Analyzing how gold is distributed for each NA LCS team – 2014 Summer
After the success of the gold distribution analysis from NA last split, as the NA playoffs roll on we wanted to do an update looking at how teams distribute their gold now and how they have changed.
First let’s look at how gold distribution has changed since last split.
Even though it seems pretty slight (only 1% or so) this is a big repercussion because of how solidified the general LoL meta is. So overall mids get more gold while junglers get less, that is the big change since last split. The other slight change is ADCs get a little bit more while Supports get a little bit less. Top, despite the fluctuation between 2v0, 2v1, and 2v2, still get the exact same percent as they did the previous split.
Now lets look at the team by team breakdown of NA LCS (note: on a 7%/-7% scale).
How to interpret these graphs
I posted this last split but I wanted to keep a little bullet list of how to interpret these graphs to hopefully avoid any misconceptions:
These values are relative to each role’s average. When you see a team like Complexity it doesn’t mean that Bubbadub gets more absolute gold than pr0lly. It just means that Bubba, relative to other supports, gets more gold than pr0lly gets relative to other Mid laners.
More gold =/= Better Performance. This metric is more used to measure style of play, rather than “who is the best”. Just because Meteos gets the most gold in the jungle does not absolutely make him best jungler, there are many other factors to conceptualize performance.
Don’t worry about “Winning Bias”. There is an assumption that winning teams that get more objectives bring their gold distribution closer to a “balanced” composition, but after working with that bias it is negligible.
In addition to the above graphs I wanted to go team by team and look at their spring split vs. their summer split and breakdown any interesting data that might not be apparent.
Cloud 9
The first team is the again league leaders, Cloud 9. Many people, including me, thought Meteos changed his style of play with these new metas and changed his farming ways to be a more team/gank oriented jungler, but surprisingly he stayed very similar this split still outfarming every other jungler (especially at 10 minutes). Sneaky remains a below-average farmed carry, despite getting more and more attribution of Cloud 9’s success. The last thing to look at is the solo lanes where we see a more balanced approach, Balls has been less focused while Hai has received a higher proportion of gold. This fits with the slow move of mid lane to play a higher carry role.
LMQ
LMQ has a really disproportioned graph with mid lane getting such a high level of gold compared to the rest of his team. We actually covered this a bit in the Thorin Theories, but this graphic really brings out the focused farm on XiaoWeiXiao. It brings back memories to the old XDG graph which many people attributed to their failure as a team, while LMQ has been pretty successful despite this odd-natured gold distribution. My opinion for why their team ended up so one-sided is because of their early-grouping playstyle which leaves most of the farm for XWX compared to Vasilii who gets below-average CSPM. This crazy one-carry playstyle might leave them vulnerable if he gets shut down in the playoffs.
TSM
TSM has remained a ‘balanced’ team with every role being pretty close to the season-average, but there have been some interesting slight variations since last split. The most apparent is the downward spike of Wildturtle’s gold. I think this is honestly attributed to his slumping split (which I believe is at least in part attributed to his changing support partners). Wildturtle has scored 35 less kills this split than he did last split (despite kills for ADC’s going up 7%). We should have a more focused article on Wildturtle specifically later in the week (or next week) as his CS@10 numbers looked particularly weak as well. With Wildturtle going down in gold, the other 3 gold-heavy roles went up. In particular I wanted to note Top where Dyrus is having a really strong split.
Team Curse
Curse underwent one major roster shift since last split and it was the joining of Xpecial. The interesting thing however is that all of the roles have shifted except for Support. Whether it be due to an analyst or just becoming more gelled as a team, Curse has a balanced gold distribution this split with slight above-average amounts for Quas and IWillDominate. Also we have seen a significant change for Voyboy and I think this translates into his play as well as we’ve seen him get better and better this split. We have seen their success in the playoffs and I believe they are strong contenders for Worlds.
CLG
CLG has looked like different team stylistically since Seraph has joined. It has looked like they reverted back to their old “protect the Doublelift”. CLG has shifted from a mid lane starved game to a now top lane starved game and have been one of the biggest shifts in gold graphs this split (with exception of maybe Dig who replaced 2 players).
Team Dignitas
Dignitas had the biggest roster changes this last split when they took the two solo laners from Coast. Many people joked when we did this post last time that if you took CST’s graph and Dig’s graph and put them together you would get a perfect team, and honestly as far as gold is concerned it worked out as expected. This balanced gold approach hasn’t brought success to the Dignitas squad though. It has been my opinion that Shiphtur and Zion seemed a bit overrated given their losing team and now they are not really performing the lane dominance as they were expected.
Evil Geniuses
The last returning team was EG who we see again trending to different priorities since last split. The addition of Altec really shifted their team dynamic as it moved from Yellowpete - a carry who got really low farm to Altec the rising star. This shift also decreased the gold from both Top and Jungle. In top lane we have seen somewhat of a shift from Innox to playing more conventional tank type champions rather than the carry-style top laners he typically preferred previously.
Complexity
The last team in the league is Complexity who just joined this relegation. They have a very skewed gold graph between Top and ADC. While Complexity is known to have a strong ADC in RobertxLee it is a surprise to see so much gold go to Westrice instead of Pr0lly. Westrice actually leads top laners in CSPM which may be due to his constant split push (although not very successful with it).
Patch analysis - How did gold distribution change over patches?
The last thing I wanted to cover with this post is we did a quick analysis of patches and how their significance on the distribution of gold between roles. We compared each patch to the season-wide average and came up with this set of gold-webs (note: they are on a +4/-4% scale which is less than the team fluctuations).
While it is hard to pinpoint which changes really lead to which outcomes I think it is interesting to see some trends here. The first trend is the shift away from farming jungles, we saw in early patches jungles get much more farm but we see them regress in particular for patch 4.10. This is interesting because we have actually seen a rise of 2v2 lanes in the later patches which I was expecting to let the jungle get more farm. The other interesting trend is the slow rise of Mid lane gold, making mid lane probably the most important role going into playoffs. Overall though there is much more analysis to the changes in patches and we want to do a deep dive into the patch progression of NA LCS and might do that next week.
Data collected with help by the onGamers Stats team: Derek 'Kathix' Adams, Jesse 'JALbert' Albert, Steven 'whedgehead' Falgout, Kent 'Traepoint' Frasure, Christoph "geilerHarry" Lansmann, Jake Morales,James 'PelkaSupaFresh' Pelkey, and José "Vodkita" Ribeiro. Design by Ben 'Sarcasmappreciated' Li.
