How Toby Boosted His Win Rate by 7% in League of Legends

We want to introduce you to Toby. He is an Australian-based League of Legends player who worked his way to a Gold solo rank by grinding daily. He had done this through hard work and long sessions of multiple games, generally at night after being at work all day.

During Season 11, Toby became an early tester of MaddCog, a new device that tracks the mental performance of gamers. MaddCog was capturing data on serious League of Legends players to learn the impact that mental performance had on their win rate and game performance.

Toby helped the MaddCog team continue their research mental performance by playing his long gaming sessions while wearing MaddCog’s sensor headband. It took Toby about one month to play 100 games, at which time the MaddCog team gave him some feedback based on his mental performance data.

“Toby, you have great mental fitness. You can play for long periods before showing signs of mental fatigue. But when you do become fatigued, you get hit hard. We’ve seen your win rate drop an average of 9.5%.”

While this was interesting, the more meaningful feedback was related to his flow.

“For most players, flow is the key mental state required to play well. You definitely fall into this category as your average win rate is 14% higher when in high flow. Put simply, flow is king for you. If you achieve high flow more often, you will win more.”

After discussing this, Toby and the team settled on these outcomes:

• Finding what helped him achieve high flow — trying different pre-game routines and tagging them in the MaddCog app. The report will then show which routines are most beneficial to achieving flow. Start out by testing three routines separately: a walk, meditation, or laying down with music.
• Avoid fatigue — Toby was generally fine for the early games, but it was recommended he check fatigue levels in the MaddCog app after each game. If fatigue was ‘Hi’, then don’t play another game as he had a much lower chance of winning.
• Try a warm-up game — his flow and performance were often lower in the first game, so play an unranked game first to warm up before moving to ranked.

Toby made these changes and with some further finetuning, started to see some improvements over the next one hundred games. This is what we saw:

• He played fewer games — while he still played most days, his sessions were shorter as he stopped early to avoid fatigue
• First game win rate increased — by having a warm-up game, he increased the win rate of his first ranked game by 4%
• He established a ‘flow routine’ — after trialing various pre-game routines, Toby learnt that 10 minutes of laying down listening to music before playing was the most effective means of him achieving more time at high flow
• His win rate increased — Toby’s win rate in ranked games increased by 7% and he eventually rode this up to Platinum

Toby’s story highlights how MaddCog can be beneficial to the competitive gamer. Making small changes and playing it smart, resulted in a substantial increase in win rate, rank and overall gaming performance.

While Toby was one of the early MaddCog testers, the learnings gained on the back of data and experiences like this resulted in the way recommendations are automated within the MaddCog app. The app uses machine learning to understand the impact mental performance has on your gaming performance, so it can provide relevant feedback that will guide your improvement.