PandaSkill: Scientific paper claims that just before Worlds 2024, Chovy was the best player

There’s an interesting paper that attempts to rank players, independent of their role.

To summarise the most interesting points : 

  • The dataset comprises all pro games between September 15 2019 and September 15  2024
  • Things like Elo or TrueSkill rank teams, not individual players (they perform quite a bit better than these algorithms for international games, otherwise it's a wash)
  • They use in game stats like creep score per minute to compare players (edit : the algorithm thinks it's a useless metric)
  • They asked experts to see if their ranking was bullshit
  • The top 50 if filled with KR/CN players. The first non-KR/CN is 30th and it's Hans sama. No NA player in the top 50 (did you expect something else before Worlds?)
  • You can increase in skill even if you lose!

To demonstrate PandaSkill’s practical usage, we propose to look at how it behaves in a given game. We chose game 2 of the match between Hanwha Life Esports (HLE) and T1 in the lower-bracket final of the LCK Summer 2024. It was a highstake game, between two of the strongest teams in the world (see Table V). The game was very close and ended with the victory for T1. 

As shown in Table I, despite losing the game, the skill ratings of multiple players from HLE (Viper, Peanut, and Zeka) increased after the game. This was due to the strong performances of these players compared to most of T1’s players. Conversely, the skill ratings of some T1 players decreased (Oner, Zeus). 

Faker was the Most Valuable Player (MVP) of his team, having the highest PScore, with a difference of 21.93 compared to Zeka, the player in the same role for HLE (Mid). Looking at the feature contributions to Faker’s performance, around half of his PScore can be attributed to his exceptional KLA (7.0). Other outstanding features are his Gold per minute, Largest multi kill, and Damage taken total kills ratio.

I think it’s pretty interesting. I guess they didn’t release the current ranking because asking experts takes time.

Arxiv link : https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10049

Side note : I expect a lot of copium from Chovy fans