Research Papers

Philip Maymin

Abstract: Being digital, eSports should have vast quantities of data, but sometimes they do not. League of Legends (LoL), the most-played multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, only has boxscore- equivalent statistics provided by the game’s publisher (Riot Games) through their free application programming interface (API) [1]: things like when each champion died, or got a kill or an assist, or similar. All current LoL analytics from amateurs to pros rely on this rudimentary API data.

‍
We have developed a new and unique way to capture the far more abundant and useful underlying data. Among other things, we track every champion’s location multiple times every second. Physical sports have been revolutionized in the past few years by similar optical tracking data for players (c.f. [2], [3]); what we do for eSports goes even further. In addition to the location data, we also track every ability cast, every attack made, and the damages caused and avoided. We track the amount of actual vision granted and denied in the fog of war. We track every player’s health and mana and cooldowns. We track everything, continuously. And we do it invisibly, remotely, and live, all without any impact on the user, or even their knowledge1.