Two champions are similar in Winrate when their average games produce similar numbers: 43 stats per game, averaged per champion and compared within a role. No model is trained.
How it is computed
- Sample. One match in 50 from patch 16.13, every region, no rank filter: 2,947,600 player-games, each one player's side of one match.
- Measure. Each player-game becomes 43 numbers, grouped in the table below.
- Standardize. Each stat is rescaled to mean 0 and standard deviation 1 across the sample, so a stat counted in thousands weighs the same as a fraction.
- Average. A champion's profile is the average of its games.
- Compare. The score is the cosine between two profiles: 1 when the champions differ from the average game in the same way, 0 when they share nothing, negative when they differ in opposite ways. Each champion keeps its top five among champions with the same most-played role.
Damage means damage to champions.
The stats leave out win rate, items, runes, abilities and Riot's class tags. Thresh and Blitzcrank match on how their games go. Nothing in the data says both have a hook.
Current examples
The last row is the champion whose best match scores lowest: a list always has five names, however low the scores. Over all pairs of champions, the average score is about 0.
Where it shows up
- Champion pages. Five icons in the header and a list on the How to play tab, with scores as percentages: .95 reads 95%.
- Player profiles. A champion opened on the Champions tab shows which of its five the player also plays, with their win rate on each.
- Search. A champion's preview has a "Plays like" row.
- Draft Assistant. Its models use their own clusters: profiles like these, grouped by k-means into 8 broad and 20 narrower groups and fixed when the models were trained.
What it can't tell you
- Whether your skill carries over. The method never looks at who plays what.
- Strength. A similar champion can be weak on the current patch.
- Flex picks. A champion has one profile across every role and rank it is played in, compared only within its most-played role.
- Anything after patch 16.13. The profiles are a snapshot. Later reworks and meta shifts are missing until they are recomputed.
The current profiles have two known flaws. Where deaths happen is stored twice, so it counts double. Games that ended before minute 30 count as zero gold and damage there, so the scaling stats partly measure game length. Both are fixed in the code for the next recompute.
