Season 5: Top bans in each league

tl;dr There is an interesting and smooth(-ish) gradient in the bans as one climbs.

I have been busily grabbing data, and now have about 18GB of matches, which is over 300,000 NA ranked solo-queue games played on patches 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4; and for the first time this dataset folds in matches from every league (bronze up to challenger).

I have always wondered if the champions that players ban varied widely across different skill levels, and now we can see for ourselves by simply looking. This post has tables that list the top ten bans in each of bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, master, and challenger. By staring at these tables we can gain insight into the psyche of NA ranked solo-queue players at every level of the game.

The dataset contains 15,022 matches played by bronze league players. Here are the ten most popular bans:

I like this list. It is a who's who of champions that can go off and carry if the opponents are out of position and all the buttons are mashed. Jarvin IV is the only real tank in sight, but I doubt that these players are considering that. It might be interesting to see how players build him at different elos (MMRs), but I would predict he is mostly damage down at this level. Akali's ban rate at 62% is fairly high, too. She is truly feared.

I have 40,173 matches played by silver-level players. Here are the ten most popular bans over that slice:

Nine out of the ten champions here were on the table above. Blitzcrank has dropped off the top ten, and has been replaced by LeBlanc. The junglers here are climbing. Akali has fallen off quite a bit, I guess there are more threats than her just carrying when you climb up into silver league.

In the dataset there are 13,480 ranked solo-queue matches played by gold league level players. Here are their favorite champions to ban:

Jarvan's ban percentage exceeds 70% on this table. He is apparently perceived as the true gold-league stomper. I find it interesting that some of the more button-mashy champions are starting to disappear, and more nuanced champions are showing up. Nidalee, LeBlanc, and Lissandra all do better on teams that play a little slower and draw fights out by poking and kiting. There does seem to be some consensus among players of different leagues which champions are ban-worthy though, which is kind of neat.

I am still working on my data acquisition techniques, so the dataset is still a bit skewed in the direction of higher-skill players. I have 98,733 platinum league matches. Here are the bans:

Even higher Jarvan IV ban percentage. I like Gnar showing up here too, tanks seem to have an impact in the game proportional to the skill of the players. We have our first marksman (ADC) ban in this table as well, with Kalista. Jarvan and Vi can definitely swing solo-queue matches, in my experience, so it is not too surprising to see them banned out so much in all these tables.

I have 139,954 diamond matches. Here are their preferred bans:

Irelia appears, and Azir skyrockets up. Diamond players are much less afraid of Vi, for some reason (qss?). This data comes from patches 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4, and if I remember correctly, Azir underwent some changes during these patches. It might be interesting to go patch-by-patch on this type of analysis for some champions... Maybe a topic for a future post.

Due to the design of the league system, there are many fewer master players than there are diamond players. So, I only have data for 4,667 matches played by master-level players. Here are their bans:

Hello Kassadin and Janna. This dataset is a bit small to say anything too concrete here. For instance, it is not clear why games where the median skill of players is master-league would have significantly different bans. However, I include the table here for fun, and potential interest.

There are even fewer challenger players, so I only have 3,481 NA matches where the median player was in challenger league. It seems that with the current matchmaking system, it is pretty rare to have majority challenger-level players in a game. Here are the bans:

The table is not too different from the ones above. Irelia is climbing, and Nidalee is firmly in the top spot. There are also five champions who are all banned in over half of the games. That represents firm agreement among these players that those champions swing the game at that level. Neat stuff.

You made it to the bottom. Congratulations, and thank you. Here is a funny match where bigfatlp didn't ban anything, built a 6k gold lead at 30 minutes and then let the other team come back. That match actually broke my analysis because there was a piece of code assuming that each team would ban at least one champion. Easily fixed.

I enjoyed this, and I hope you did too. Tweet me if you have any thoughts, I think there is some really interesting analysis to do in this area.

Those were the bans. Go back to the index and find something else to read. Gotta read 'em all, then subscribe to the rss feed and be the first to know about the next post. The data is only growing and the analysis is only getting more interesting from here.

Take care of your league, and take care of your math. LeagueMath.com has your back.

No feelings of bronze-akali-banners were hurt in the making of this article.

Peace.