AWS for Games Blog
How AWS Powered Global Power Rankings for LoL Esports Worlds 2024
Whether you want to see how your favorite teams are trending or you’re seeking a better understanding of the competitive landscape, Global Power Rankings is the new way to track team strength for League of Legends Esports competition. With a calculated Power Score and highlights like “Biggest Mover” and “Biggest Upset”, Global Power Rankings aim to contextualize team strength across Tier 1 Leagues.
Igniting the Worlds Excitement
It’s that time of year again, when the top League of Legends (LoL) teams around the globe compete to earn the title of “world’s best”. The League of Legends World Championship (also known as “Worlds”) is the ultimate tournament in esports, growing from humble beginnings filling out spare conference space to now selling out Olympic-sized stadiums. While thousands of fans pour into arenas, millions more watch through livestream online.
One of the things that makes Worlds so special is Riot Games’ commitment to push the boundaries of the player and fan experience. They have produced some unforgettable moments, like augmented reality (AR) K-Pop bands and even dragons flying into the arena on the livestream.
During Worlds 2023 in Seoul, South Korea, Riot teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to integrate machine learning (ML) into their broadcast stats workflow. They created the first calculated stat for esports in “Win Probability Powered by AWS”. This advanced stat, introduced by popular community demand, changed the game by providing a second-by-second prediction of the probability of which team would win. It’s been exciting to see how the stat has been used by casters, analysts, and even new LoL esports viewers to better understand the action.
But Riot and AWS are not stopping there—this year they were back with more.
Figure 1: Win Probability Powered by AWS.
Bringing Data-Driven Insights to Fans
Providing a transparent, global ranking system for LoL Esports teams has been a long-standing challenge and priority for Riot Games. As the LoL scene has grown to include top teams from around the world, there has been an increasing demand from fans and analysts to understand the relative skill levels of these teams, even when they don’t directly compete against each other. Previous ranking systems have often been opaque or subjective, leading to debates and confusion.
Partnering with AWS, Riot saw the opportunity to leverage the power of machine learning and cloud computing. They could build a scalable, reliable infrastructure that would continuously update the rankings in near real-time, delivering a new level of transparency and engagement for the Worlds 2024 broadcast and beyond.
Figure 2: Global Power Rankings powered by AWS.
To further satisfy the demand for esports insights, AWS and Riot Games have introduced the LoL Esports Global Power Rankings powered by AWS. Global power rankings (GPR) were a new addition to the Worlds 2024 broadcast, providing fans with a deeper understanding of the relative strengths of the competing teams. During the tournament, GPR data was integrated directly into the livestream, with casters and analysts using the rankings to enhance their commentary and storytelling.
Viewers saw near real-time updates to team and region rankings as the matches unfolded, bringing an added layer of excitement and anticipation. Fans had the ability to dive deeper into the rankings, exploring historical trends, regional breakdowns, and team comparisons.
By integrating GPR technology deeply into the Worlds 2024 experience, AWS and Riot Games are empowering fans to better understand the skill levels of the teams, the dynamics between regions, and the potential outcomes of the tournament. This data-driven approach adds a new dimension to the Worlds viewing experience, providing fans new ways to engage with the action as the best of the best compete for the championship title.
Powering Global Power Rankings with AWS
Leveraging a variety of AWS services, GPR infrastructure is designed to efficiently update, persist, and expose the ranking data to the frontend. At the heart of the system is the power-hub service, a Java API built on AWS Lambda. This serverless function handles the core GPR functionalities:
- Updates: When a LoL match ends, an AWS Lambda trigger (gpr-trigger) is invoked to call the power-hub service’s /gpr/gameEnd endpoint. The power-hub service then processes the game details, retrieves the current team and league ratings from the database, and calls a Databricks model to calculate the new GPR scores. These updated scores are then persisted in the power-hub-db database.
- Persistence: The power-hub-db is an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) MySQL database that stores all the GPR-related data, including team information, league details, tournament data, game results, and the GPR score logs. This validates the GPR data is reliably stored and available.
- Exposure: The power-hub service provides two key API endpoints (/gpr/teams and /gpr/leagues) that the frontend can call to retrieve the latest GPR rankings for teams and leagues, respectively. The frontend can then cache this data for display.
Figure 3 : Architecture diagram depicting Global Power Rankings.
AWS architecture utilizing AWS services like Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS and Amazon partner solutions, such as Databricks.
The infrastructure also includes mechanisms for error handling and reprocessing. If any game end events are missed, the system can be manually triggered to reprocess those events and update the GPR accordingly, using the event history stored in the power-hub-db database.
The GPR model itself is housed in Databricks, a unified analytics platform that allows the data science team at Riot to develop and deploy the machine learning models powering GPR calculations. The power-hub service seamlessly integrates with Databricks to fetch the new team and league ratings based on historical data and the latest match results.
The GPR infrastructure uses various AWS services, such as Lambda, Amazon RDS, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Partners like Databricks. This provides a scalable, reliable, and efficient system that delivers a centralized, transparent, and constantly updated global ranking of professional LoL Esports teams.
Global Power Rankings in Action During Worlds 2024
Worlds 2024 viewers saw Global Power Rankings powered by AWS featured on the analyst desk for the duration of the tournament. LoL Esports analysts leveraged GPR data to provide deeper insights on the broadcast, showcasing the current overall team rankings, analyzing head-to-head matchups, and tracking teams’ GPR trajectory throughout the tournament.
Figure 4 : Global Power Rankings in Action during Worlds 2024.
Example of the Global Power Rankings being used during a live broadcast at Worlds 2024. The image displays the text “Where they Stand” as a header, with a listing of team names below, in order of ranking 1-5 accompanied by the corresponding league, power score and win loss record (with win percentage). The top 5 teams listed in order are Gen. G, Bilibili Gaming, Hanwha Life Esports, TOP ESPORTS, G2 Esports, with callouts at the bottom for the teams ranked 19 and 52, PSG Talon and paiN Gaming respectively, as they are the focus of the discussion. A smaller overlay image of the broadcast is displayed in the bottom right, showing 3 broadcasters sitting while discussing the teams.
What’s next for Riot Games and AWS
Riot and AWS are exploring ways to further enhance insights delivered to fans by combining GPR data with advanced win probability models. This will enable win probability calculations that are dynamically informed by the relative power rankings of the teams, rather than the current neutral 50/50 split. Doing so will provide an even richer understanding of each match’s ebb and flow, as the probabilities shift in near real-time based on the projected strength of the competing squads.
Additionally, future iterations of the GPR model aim to incorporate player-level statistics, allowing the rankings to reflect not just team dynamics, but the individual contributions of the pro players themselves. By continuing to push the boundaries of data-driven esports analytics, AWS and Riot are committed to delivering an unparalleled Worlds viewing experience that continues to captivate fans.
Stay tuned to see what innovative insights will be unveiled next.
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Further Viewing & Reading
- Learn more about how Riot Games and AWS worked together to decommission data centers and move to the AWS cloud
- In this video, Brent Rich, head of global infrastructure and operations at Riot Games, shares how the company transformed from a single-game company depending on local data centers to support its hundreds of millions of players to a cloud-first gaming company with several major titles.
- GPR was born from fan feedback and makes the game more accessible and exciting. In this AWS on Air segment, host Nick Betz talks with Nick Straughn (Senior Product Manager, Riot Games) and Ashwin Raghuraman (Senior Solutions Architect, AWS) to reveal the story behind how the Rankings originally came to be.
- Dive into the data at https://lolesports.com/en-US/gpr.
- If you’re interested in learning more about the ranking model, check out Riot’s Dev Diary.