Patch 5.8: Black Cleaver usage

tl;dr Players buy an item more when you change it

Welcome to a very special, and decidedly abbreviated, graduation weekend and Mother's Day edition of LeagueMath.com. I am super-interested in the re-worked Black Cleaver that was released with patch 5.8. It has been more than a week now, so there are plenty of games to analyze with regard to this change.

This week's dataset is 1,111,156 ranked NA solo-queue matches played by players of all skill levels from Bronze through Challenger on patches 5.3-5.8. Due to Fun Life Events™, I have only had a few minutes to start analyzing the data for insights.

I like the first plot I made though:

It is a plot of Black Cleavers bought per match, split by patch.

There are about twice as many Black Cleavers bought in a typical match on patch 5.8 than on other recent patches. This is a fun quantification of a change in player behavior in response to a change in the game. Honestly, I was expecting to see a bump in the use of this item following in this change; but I did not think it would be this dramatic.

Sadly, that is all I have got for today. I have had to prioritize other things over LeagueMath.com recently. The situation is temporary though, I promise I still love you.

Well, that is definitely the shortest post yet. I will be back next week, like always, with more LeagueMath.com. Right now, I am planning to pick apart the data on Black Cleaver use to see what patterns arise. Let me know on twitter if you have any thoughts on interesting angles to explore.

There is the rss feed if you are into that kind of thing; otherwise check the index and make sure you are up to date on the earlier articles (every single one has more and deeper insights than this one, ha!).

Wow, TSM got rekt at the mid-season invitational. RIP NA

So much League-er-ino and so much Math-er-ino; it can only be LeagueMath.com.

No fellow graduates or visiting relatives were harmed in the making of this article.

Peace.