Full warding data for Worlds Group Stage

This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

Throughout the World Championships we have seen more and more stats used by the casters, with a key one being warding. So, to help provide this information to the public we put together a breakdown of warding by Players, Teams, and a look at 'Vision Control'.

Riot provides us with 4 points of raw data. Wards placed, Wards killed, Sight Wards Bought, and Vision Wards Bought. In an effort to make them more refined we took each of these stats and made them into "per average game", which means we made them "per minute" stats then multiplied by the average game time (37.26 min), so that teams with longer duration games or teams who have played tiebreaker matches don't get an artificial inflation.

Note: placing more wards doesn't always lead to the most effective use of wards.

Team by Team Warding Ranking

First a look at the general ranking of each team in the 4 major ward categories, with a slight sorting rank at the end. For each section we will put together a few conclusions or interesting facts that we found in this data.

Conclusions:

• The top 3 teams in the "Total Rank" Sort are all Korean teams, reaffirming the idea that Korea values vision more heavily. However, vision alone doesn't win games as the second rated region would be EU who did not get great results in the group stage.
• China looked to be the worst region in terms of vision with notable exception of OMG who placed pretty high. A lot of this was on the back of Dada777 who placed the 2nd most wards (behind Yellowstar) and killed the 3rd most wards.
• LMQ as well landed near the bottom of this chart with an overall weak standing on vision. This is probably due to their teamfight focus over rotations, as we noted in the Thorin's Theories.
• Fnatic was the highest non-korean team almost all off the back of Yellowstar who had the most placed wards of any player and most wards killed of any player. The rest of his team had middling or weak rankings.
• C9 has the 14th on wards placed and generally weak in all categories except for 1st in wards killed, bringing this idea that they get early sweepers and focus on vision denial rather than getting vision to open pathways.

Warding Distribution Between Roles

• One thing to keep in mind is that there is a big difference between wards placed and wards bought because every support gets sightstone and quite often junglers get sightstone as well.
• Also in Worlds we have seen a more heavy sweeper trinket trend than we did earlier in the year, so quite often at ~15 minutes we'll see 4 sweeper lenses. Leading to less trinket placements than you would expect (47% of wards placed by top laners were sight wards, 52% for mid).
• As expected support dominated most fields as their role is key to vision; however, one interesting thing was the distribution of vision wards. With 3-5 wards commonly on the map for a team at any given time I expected the distribution to be more even, but it is still just as dominated by supports as wards placed.
• Out of all the sections "Wards Killed" is the most equally distributed which makes sense because teams typically clear wards and progress vision together as a team, something important to remember in solo Q (protect your support)!

Player by Player Ranking

• Yellowstar along with being noted as a strong player brought a lot of wards to the table, as he was at ~37% above the average support.
• LemonNation on the other hand had the least wards for a support which we will see a trend in these lists, he was at ~25% below average.
• AHQ Prydz placed a lot of wards for a top laner, largely due to buying a lot of green wards, as he led all players in Sight Wards Bought per Minute.
• TSM Amazing had the most wards placed but this more attributed to the fact that he played Lee Sin in 5 of his 6 games, Lee Sin had 31 average wards placed per game, almost 50% above the average jungler.

• Wards Killed per Game we see a more diverse role distribution as at Worlds vision control was more often than not a team effort, with supports rarely clearing wards on their lonesome, and most teams switching to 3-5 sweepers by the 15 min mark.
• NaJin White Shield as a team stands out the most in this data, as while GorillA was 12th in wards killed the Mid, Jungle, and Top were all 1st or 2nd in the kill category, showing their clear as a team strategy.
• LemonNation was 2nd in wards killed per game despite being 16th in every other category, including vision wards bought.

• Top lane bought the most sight wards with mid slightly behind and jungle coming in third.
• 7 AD Carries at worlds didn't buy a single sight ward the entire tournament, including all western AD Carries except CandyPanda.
• With AHQ Prydz's 15 average wards per game he spent ~9% of his total gold income on wards (and would have been more gold efficient to buy a sightstone, given the item timings).

• Despite the tendency to see 3-5 vision wards active at any given time, still supports dominate the vision wards bought, getting 45% of the wards.
• The only support to get less vision wards than a team member was LemonNation, who got only 4.36 vision wards per game (about half of the average support), while Meteos got 4.51 vision wards per game.
• SSB Deft buys 2.7x the pinks of the average AD Carry

Thanks to Cuzimafish who helped us discover this data but big thanks to TinyShrimp who helped get and organize this data!