Photo: Riot Games
We came across an interesting site recently and we couldn't help but share our findings with you. This site lists month after month the distribution of League of Legends players according to their ranking. It details the cohort of players with a fine-tooth comb and allows you to do a whole lot of statistics. We can thus answer several existential questions: what is the share of Challenger players, the cream of the crop on the Riot Games MOBA? But we can also know how many players are stuck in Iron ... the lowest division.
Don't laugh too hard, we've (almost) all been there. Even a big guy like Joel from BMS had an extended stay there at the start of the season.
esportstales, thanks for the work!
esportstales offers month-by-month tracking of the distribution of League of Legends players according to their ranking. This monitoring is particularly interesting at the beginning and end of the competitive season, to see if the players who rush are able to improve the statistics. Theoretically, one would have expected to see a line graph in both directions, with very few very bad players and very few very good players. Overall the trend is present, but there are still quite a few levels that make the curve much less smooth.
In June, here is the distribution of the different players according to their division
- Iron: 4.7%
- Bronze: 26%
- Silver: 34%
- Gold: 23%
- Platinum: 9.6%
- Diamond: 1.7%
- Masters: 0.17%
- Grandmaster: 0.032%
-
Challengers: 0.014%
Overall, the vast majority of players are in the Bronze-Silver-Gold levels. Between them, they represent no less than 83% of active players in ranked games. The notion of high elo is debatable and much discussed. If some believe that it starts from the Diamond rank, we can also defend players who are Platinum .
The step effect, what is it?
esportales goes a little further in its division and we observe that there are level effects between each major division. For those who are new to the system, the major divisions are divided into 4 ranks. The Silver division is thus made up of the Silver 1, Silver 2, Silver 3 and Silver 4 leagues. And in the 4 divisions, there are a lot of people... There are so many, that it breaks the linearity of the curve. The cases of the Iron and Bronze divisions are a bit special, but in the others it is obvious:
- Silver 4 : 11% of players
- Gold 4 : 10% of players
- Platinum 4 : 4.8% of players
-
Diamond 4 : 0.67% of players
This "anomaly" can be explained by two main reasons:
- Concretely, the players are protected once they change division. You can easily go down from Gold 3 to Gold 2. On the other hand, to lose your Gold rank and return to Silver, you have to have a serious losing streak.
- In addition there is the feeling of having accomplished which to account for. A lot of players play for fun and once they've reached a rank, they don't necessarily want to tryhard any further. Some will speak of a glass ceiling which is individualized to each player. A significant portion of the community wants to go Gold to get the competitive season skin. Once they're Gold 4, there's no real reason to go any higher.
League of Legends players sometimes think everything was better before, but Riot Games had to deal with issues that would seem surreal to us today. One of the best known is related to the history of objects, before they were reworked by the editor.
