Two things separate a Challenger player from a Bronze one on this chart, and only one of them is a skill.
Earlier today Elophant released this chart on the relationship between warding, ping, and where a player sits in each tier:
Top panel: wards purchased per player by tier, broken into total wards, Sight Wards and Vision Wards. Bottom panel: average ping by tier, falling from about 89ms in Unranked and Bronze to about 27ms in Challenger.
The first panel is hardly surprising. The more you ward, the less likely it is that an enemy champion ganks you, snowballs off it, and wins the game. What is easier to miss is that even between Diamond and Challenger there is a clear gap in how many pink wards get bought.
The second panel is the more interesting one, because it is a correlation between ping and rank. Does that really imply everyone in Challenger lives on the west coast next to the Riot servers? Worth thinking about.
Personally I think anything under 80 is perfectly playable, and even 120 will do in a pinch. Anything more and you are at a disadvantage. Apparently sub-30ms is the way to go in Challenger, though.
Internet + Wards = Elo?
Reading this in 2026. Three things have moved since this chart was made. Elophant, the stats site that produced it, no longer serves anything. The two ward types on that top panel are gone from Summoner's Rift under those names: the Sight Ward is now the free Stealth Ward trinket, and the 125 gold Vision Ward is the 75 gold Control Ward, with the originals surviving only inside League of Legends Classic. And the ladder the chart sorts by has grown: it uses six ranked tiers, Bronze through Challenger, where the ladder now runs ten tiers deep, so "Diamond" here covers a wider slice of players than the same word does today. The ping argument is the part that has aged best, and it is worked through properly in Does Ping Change Which Champion You Should Play?, which uses this same chart.
large discrepancy between diamond and challenger? .3, .4 isn't a massive different. Its the difference of the support buying about 1 more pink ward which could come more to game duration more so then anything.
ReplyDeleteThis hows that ping has creates a larger discrepancy between players with a 30ms difference between diamond and challenger. That data is probably skewed however due to professional teams who make up the majority of challenger tier move to gaming houses closer to the servers while diamond/plat players are more often regular people who just play where they live so that end data (that is, challenger ping) hold very little value.
The ward data but, it shows that bronze and silver both have the idea of using wards, but need more practice utilizing wards rather then just buying. A ward is only as useful as the vision is grants, that vision is naught if the player doesn't check the mini map (I had a Nunu walk right through my ward the other day, didn't even know he was there until he was on my screen, my ward only aided me by maybe .2seconds rather then me spotting him several seconds earlier).
This data needs to be used to show low elo players (like my self) that wards are powerful tools, but must be used correctly and as the OddOne always gets mad about, players need to constantly watch their minimap! Wards don't help you much if you don't watch your minimap.
i get between 180-200+ ping :/ I live in Jamaica, so I'm way way out from the US west coast. they should set up a florida server, or even a new york one; most times I'm even disconnected from pvp.net client chat, which means i can't invite nor be invited to games, No duo queue for me, I can't even see or talk in lobby or end game chat, which means people tend to bitch about lanes they call even though i try to pick around the champs i see selected, I just have to assume where each person will go with the present composition and pick to match that.
ReplyDeleteI don't lag though, very occasionally i might have in game disconnects, but everything else runs fine.
ReplyDeleteIn b4... Canada, NA East and NA West servers for ping.
ReplyDeleteI'm getting into the habit of minimap watching.
Even in practice AI games when I can "relax", I still buy wards to help me budget my gold.
Ask and Australian we have been saying this about our ping disadvantage for years, now we have a server close to home it should be better.
ReplyDeleteCan't you get low ping even if you live on the east coast?
ReplyDeleteThey did. The Latinamerican North servers are currently in Florida. I went from 180 constant ping to 58, and I live in Puerto Rico, not so far from you. Transfer is free at the moment.
ReplyDeletePlayers who play league competitively tend to have better equipment and therefore lower ping.
ReplyDeletePlayers who play league casually tend to not have god-tier equipment and therefore tend to have higher pings.
The pings are not what exclusively distinguish between platinum players or bronze players; the graph simply illustrates that at higher tiers, players are more skilled, focus more on gaming, and invest more in their gaming experience.
As a network technician and specialist for a Tier 1 ISP in the United States, you are incorrect.
ReplyDeleteIf you gave me 200,000 dollars in cash for me to spend ENTIRELY on my computer, network service, network card, etc, I would only lower my ping from 85 (what it is on the east coast for me now) to 78. There is a hard floor on latency since it is basically the speed data can be transmitted. The speed of light traveling through predetermined 'wires' that consumers in the US use can only go so fast. There is literally no way for me to lower my ping below that, other than constructing a 1:1 Fiber Optic cable (which would cost millions) or simply moving.
Ping is all about location, not gear. I can pay 10 dollars a month for the cheapest service here, or 299.99 per month for the best tier 1 Fiber Optic, it won't matter. I will only be paying for better bandwidth and DL/UL. My ping will be around the same.
Ping is a crucial factor in reaction time, and although gamesense is the most important factor (I.e. anyone can hit challenger even with 180 ping etc), it is indeed a great factor.
No but everyone says if riot ads more ram to their servers my ping will go down.. /s
ReplyDeleteshort answer is no. The servers are on west coast. data needs to travel all the way there if thats the only server location.
ReplyDeleteToo bad Riot is too greedy to make East Coast servers. They ended up making even more servers in the west when their ping was perfectly fine. And you know what ping I've been playing at for the entire time? Over 110, and the occasional spikes aren't helping. I'm considering moving to Dota 2 at this rate since there's no love for the East Coast from this company.
ReplyDeleteI know they've been saying they're "working" on it, but that doesn't mean anything. They say it's on their sights, but you know what they're really thinking? How to make as much money as they can from each skin they try to sell.
im just going to put my 300 ping average here... yeah... at least you have a server on the same sub-continent, east asia gets no love.
ReplyDeleteI'm from Brasil and i play with 20 ms all day long.
ReplyDelete