The first days of a patch

A placement is a number from 1 to 8, and one game says almost nothing about a comp. Strong boards still go out early to a bad matchup, and weak ones sneak into the top four. An average only means something once enough games stand behind it.

How many is enough depends on how widely a comp's placements spread, and they spread wide. The piece below takes the most played comp right now and shows how far its average could land by chance at any number of games. The range shrinks slowly: ten times the games cuts it to about a third, and it takes a hundred times the games to cut it to a tenth.

On the day a patch lands, every number you see comes from its first few hours. That is few games, and not a fair sample either: the players who try a freshly buffed comp first are the ones who went looking for it. Comps with almost no games can top a list by luck, which is why the comps page sorts comps with too few games to the bottom.

Hotfixes add a second reset. When something is clearly out of line, Riot ships a smaller patch a few days in, a b-patch. This set, 3 of its 4 patches so far got at least one. HexKey keeps a hotfix's games with its patch, so for a few days after one the numbers mix games from before and after the fix.