Riot Games today unveiled Global Power Rankings for League of Legends esports, a data-driven rankings engine powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to the company, this new innovation will “contextualize team strength across Tier 1 Leagues.” The Global Power Rankings evaluates teams and their regions and will be updated after every day of play at the upcoming 2024 League of Legends World Championships (or Worlds 2024) to provide “a comprehensive and transparent snapshot” of teams across the world.
The Global Power Rankings uses a blended Elo metric, creating a weighted average between a team’s Elo (which is weighted at 80%) and their league’s Elo (which is weighted at 20%). The rankings are updated after every day of Worlds to take the games played into account, and international events are weighted more heavily than regional events. The system can potentially predict events, showing a correlation between predicted outcomes and the actual events.
According to Riot, the Global Power Rankings are designed to address problems peculiar to League of Legends esports. The company says their decisions about the game are “heavily influenced by the fact that we have an ever-changing meta influenced by bi-weekly patch updates and the varying structures and skill levels across different leagues.”
Riot also added that it plans further improvements next year for the Rankings. It will incorporate in-game stats to adjust scores to match performance, as well as introduce individual power rankings and further refinements to the Global Power Rankings accuracy.