to EU adcs. When Riot applies their damage metric algorithm, Rekkles shoots from fifth in EU all the way up to second in the world, followed very closely by TSM’s ADC Doublelift and beaten out heavily by HK Attitude’s ADC GodKwai.
Well, what does this mean for the fans? For those of you into fantasy draft, you may either be astounded by these facts or completely blind to their meaning. We can see that Rekkles wins a lot of games, and does well when ahead. Having a positive rating when your team is losing games means there’s likely potential in said ADC, and you can follow them through teams they migrate to over the years. Rekkles has proven to be a good player, but is his team feeding him that skill directly? If you view a few of Fnatic’s games, you’ll see one way or the other, but damage rating is a decent metric to estimate a player’s usefulness on a team.
The way the rating is calculated should make this rambling come together. Adjusted damage per minute is the damage per minute spent near enemy champions. This is to avoid times where damage is impossible to deal. Then, that data is compared to other (wins/losses, based on the outcome of the game) and the damage rating is born from an average of this metric for all of a player’s games in the season. Riot requires 5 data points to allow a game to be comparable, so if a player wins as Kled, there must be at least 5 other Kled wins by other players to allow the player to have a damage rating calculated for that game. This makes the metric much more reliable, and allows fantasy players and eSports fans alike to view the game’s stats concisely.
