Reddit is burning about it!
LoL Myth Debunked By Riot After 13 Years
Everybody encountered them, and everybody loves or hate them – One-Trick Ponies (OTP's). And for a long time, a myth existed in the LoL community: Champions that are mained a lot have higher win rates. Apparently this was debunked by Riot after over 13 years. Needless to say, Reddit is burning.
Riot Debunks old LoL Myth
Ladies and Gentlemen, the League of Legends Subreddit is burning once more. This time about the well known topic, "Champions mained a lot have higher WR", or to phrase it more understandable: Popular Champions, which are getting played by One-Trick Ponies (OTP), have a higher win rate because of these OTPs.
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An OTP is a player, that only plays one champ. So they are better on the champion and increase the win rate doing so (More OTPs = Even higher win rate). This myth is as old as LoL itself, but now Riot Games have debunked this myth.
According to the Reddit user "FluckyVer", who started the whole discussion, there was an interview with the Riot employer Phroxzon (most likely Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison, Lead Designer of the League Balance Team).
Apparently, Phroxzon explained, that he conducted a study over one and a half year. With some interesting outcomes. It seems to be the case, that the increased win rate for mained or OTPd champions gets lowered again by casual players.
According to the Reddit post, the only champion with an increased win rate by OTPs was Katarina. Her win rate has increased an astonishing 0.4 % due to her popularity for One-Trick Ponies.
Community Reactions
As every experienced LoL community member might already expect, the Reddit comment section has gone wild about this post. Some are questioning how Phroxzon interpreted the numbers to get to this conclusion. And others are asking if there are any parameters on when you are counted as an OTP.
For example, the user "No_Cauliflower633":
Didn’t he define a main as someone who has at least 25k mastery on a champion? I’d be curious as to how the numbers changed if that was bumped up to 250,000.
And of course, a big portion of the community is still discussing if this could all be true or not. For example, the user "Riokaii" wrote:
the claim that they have a higher winrate is true, the problem is the they are a minority and do not significantly affect a champions OVERALL winrate. The extent that mains do swing the overall winrate is by a 0.4% margin at the most.
High mastery curve champions do still trend higher winrates for their dedicated main players
Others, like the user "Ekklypz", are more hesitant when it comes to numbers from Riot: "Reminder to take anything Riot calls a statistic internally made should be taken with a huge grain of top laner salt."
It will be interesting to see, how the community will further react to this now debunked old myth. But it's nice to know that Riot Games is addressing these topics that have been discussed by the community for a very long time now. Even though we all know that the discussion will never stop.