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Inspiration
Embarking on this journey as a lone enthusiast, my inspiration was fueled by a passion for esports and a vision to make it more accessible and understandable to a wider audience. League of Legends, while immensely popular, is intrinsically complex and often daunting for newcomers and casual followers to fully grasp in terms of competitive play and team rankings.
I aimed to demystify the global rankings, crafting a method that, while robust and reflective of the game's complexities, is also intuitive and easy to comprehend. In doing so, my goal was to broaden the appeal of esports, allowing more people to appreciate the strategic depth and competitive brilliance of League of Legends without feeling overwhelmed by the intricacies of its professional scene.
"Money is all you need" was born out of this inspiration, embodying a vision of simplicity and clarity in understanding the global prowess of LoL Esports teams, making the esports scene more approachable and engaging for everyone.
What it does
"Money is all you need" is a powerful yet intuitive ranking system meticulously designed to evaluate League of Legends Esports teams globally. The process starts by establishing a base ranking, focusing on the sum of gold differences from each team's last 30 games. This approach ensures the rankings are reflective of recent performances, adapting to the game’s ever-evolving nature and patches.
The base rankings then undergo a transformative process, where multipliers are applied to refine and adjust the team scores further. The multipliers are calculated using the formula:
Multiplier=(1+(winrate−0.5))2
Teams without international exposure receive a default multiplier of 0.3. These multipliers play a pivotal role, ensuring that the rankings are balanced and accurately represent the teams' international performance levels, allowing for a fair comparison across various regions and competitive environments.
Tournament Rankings
For tournament-specific rankings, the system focuses on the final day, tailoring the rankings based on the participating teams and the data available up to that specific date. This ensures that the tournament rankings are current, relevant, and reflective of the teams’ most recent performances and adaptations.
Global Rankings
The global rankings offer a broader perspective, allowing for rankings to be generated on any given date within the available data. This feature ensures that the global rankings remain dynamic, up-to-date, and an accurate reflection of the global competitive landscape in real-time.
Team Rankings
Team rankings offer a more tailored analysis, providing rankings for a specified list of teams. Like the global rankings, team rankings can be generated for any given date, ensuring a focused and specific evaluation, providing a detailed perspective on the selected teams' competitive standings and performance trajectories.
The culmination of these features and methodologies results in a ranking system that is not only robust and accurate but also clear, accessible, and reflective of the true competitive standings in the international League of Legends Esports scene.
How i built it
The foundation of "Money is all you need" started with the base script provided by Riot Games. Adaptations were made to this script, tuning it meticulously to focus on downloading specific in-game data, primarily centered around gold information, along with essential mapping data. This approach was strategic, aiming to hone in on the most relevant information necessary for building meaningful rankings.
The data acquisition process was substantial, consuming around 30 hours to accumulate all the necessary game data. Armed with this rich dataset, the next phase involved joining and consolidating the data, ensuring a cohesive and comprehensive data structure. This meticulous data preparation laid the groundwork for the subsequent steps, ensuring that the rankings would be built upon accurate and insightful data.
For the construction of the rankings, AWS SageMaker emerged as the tool of choice. Using a Jupyter notebook within SageMaker, I embarked on the journey of crafting the ranking algorithm and methodology. Alongside, AWS S3 storage played a crucial role, housing the voluminous game data securely and efficiently, ensuring that it was readily accessible for processing and analysis.
The synergy of these technologies and tools, coupled with a clear vision and strategic data processing, facilitated the creation of the "Money is all you need" ranking system, showcasing the capability to execute a robust project single-handedly with precision and innovation.
Challenges i ran into
Navigating through this project was a journey filled with learning curves and hurdles. One of the most substantial challenges faced was in the realm of data processing. The act of joining data, particularly relating to tournaments, proved to be a daunting task. Tournaments housed pivotal information that was integral to creating a meaningful ranking system, but the complexity of the data structure, including nested elements, added layers of difficulty to the process. Unraveling this intricacy required a significant amount of effort and strategic problem-solving.
Moreover, the journey with AWS presented its own set of challenges. Acclimating to AWS's environment and services was a learning process, filled with moments of trial and error. However, amidst these challenges, AWS SageMaker emerged as a beacon of user-friendliness and functionality, facilitating a smoother experience in building and executing the ranking system.
Each challenge encountered was not merely a hurdle but a valuable lesson that contributed to the growth and refinement of the project, ultimately leading to a more robust and resilient ranking system. Through perseverance and a problem-solving mindset, the obstacles were navigated successfully, paving the way for the realization of "Money is all you need."
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm incredibly proud of developing a ranking system that stands resilient in the face of international disparities in gameplay and competition levels. Despite teams playing the same game but at varying degrees of mastery and style, "Money is all you need" has succeeded in delivering rankings that are both accurate and universally applicable.
Central to this achievement is the system’s simplicity, focusing predominantly on teams' gold information. This streamlined approach has not only upheld the integrity of the rankings but also made them easily comprehensible, fulfilling my vision of making esports more accessible.
The integration of multipliers, based on regional and individual international performances, has been instrumental. This feature has fine-tuned the rankings, ensuring they are balanced, fair, and reflective of the actual global standings despite the intrinsic challenges posed by the diverse and multifaceted international esports landscape.
What i learned
Participating in this hackathon has been a monumental journey of learning and discovery, especially as it was my very first hackathon. The experience was both challenging and exhilarating, pushing me to navigate the complexities of vast datasets and develop a nuanced ranking system from scratch.
One significant lesson was understanding the intricacies involved in handling and processing large volumes of data. Extracting essential information, ensuring its relevance and accuracy, and synthesizing it into a coherent and functional ranking system was a Herculean task, filled with valuable learning moments.
Balancing this project was particularly challenging as I was concurrently working on my master’s thesis on an entirely different topic. Managing both commitments demanded meticulous planning, adaptability, and perseverance.
Despite these challenges, the hackathon was incredibly rewarding. It was a playground for learning, experimenting, and growing, allowing me to delve deep into the realms of data manipulation and analysis in esports, enhancing my practical skills and knowledge.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate in this hackathon. The experience has been enriching, filled with moments of triumph, learning, and immense personal and professional growth.
What's next for Money is all you need
Looking ahead, there are avenues to explore and potentials to unlock for "Money is all you need." One intriguing possibility is the integration of machine learning models to enhance the ranking system further. Initially, the idea of incorporating machine learning was considered, but the emphasis on explainability and clarity in the ranking methodology took precedence.
Maintaining a system that is comprehensible and transparent was crucial to meet the project’s objectives and requirements. However, with the foundation now solidly established, venturing into machine learning presents an exciting opportunity to explore new dimensions, bringing additional layers of sophistication and predictive power to the rankings.
While the integration of machine learning models holds promise, careful consideration will be given to ensure that the system maintains its essence of clarity and explainability. The goal will always be to foster a ranking system that is not only robust and accurate but also accessible and easy to understand for the broader esports community. Thus, the journey ahead for "Money is all you need" is filled with possibilities, exploration, and continuous improvement.
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