[spoilers] Tristana right now
After the matches yesterday between c9 and TSM, a lot of people seemed to be of the opinion that Tristana was just too OP to handle. That if C9 had just banned Trist, all would have been different! And perhaps this is true. I wanted to however take some time to take a look at tristana right now in terms of competitive play, and why I think it's not her being OP and the pros 'just not realizing it' that's losing proteams games.
Couple of things at play here. First off: her win percentage. A lot of people seemed to think that her high win percentage during NA playoffs and summer split are surely an indication of her being OP. Why this is not the case:
The sample size is way too small to generate reliable numbers. I might be saying that wrong (not a native speaker) but my point is that with so few games played among so little players, you cannot possibly conclude that all of her wins are attributed purely to her strength. Other factors such as 'who is playing her?', 'who is on her team?', etc, influence the winrate. If player "A" is very good on a certain champion and his team is very good so they win everything, then surely the winrate of that champion goes up. That does not mean it's the champion doing all the work. Also, Curse for example as well as Alliance have played Tristana as a midlaner. In such a case, the champion fills a different role and so it's hard to say if her power as a midlaner says anything about her power as an adc, yet her wins in that role do add to her winrate.
To increase the sample size we could grab other regions and add their numbers. So let's take a look at EU adc numbers.
During playoffs:
47.1% winrate with an 8 - 9 record. That includes 2 won games where Froggen played her mid. Kog'Maw is the playoff king here, averaging 77.8% winrate in 18 games played.
During summer split: Tristana 41,2% in 17 games. Corki & Twitch 58,3% in 24 games.
Let's look at Korea next. The regional qualifiers (13 games total, most recent event):
Twitch 81,8% winrate in 11 games. Tristana picked twice, lost twice.
Champions Summer:
Tristana 50% winrate in 12 games. Kog'maw 53,8% in 26 games.
If we're going by the numbers, win percentages etc, one could almost conclude that Tristana is only "OP" in NA.
One way to get a bigger sample size is to look at soloqueue numbers from lolking for example. Lolking gives a 52,16% winrate on tristana with a 33,45% popularity rate. Now, these numbers are already a lot more telling. More games are being won by teams with Tristanas than lost. If we look at other champions with comparable or higher winrates and a high popularity however, we come across Leona, Blitzcrank, Katarina, Warwick and Amumu (all reasonably high popularity and higher winrate). All champions we don't even see played in the proscene. To me, that's a clear indication that soloqueue numbers can't be used 1 on 1 with professional levels of play, as clearly other factors are at play.
Another thing I want to touch on is the level of play these games are played. These are the best players of the region and they're playing at an incredibly high level. They will capitalize on every mistake made by the opposing team. A good example of this was when Dyrus used his Zhonya's by accident in game 3. The amount of objectives and advantage c9 managed to take off that shows that anything can lose or win you the game. To think that in a game with 10 players, 22 towers, 3 inhibitors, 2 blue buffs, 2 red buffs a dragon and a baron it all comes down to 'who has Tristana' is pretty ignorant and quite frankly insulting to the players.
Another (last bit here) thing that I find insulting towards the players is the idea that the players are simply too dumb to realise that 'all they have to do is ban Tristana'. Again, these are the best players of a region competing. For every game we see them play, they have played a whole bunch more in practice. Just because other teams are losing games that have a Tristana on the opposing team does not mean you throw all your practice away and say: "well, according to the % winrate, Tristana is our ticket to worlds!". Specific to this BO5 between TSM and C9, Tristana lost 2 games. One where she was on C9, one where she was on TSM. Clearly, it was not big enough of a 'problem' to justify a ban or a first pick.
This is a whole bunch of rambling, but I wanted to post this because it's not just with Tristana that I see this. Every event, every game played, there's always a couple of champions that people think decide the outcome of the game before the game is even played. I think it's not that black and white, ever. (and I also think that the 'analysts' at the analyst desk should know this and not just go 'derp haha dunno why people pick Lucian, must be dumb players!')