A good morning might involve a cup of coffee and an open seat on the metro. It might also mean not waking up at all, or it might mean your little demon cat rubbing against you and purring. A good game of League of Legends is usually a win, or maybe you have a good score line, or maybe it was super back-and-forth and you just had a lot of fun. To one person, going 10-0 but losing is good, and to someone else, going 0-10 but losing is good. It is rarely a science when we say something is “good.” 

Even in sports, where super advanced metrics have been developed to score athletes, there is contention. One person might see Russell Westbrook as a supreme talent, and another might see him as completely overrated. And this is with access to some of the most advanced statistical approaches to a game in the world. How, then, when we look at League of Legends, a game that constantly changes its very core between weeks, and changes its variables from game-to-game, does anyone reasonably say who is good or who is bad? 

Here is a statistical look at six different mid laners from after Week 6:

At a glance, it is essentially impossible to identify which player is which — but you might think to say someone who is ranked highly across the board here is more likely to be “good” and someone who ranks lowly is not. By this logic, 1, 4, and 6 are likely to be better players than 2, 3, and 5 — they are Crown (1), Nisqy (4), and Bjergsen (6) respectively, and then Damonte (2), Jensen (3), and Pobelter (5). But the problem with zoning in too much on stats is that these numbers favor teams that are winning — you are more likely to do more damage when you win fights, for example. Your KDA is better. You have more opportunities to fight. 

Additionally, these stats won’t tell you is how likely a team is to send their jungler to mid lane, or their support to mid lane. Or how often they are split pushing in end game or how often their team plays team fighting comps. It won’t tell you what types of champions they like to pick — are they picking aggressive champions to win lane, or are they picking safer champions to survive lane so that another lane can get going? Are these players’ side lanes winning lane, too? Or is the whole map losing? 

So, of course the stats don’t tell the full story. But there are things we could infer if we looked at them alongside games. To me, they serve more as maps or guides on how to watch a team play. For Jensen, for example, he’s basically at the bottom of the league for Kill Participation, but I don’t think anyone in their right mind would call him a bad player. So you might see that and think they’re just sending him to the side lanes more often end game, or that they are generating a lot of early kills elsewhere (like bot lane) that skews that number. Conversely, Pobelter is #2 in that category, which could mean FLY is unable to generate kills unless he’s part of the play, or it could mean he’s always grouped with his team. 

Somewhere in this storm of numbers, you might be able to come up with a personal evaluation system. You might look at all of Nisqy’s games and determine whether he was good or not based on whether or not he did what he was supposed to do given the circumstances of the champion picks and how the teams were playing around him. But that evaluation might differ from someone else who is looking at another thing entirely. And in either case it’s not an easy thing to derive from looking at stats. So I asked a couple of pros at Rift Rivals this year what “good” was for them. 

Nukeduck, Origen’s mid laner in the LEC, said, “The obvious ones are reaction times and skill shot accuracy. With Caps — he has that — but you will also see that he knows [the game] very well. The thing with him is it’s not all his mechanics that make him stand out like that. He’s also very, very smart and he understands the champions he’s playing against very well, and he knows the damage very well, so that’s why it looks like he plays very well.” 

Which is a thing that’s super hard to judge as a spectator — beyond our eye test or deep dives into numbers, there’s pro player perceptions as well. I mean, how do we actually tell if someone has good reaction time? You could go through and check for skill shot accuracy, but then you’d also have to differentiate missing ones that matter (in close team fights) and ones that don’t (shooting an Ezreal ult across the map). But for many pros, their answer for whether someone is good or not generally comes down to a “feel” thing. They just know, instinctively, when someone is good or not (to them).

Caps, G2 Esports’ mid laner, told me, “Players can never be defined by one play or one game.” As spectators, we have a tendency to make a lot of snap judgments. You only see 18 games from players in the regular season, but teams might practice between 6 and 10 games a day — pros are just privy to information that we are not (though that doesn’t make them right or wrong). 

He adds, “People do a lot of good things and I think it’s not necessarily doing good things that define a player. It’s not just [avoiding] mistakes either. Ideally you want a player who does good things and no mistakes, but these kinds of players don’t exist. You kind of want a mix of doing really good things and doing as few mistakes as possible.”

He had a bit more trouble explaining what exactly he meant by “good,” but it felt to me very much like an instinctual thing for him. Caps is, of course, one of the best players in the world and is renowned for the whole Craps or Caps coinflip-type of performances where he sometimes plays like the best player in the world and sometimes he feeds the other team like he is a chef. What we do know is a good player must make more good plays than they make mistakes — both of which aren’t super easy to quantify. This is why we have a tendency to tie results (stat lines, wins and losses, etc.) to whether a player is good or not. 

But with Pro View, we have more access to how a pro plays than ever. This is what Nukeduck told me with regards to what to look for when watching the PoV of a pro player: “First is your visuals — when you see something, how fast can you react to it? It’s also how well you are moving your champion to each side. For example, when you want [your character to move], it’s much better to click really close to your character, and if you want to switch direction, then you just move your mouse a little bit and click the other direction. That’s something you can look for — if someone is going really far away from their character and clicking, that can be a [bad] tell. How many times you click is also something. It’s harder to hit someone who is always moving. A lot of skillshots are not actually dodgeable if they are aimed perfectly in the middle of the character, but the trick is to always move so he can’t aim perfectly on your character. It’s much harder to dodge a skillshot if you stand still and then once he throws it, you start moving, as opposed to if you are always moving and he can’t aim it perfectly. That’s why it’s important to click a lot of times so he can’t aim properly.”

I found this to be a super interesting answer and it is very much tied to perceptions of what a “mechanically good” player might look like. Mechanics is another thing that is kind of hard to define, but it’s a word that is thrown out frequently by analysts, pros, fans, etc. I think by and large fans tie that to two things. First is how often a player makes majorly noticeable gaffes (missing an Orianna ultimate, Flashing into a wall) or outplays (Flashing a Malphite ultimate, the Captain Jack QSS). Second is numerical things like how much CS they have compared to their opponent, which like I mentioned earlier is affected by factors outside of a player’s immediate control. I think the first one is a more interesting way to think about this — do they hit the abilities they need to hit in the correct order? Do they take kills when the margin is there for them to do it, or do they back down because they don’t have confidence in their own power? 

And then you also have to factor in how often a player is in the right place on the map at the right time. If that is a macro decision or something more tied to, say, game sense, then how is that affecting their mechanical ability? If you are often in the wrong place at the wrong time, then it’s going to make your mechanics look bad because you start from a disadvantageous position. Conversely, being in the right place at the right time could make your mechanics look better. Is it poor mechanics for a jungler to miss Smite, or is it poor macro decision to allow the other team to even have a shot at it? These things are of course all tied together — a good player needs to have good game sense (being in the right place at the right time) and then they need to be the proverbial horse that drinks the water. They need to land their abilities.

All of this is to say that it is very difficult to say with any sort of definitive confidence that a player is good or bad based on just the numbers. Again, winning teams will have good stats and their players, across the board, will look better. And losing teams the reverse — the times we might highlight a good player on a bad team are when they have good stat lines or perhaps if they manage to complete a flashy play. You can pass the stats test but fail the eye test (or vice versa), and you could pass both of these tests and other pro players still might not think very highly of you. I think we’ve all played with that one Rengar (it is always Rengar) that has a lot of kills but then you lose the game anyway — getting kills or having individual popoff plays doesn’t mean you are actually winning, and if your style is not contributing to wins, then are you actually good?

Honestly, I don’t have a good (heh) answer to that. Muse as I might (and I have here), for me personally it is undeniably a gut feeling which is affected by all of the above. I am by nature drawn to the flashy plays, and I am more apt to judge player for making a big mistake. I am lured in by narratives that I like — I may be, for example, more sympathetic to Rookie’s mistake because I enjoyed something he said in an interview. It might affect how good I think he is. If there is such a thing as completely objective analysis for what is good or not, I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet. And honestly I hope we never do. I hope we continue to disagree on the criteria that qualifies someone as good or not. It is not a science nor is it a feeling — it’s something in between that space that’s founded on our own principles. It is the lighthouse we are, always, sailing towards. That is what we talk about when we talk about good.