Usability and Game Analytics

Understanding UX

Abstract

This paper investigates telemetry analysis and UX study for League of Legends by Riot Games. “Do beginner players understand the recall mechanic?” “Does getting match first’s such as first blood, help the team in winning a match?”. This paper uses telemetry analysis and discovered that destroying the first tower in a match gives the team a 93.3% chance in winning the game. A small UX study has found that New players to League of Legends do not use the recall effectively sometimes forgetting to use the mechanic until they are already halfway back through traversing under normal means. Unfortunately the UX study was quite small and further study needs to take place.

Above you can see the graphs generated through Pandas of the data I have generated looking at the correlation between boss kills and win percentages.

Conclusions

In conclusion does getting the match first’s help the team in winning the match? Yes, when it comes down to getting the first tower destroyed the team has 93.3% chance in winning the match this is most likely due to a feedback loop starting and pushing the opposing team back as they try to regain control of the map. Looking at the other figures it would not be in the team’s best interest to aim for getting those firsts. Of course, getting the Rift Harold first has a high percentage to win the match at 83.7% but this boss does not appear until later into the game and the team that kills the Rift Harold is most likely already at an advantage.
In regard to the UX study “Is the recall mechanic being used and understood by beginners?” yes, new users do use the recall mechanic but may also forget that it is there to be used. For it being used effectively, from this small study it shows that some beginner players are not using it as effective as others, but further studies need to be made and looking into the telemetry data could help in further studies of this mechanic.
Further work needs to be made on both the telemetry study and the UX study, further digging and correlations can help further the answer for getting match first’s and the UX study needed more participants of different skill levels to make more comparisons and to help concrete the theory further.

If you wish to read more on this project you can take a further look at my full paper here.