"Can You Play Anything Else?" Understanding Play Style Flexibility in League of Legends

TL;DR

The paper addresses how LoL players' willingness to diversify play styles relates to performance and adaptation in dynamic team contexts. It introduces a flexibility score $F$ derived from $P_i = N_i / N_{games}$, with $P_{max}$ and $P_{norm}$ computed across 21 functional play styles, and defines $F = 1 - P_{norm}$, complemented by a temporal flexibility coefficient from rolling windows and linear regression. The study finds that elite players have lower overall flexibility, higher competitiveness reduces flexibility for all, and temporal flexibility tends to increase for elites while decreasing for non-elites, with distributions differing by play style. These insights illuminate the balance between specialization and adaptability and have implications for strategic planning and resource allocation in competitive environments.

Abstract

This study investigates the concept of flexibility within League of Legends, a popular online multiplayer game, focusing on the relationship between user adaptability and team success. Utilizing a dataset encompassing players of varying skill levels and play styles, we calculate two measures of flexibility for each player: overall flexibility and temporal flexibility. Our findings suggest that the flexibility of a user is dependent upon a user's preferred play style, and flexibility does impact match outcome. This work also shows that skill level not only indicates how willing a player is to adapt their play style but also how their adaptability changes over time. This paper highlights the duality and balance of specialization versus flexibility, providing insights that can inform strategic planning, collaboration and resource allocation in competitive environments.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Flexibility scores stratified by role preference.
• Figure 2: Flexibility scores stratified by both role preference and skill classification, where H denotes elite players, and L denotes non-elite players.