The Problem with ‘Power Rankings’

People are always going to argue and disagree over anything claiming to accurately place teams in order of strength. With League of Legends ‘Power Rankings’ however, this seems to go a step further.

Let me explain.

In my mind, to do any list of this sort, you need to clearly define your criteria. Ranking teams is meaningless unless you are able to explain why they justify that position in your list. Do you have to be 100% correct in your assertions? No. But at least people will be able to see your reasoning, no matter what they feel about the conclusions that you’ve made.

To give an example, Thorin regularly produces a CS:GO top 10 teams in the World, in which he always explains which factors his lists are predicated on. If I find myself disagreeing with a placement, I can usually find within the article why he has at least made that decision.

The latest:

http://www.goldper10.com/article/3074-thorins-csgo-top-10-world-rankings-27th-january-2016.html

He suggests that this list is placing particular weight on offline performance. This immediately answer questions from fans who might be up in arms because NiP played really well in some online tournament, therefore justifying their placement in this context.

There has been a lot of discussion lately around both the lolesports Power Ranking and also the ESPN Power Rankings. There seem to be 2 schools of thought relating to both of these lists. Firstly that these are subjective lists based on the relative strength of the teams as perceived by the authors of said lists. The second is the idea that actually the rankings are based purely on win/loss record.

Let me tackle the latter first. This is something that has been suggested, and an argument that members of the community have also used to justify/defend these lists.

“Why are you complaining that team X is above team Y? It’s not the author’s fault if team Y hasn’t won as many games as team X!”.

This suggestion would hold up if it were not for the fact that having such a list which simply states the records of the teams would be pretty pointless. More importantly though, this is categorically not the case. Let’s take a look at ESPN’s list.

http://espn.go.com/esports/story/_/id/14701315/league-legends-global-power-rankings-week-3

Clearly some teams with worse records are above others with superior records. SKT for example has a record of 3 wins 2 losses, which statistically is inferior to G2’s 5 wins to 1 loss. Now, why has this happened? Is it because Korea is regarded as a stronger region than EU? Is it because even in victory, G2 has shown more weaknesses than SKT? Either way, it doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s clearly not a list solely crafted on the individual records of the teams. So can we please as a community get that out of our heads?

These are subjective lists that need clearer criteria. Whenever someone creates such a list, they should be brave enough to stand behind their opinion and not leave the criteria open to interpretation so as to avoid criticism. I am not saying that this is definitely what has happened here, just that while your criteria is ambiguous, this is a fair suggestion at least to make.

TL,DL Define your criteria so that people actually know what they are looking at.