Why the removal of mobalytics stats actually mattered

https://mobalytics.gg/blog/dev-blog-the-future-of-our-lor-meta-stats/

For those that don't know last year mobalytics made the call that it could no longer responsible support statistics tracking for legends of runeterra.

It's all in the dev blog here but basically - the spread is too large to cover and the sample sizes are too small.

So deck diversity, plus unstable metas, plus games being played in the thousands vs the tens of thousands.

Why does this matter?

Well the statistical spread on decks actually massively shifts based on the smaller hosting websites we have available today.

Example go to mastering runeterra and you look at 3000 games of Jax played and it will be sub 50% so okay terrible deck.

But I go to runeterra ar and it says 2,000 Jax games played at 57% winrate basically saying it's an amazing deck this patch maybe because it outscales elites?

The truth is nobody knows the spreads are too wide, the sample sizes too small, and there are too many variables to know for sure.

Anyone saying otherwise is kind of stuck up their own butt.

So that brings us to this patch, we know that jayce is good, we know that elites are good.

Beyond that we have no idea, nobody is willing to play the lower tier lists enough to get reliable data, or brew counters for a concrete two deck meta that will last a month.

So maybe Mobalytics was right, stats for LOR are kinda garbage in 2023 and knowing that empowers you to play your own lists and search for your own solutions.

Now that does beg the question what is a more reliable metric of lower tier deck sucess if not statistics?

Some people look to individual player sucess for example James Ruban piloted a Shivana deck to the coveted 70/30 or whatever.

70% winrate over 30 games, but most people myself included would subjectively say Shivana is not an "amazing" champion right now and that Ruban could pilot 40 scraps of virtual cardboard to sucess.

So instead I might recommend time trials. How quickly can players climb with a list on average instead of hitting arbitrary metrics that don't really impact the average player experience.

Did you hit diamond in a couple hours without breaking a sweat? How long to diamond to masters? Are you playing 24/7 7 days a week or 1 day a week for a couple hours.

That more then anything reflects relative deck strength in modern LOR, how long, vs how sweaty. That's objective sucess.