Two days ago, Riot announced a new metric they created to chart in their words: “the people who make the best use of their champions damage potential”. Damage percentage and damage per minute already exist as counting stats, but the new damage rating takes very basic stats and helps draw a more in-depth conclusion. The newly invented metric attempts to show how good or bad a player is at dealing damage in a certain scenario compared to expectations. Fan reaction took the fairly simple conclusion Riot drew and flattened it out to a base level, to the point of wrongly disparaging Cloud9 mid laner Jensen.

The Danish mid is having an outstanding individual season and is almost a shoo-in for a top three MVP placing, but when the damage rating came out that showed Jensen in only fourth place at his position, fans were up in arms. Fans took this metric to showcase that his season isn’t worth the hype and that he’s not as good as proclaimed. The argument for this is that his damage rating is worse than Bjergsen and two other mid laners, one (Froggen) on a far worse team and another (Huhi) who has been regarded as a worse individual mid for two years. With this single metric being released by Riot it garnered a lot of attention, but the fans who reacted in this way were ignorant of a basic principle of sports statistics: They typically show a lot, but they never show everything and what they don’t show is vital to a full understanding.

The new damage rating uses a large amount of variables and due to this it is effectively useless at setting out what it wants to do: chart the people who make the best use of their champions damage potential. Riot never released the algorithm, but they stated they used parts of the below stats to reach their conclusion:

Damage per minute

Proximity to enemy champions

Champions played

Winning or losing

All of these stats are highly dependent on other variables and almost entirely useless individually. For example, damage per minute is dependent on game times, champion choices, and team play styles among a host of other variables. A mid laner on a team that picks Corki often, team fights frequently, and goes to 40 plus minutes every other game is inherently going to have an extremely high damage per minute.

The new damage rating takes individual stats that are near-meaningless on their own and combines them to form an in-depth conclusion, a conclusion that is empty and led to a toxic discussion regarding the greatness of Jensen’s split. There are many ways we can discuss whether his split lives up to the constant hype, but damage rating isn’t the path to go down.

Damage percentage and damage per minute at least give us counting statistics while damage rating gives us nothing. It is a vaguely relevant ranking that is inferior to the eye test of a qualified analyst due to the lacking information the metric is created with. To truly quantify how great a player is at outputting damage, you need to know a host of other variables that are unfortunately not quantifiable currently such as positioning throughout the map and target prioritization in team fight.

In spite of the inability to calculate complex gameplay and the resulting low quality discussions surrounding Jensen, well thought out advanced statistics and basic counting stats absolutely have their place in competitive discussions. These can all help push, destroy, or create narrative. For instance, this split in NA LCS, Team EnVyUs ADC Apollo was regarded as one of the top individual laners after it was pointed out he had the best CS differential at ten minutes. It was a surprising revelation given Apollo’s lukewarm performances throughout his career (+0.7, -4.4, -0.3 CSD@10 in his three prior splits), but if you look just past the statistic you can spot some context to explain: NV support Hakuho’s own phenomenal play.

Supports traditionally dictate laning phase, but because statistics lack context, it’s easy to heap praise on Apollo for his impressive laning. Just as there’s no way to show how good or bad a player is at dealing damage, there is also no statistic that shows how great of a laner a support is. Less-than-hardcore fans rely on stats to form their opinion of players and due to the lack of support stats, it’s tough for those types of fans to discern good and bad support laning. As is the only way to get a grasp on how good or bad a support is in lane is through the eye test, which only create gulfs in perception between more hardcore fans and more casual fans.

Hopefully as Riot pursues statistics at a more in-depth level, the less-than-hardcore fans will have a greater understanding and literacy, and learn that statistics aren’t everything. They never tell the full story, but they can be powerful tools in fueling community perception of players and can shape entire narratives. Damage rating isn’t a good first outing and the fan reaction was wildly off the mark, but more data should help teams reach greater heights and more attempts by Riot to invent advanced statistics should increase community literacy.