Does A Support Role Player really Create Difference towards Triumph? Analyzing Individual Performances of Specific Role Players to Predict Victory in League of Legends

Players make comments like "Mid Diff", "Top Diff", "JG Diff", etc. in the in-game chat at the end of almost every match of League of Legends. It represents the relative difference in in-game abilities of players of the same position that leads to a significant difference between two teams in determining the loss/win of a particular match. However, no player seems to pay enough heed to if there is a difference between players who play the Support role (or "SP Diff" to be specific) which also may have also helped them to win a match. In most places, this role is considered insignificant among players. But do they really not contribute towards the winning of a match? In our research, we investigate the impact of a player who contributes in a Support role toward match victory. Previous researches show collective intelligence (CI) to be a factor in team games that helps to analyze their capacity to work and win collectively. To our knowledge, this is the first work that focuses on the contribution of any single particular role out of the full team of five players toward the victory of a match. We also create a custom dataset based on the match statistics and match-specific performances of different Support role players and evaluate if the outcomes and performance shown by a particular role are crucial enough to the world of teams in competitive online video games, where intensive, self-organized, and time-pressured cooperation takes place entirely online. The results show a stronger correlation between a certain support player’s performance and the match result than usually thought of. This points towards more reliable match result prediction in the game. We make the dataset publicly available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/joyanta180199/lol-sp