Riot Games announces League of Legends esports Global Power Rankings

Game developer Riot Games has announced a new global ranking system for League of Legends, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology.

The Global Power Rankings aims to rank all teams from tier-one League of Legends competitions and leagues worldwide.

The ranking will be decided based on an ELO-like model. according to the release, the model will not only judge the performances of the team but also the strength of the region that the team is from. Riot Games has referred to this as ‘a blended Elo metric’, which creates a weighted average between a team’s Elo and the league’s Elo.

The Power Score formula has weighted the team Elo at 80% and league Elo at 20%.

Unlike many ranking systems from other esports titles, the League of Legends ranking aims to update after every game in a series of matches. This means that Riot Games will take into account every game played during a regional split or international event as part of the ranking.

Another feature that Riot Games has announced is ‘Contextualised Match Weighting (K Factors)’ which determines how certain competitions are weighted in the ranking. As a result international events are valued higher than regional events and knockout matches carry more significance than group-stage matches.

The Global Power Rankings also has the ability to predict match outcomes. According to a release, this has been thoroughly tested with results indicating a ‘strong correlation between expected and actual outcomes.’

The final feature announced is an evaluation for League Elo (three years) and Team Elo (two years). This is an attempt to balance the system when it comes to roster changes and to ensure a large sample of international matches.

There is no official roadmap for the rankings, but in its announcement the company stated it was already looking at what future features could be added. This includes incorporating in-game stats, having player-based power rankings and ‘exploring more granular K-factors’ to refine the system’s accuracy all being listed.

League of Legends is not the first esports title to have a dedicated ranking for its esports ecosystem with Valve having its own CS2 rankings alongside rankings from news and coverage site HLTV.org.

The Global Power Rankings’ first real test is set to take place this month as it will be consistently updated after every day of play from the League of Legends World Championship 2024.