That's actually really good to know.

But please don't tell that to the Bronzies.  They believe that if a Yi gets slightly ahead... even if we have a ton of tools to deal with him including my much more fed Swain or Irelia... then everyone on the team, from the Support to the AP Mid, must immediately start building a Thormail so that Yi will die whenever he right clicks on an opponent.

catching up on news - I read this stuff later:

pbe jungle changes for season 5 - http://boards.pbe.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/champions-gameplay-feedback/5AN5oKRM-preseason-2015-experimental-jungle-changes

read this stuff - night all!

http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/help-support/WH8doH76-na-servers-and-the-future

 smeh - copy paste

reading now - fyi - lunar eclipse underway atm.  6:25AM EST- 7:15AM EST or so. 

Provided that there is a strong correlation between the best players in the world and how a champ does in solo queue/ranked 5's... but that's not the case based on win rate. Good point that kha's not doing as well on the world scene currently (also a few patches ago), but in ranked 5's he's incredibly strong 57-58% win rate, but he drops off some in solo queue 53-54% win rate. 

Also, I don't really buy into this freelo stuff - I just think that the statistics can and often do point out champs that have an edge in the current meta (provided there is a good sample size. The stats alone do nothing for my individual skill level - BUT, those stats often tell me what champ I should spend some time developing - IF I get on the bandwagon before those champs have high ban rates. 

• high ban rate means the general public believes a champ is strong (regardless of reality)
• high pick rate also means the general public believes a champ is strong
• high win rate with a high pick rate generally means a champ is strong (in whatever you pulled the stats from - eg high pick/win in solo queue plat, high pick/win in ranked 5's plat)

Things get much more muddy with a small sample size (karl's rammus example). 

That's a really good point.  I think we'd see a drop off in power/win rate if that change was made.  I kind of think it would be smart as well, but I don't think riot is going that way. 

Makes sense and I agree.

Agree on 1 point - I think its very important to learn how to counter those trends (banning or playing champion counters).  But I still see the value in trying to use the trend to your advantage provided you pick up on it prior to someone moving towards must ban status.  Also, trends happen over time, but a trend can develop very quickly and need not be examined over a long duration (google trends shows you trend of today for instance).  What I'm generally talking about here is picking up on an individual champions strength, often by noting win rate spikes, and then figuring out why.  I personally find value in that and have benefited in the past.  There's a big difference seeing a champs strength before everyone else and deciding I want to main Kassadin back when he was banned every game. It's still worth figuring out why Kass was getting all the bans, ofc. 

I'm seeing that as well.  Seems like a very good pick up in many more situations now.

Also, I like/dislike this series at LoLking.  They do weekly analysis on league trends.  I like the data - I don't like that they break down the data for everyone.  An example of what they do - they note pick rate increases for the week.  Then they tie that stat to things like  -well, that champ got played at worlds.  Give an episode a watch

Oh - and I'll jibber on about games last night a little.  played 1 ranked game.  Got 1 ranked win - think I got like 26 LP so PROBABLY 4 more wins and I'll hit another promo series (riot does enjoy putting people to 98/99 lp to be a pisser).  I had a so-so showing as lucian.  Duo'd up with a really nice guy I played with before in ranekd - barklous.  He hits me up pretty frequently for games but I'm usually involved in something else when he asks.  He's actually a super nice.  Can't say I was super thrilled with him going blitz into a leona/trist lane with me as lucy, but he had many really good grabs.  We went way too ham for some kills early/mid, but the enemy team couldn't really make us pay for it all said and done... but it was shite play on my part. 

All other games were normal/draft.  My other pal (trick) that I've been duoing ranked with apparently went full on tilt when paired up with a silver MadCast support.  To be somewhat fair, he was up against a master tier draven in the previous game and got worked a bit.  Then he got wrecked the next game... also by a draven... but apparently raged a ton at his support and had some pretty BM from what I heard.  Been there, done that, but I a bit bummed that he went all ragey the 1st or 2nd time playing with some MC folks.  He seems pretty difficult to get to untilt once he gets going.  Anyway, might have to limit my games w/ him to ranked, but we'll see.

My fav moment of the night was actually in the game where trick tilted.  I'm playing ryze top lane.  The enemy team's riven screwed up pretty damn badly and put me into a position where I could forever freeze the lane.  So, the riven disappears and I freeze the lane for a good 4-5 minutes. I notice that bot lane is caving pretty bad, so I decide to unfreeze my lane and push to tower so I can roam, get tower or tp.  Now, riven has been missing from the map for 4-5 minutes since she screwed up and put me into frozen lane mode.

It turns out riven had been sitting in the top bush near where I had the lane frozen for the ENTIRE 4-5 minutes while I farmed.  She, being close to the creep wave, missed all the cs, but got all the XP. So, she pops out having hit level 6 and having ignite and wipes me.  I found that particularly funny anyway.  Willing to stay in a bush that long just waiting for me to push.  I'd have kept the wave frozen MUCH longer if bot lane hadn't been doing so poorly, but I felt like I had to move out so I could help ease the pressure. 

Ripped from reddit:  4.18 patch coming out tomorrow oct 9.  Includes this stuffs

• Sion champion update - new kit (champion spotlight), visuals ( splash), lore, updated skins.
• Four new champion skins: Championship Shyvana, Dunkmaster Darius, Underworld Wukong, Ravenborn LeBlanc
• New splash art: Cho'Gath, Kog'Maw, Lee Sin
• New Ward Skin: 2014 Championship Ward
• New Featured Gameplay mode - Hexakill: Twisted Treeline
• Three New Summoner Icons: 1, 2, 3
• Texture rebalancing for ~20 champion and skins - Blitz, Brand, Evelynn, Nocturne, Olaf

Yeah, and I've also watched you lose yourself a lot of games using this strategy.  I think if you add up the negatives along with the positives, the negatives win.

Early in the season, you were picking a lot of...creative...junglers in the hope of jumping on a secret OP jungler/strategy.  It did not go well even at Silver and you didn't even maintain .500 for a long time.  But, as soon as you went to obvious picks that everybody knew were strong (like Lucian), your winrate shot right up.  Honestly, watching those games I thought that you would have had a good chance to win if you had just taken Wukong, but basically really gimped yourself by taking weak junglers that you hadn't practiced much.

This is the drawback to your strategy - you have to play champions quickly, so you can't practice them that much.  And you have to hope they are OP before everybody has really confirmed they are that strong, so they might not actually be OP.  So a lot of the time you end up playing a not really OP champion that you haven't practiced much.  That has a good chance of losing you the game.

So yeah, you might be able to outsmart everybody and get a few days of an OP champion that you haven't practiced that much.  But the fact that you haven't practiced the champ much cancels out the OPness, so its somewhat of a wash, and its a temporary advantage since the nerfs/bans are coming.  But you risk playing a mediocre champion badly.  I don't like that deal, so its a questionable strategy to me.  And having seen a fair number of your games from an unbiased perspective, I'd question that this strategy has helped out your ranked games in any way.  You do best in ranked when you make obvious picks in bot lane and smash people, not creative picks elsewhere.

I think what you are referring to is not what I'm talking about though.  Let me site 2 things that I think you might be talking about - shaco and let's go with feral flare udyr.  Nothing re: playing those champs was influenced by win/ban/pick rates. 

Shaco I wanted to learn because I enjoyed it and he has god tier ganks.  The weakness being putting the team into a position where you either need to end as quickly as possible or be able to split push while other group.  All said and done, it was fun and I learned a ton.

The udyr feral flare thing actually WAS pretty damn op, but you needed a team that didn't get destroyed in the lane phase.  Also, not win/ban/pick rate related, but more about a style of play I wanted to try out and see how it did.  And like with shaco, I eventually reached my conclusions as to the weaknesses and strengths. 

Anyway, just saying that things like feral flare udyr or even trynd jungle were about trying out gimmicks and seeing where it went.  Truth be told, I don't think I played too much of that stuff in ranked. 

At any rate, I think the only time I was really able to pull off picking up on a trend before it took full effect was with nunu. 

The practice that I think is worth repeating is looking at the high win rate, pick rates, and ban rates. Then figuring out exactly why that is the case. 

Except there was never even a statistical case for Nunu that I'm aware of.  His winrate was never that high (he has always been right around 50% as far as I'm aware), and its not like there was ever a major trend toward Nunu play.  Sure he got a slight uptick in play when some pros started playing him, but he was never a big thing - we are talking about from 2% play to like 4% play.  And he was never a ban target.

So what was ever the statistical case for identifying him as a trend, or for him being OP to the point where having "secret" knowledge that he was OP was an advantage?

It was a couple weeks before nunu hit that should be banned status.  Think I had a like a 2 week window where I could get him consistently in ranked.  If I remember right, he had some sort of change and ended up seeing like a 2-3% increase in win rate and I dug in from there (it didn't sky rocket him, I just saw a decent sized power increase and I was curious why).  Kudos if you have the inclination or the stats available to find that window - but its just prior to that block where nunu was banned a bunch. 

Nunu has had exactly one change this season - he got 4 additional armor.  This happened in April.

There is no window in the last few months where he had a statistically significant increase in win percentage.  He is remarkably consistent at 50% or just under.  His popularity is also remarkably consistent.  There was never a "Nunu should be banned" state in ranked - he hasn't received changes in forever, and he is never banned now and almost never picked.  So I don't see why there would be a magical time when he was a must ban champion for like a week.

I think that you probably overinterpreted some noise and got a bit excited.  But the Nunu movement just wasn't a big thing - he got a tiny surge when he was kind of popular during NA LCS playoffs IIRC.  So the Nunu surge should be in early September, but there is just nothing there in the stats in hindsight.  People went the other way and instead of playing support junglers, they went with damage junglers (Kha, FF WW, etc).

PROVE IT

I'm not motivated or inclined, but I described in detail what happened.  Prove me wrong if you can/want.  If you just disagree, then that's fine. Not a big deal to me.

You can condense my thoughts re: stats pretty easily though.  I think its worth paying attention to changes in win/pick/ban rate.  If you don't have an answer for why those increases/decreases are occurring, then find out.  If you don't know why kass had a huge ban rate, find out.  If you happen to be fortunate enough to be skilled with a champ when they see a win rate increase, then work it. 

Thinking about things this much occurs because I like analyzing data and am a bit of nerd/fan of lol.  I like putting thought into these things. I don't claim to come up with the right conclusion all the time, but I do explain my thoughts as best I can. 

I think its a good habit for folks like us to pay attention to these trends.  Always good imo to figure out why someone is op.  If I say, yeah, trist is op - its good to know why.  It's even better to know why before she's banned.  And if you happen to know why before she's banned and you know how to play her, well - play her and profit.  You don't get free elo, but you likely obtain an advantage. Take it all with a grain of salt, but take a look and then I'd argue to broaden your skill level with additional champs.

I like arguing too. Everybody is op all the time. Love plat swan.