Information Cascades in Esport Drafts – “League of Legends”
References: 1) https://blogoflegends.com/2020/07/14/lcs-tsm-struggle-drafts
2) https://www.esportznetwork.com/tsm-crash-out-of-worlds-2020-with-a-winless-record
3) https://blogoflegends.com/2020/07/14/lcs-tsm-struggle-drafts
Competitive gaming was an area that nobody ever believed could exist. Fast forward to today, not only does it, but it’s thriving in 2020. Popular video games like “League of Legends”, “Fortnite”, “Valorant”, and “Rainbow Six Siege” are dominating the market as investors and business owners all around the world want to get on the hype. Esports is becoming so big that you even have music artists and NFL owners like Robert Kraft, Mark Cuban, Drake, Marshmello, Travis Scott, and so many more investing millions of dollars to secure a percentage in these growing companies. As someone who’s apart of the younger generation it makes total sense as to why it’s as big as it is – I mean who doesn’t like to play video games? For people like my parents however who grew up in a time period where it wasn’t as common or normal to “play video games professionally”, I totally understand why it wouldn’t make sense to them. The reality however is that it does exist and players are being paid upfront of millions of dollars to compete at the highest levels where millions of people tune in and watch. “League of Legends” for example just had approximately 3.9 million people tune in to watch “Worlds” this year which is a tournament that invites the best teams from each of the regions including: North America, Europe, China, Korea, and Oceania to compete for a massive prize pool and earn the title of being called the “best in the world.”
The reason behind why “League of Legends” is so entertaining to play/watch comes from the ability to draft a lineup and the strategy that’s involved in the game. In “League of Legends” every match is a 5v5 with a pick/ban phase. A pick phase works in the sense that if you have first pick, you are allowed to select any champion for your team first, and then after your turn is over, the opposing side will be allowed to select two champions. A ban phase on the other hand allows both teams a set amount of bans (5 bans each) where they are allowed to ban opponent champions. Of course just like in any regular sport, these players are going to have coaches who will be working through the draft phase to ensure that their team comes out on top.
Now while this always may be the goal, this doesn’t always occur. Coaches will often use prior matches/experiences to come up with the champions that they decide to draft, and a lot of these conclusions actually take part from watching other teams play and tryout similar compositions. While a lot of teams will try these strategies out for themselves, it’s very likely that a part of it would be missing due to the fact that other teams have already tried a similar strategy and so coaches are doing their best to modify information based on what everyone else is saying and not that of their own opinions. This is a prime example of an information cascade being formed and similarly in our class discussions, we’ve learned that this occurs when people are being influenced by the decisions and opinions of ones network.
A prime example of this happening is during the 2020 Worlds Championship, a North American team known as “TSM” – Team Solo Mid, had a 0-6 exit from Worlds. They played extremely poorly, but it didn’t help that every single game, it included a terrible draft: “Over the years, the main criticism of TSM has always been their failure to draft team compositions that would put them in a position to win.” As I had mentioned above, many coaches fall into this cascade effect where they end up drafting teams based on prior decisions made from other people. This however, isn’t to say that the coaches are even at fault because it’s extremely difficult to come out on top every single draft, but of course it is not impossible to do it. It just goes to show that amount of strategy that is being involved with this game, and how much data can factor into the decisions that these coaches are making. Sometimes your best move is indeed to go with the opinions/information received from someone else or from multiple people rather then that of your own. Unfortunately in terms of TSM’s case, in one of the worlds biggest games: League of Legends, this isn’t working, and until they are able to get out of the cascade that they are currently in, I believe this losing streak will continue.