Choose the right champion to win the game
Games are something that always inspires me. The speed, accuracy, and concentration of professional athletes is astounding. It's impressive how this industry has evolved and grown in just a few decades.
Team Liquid has a dominant presence in the world of esports, with over 160 professional players across over 15 games and an incredible fan base of over 10 million followers across various social media platforms. I'm proud. With over 75 premier event wins, Team Liquid is one of the most successful organizations in competitive gaming.
The game with the highest ratings and widest fan base is League of Legends. Team Liquid has successfully competed against League of Legends teams, recently winning the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) 2024 Spring Tournament.
The goal of League of Legends is to outsmart and outsmart your opponents during the game by creating a strong, balanced team of five characters called “Champions” to stay one step ahead of the competition. That's it.
Teams will participate in a pregame draft process to select a champion before the game. This includes banning champions and choosing among 166 options to create a powerful team.
A champion is a person in the game that each player controls. Each champion has specific skills and specialties. Bringing together champions allows your team to play in different strategic directions to win the match.
After selecting their five champions (“Pick”), each team can also remove five Champions from the pool (“Ban”). These players cannot be nominated by either side. You can use this to remove certain parts that counter your strategy or prevent other teams from playing your preferred style or composition.
Esports teams and their analysts need to prepare for the draft process, as it requires knowledge of the opponent's favorite picks and strategies. Imagine a 5-a-side dodgeball game. Before the match begins, his five players on each team draw a champion from his pool of 166 individual champions.
Competitive League of Legends is a game of constant change, as biweekly game updates (“patches”) specifically affect champions, but also indirectly team practice and the development of new strategies. This forces you to constantly adapt your draft to new environments and analyze the actions of both your team and the opposing team.
Additionally, the nature of the draft process and the varying strategies of opponents make accurate predictions difficult. The esports team has only one week to prepare for the match and gather knowledge about the other teams' favorite championship candidates, strengths, and weaknesses.
Previously, Team Liquid coaches prepared draft scenarios based on manual analysis of opposing teams' draft behavior and champion preferences. However, the challenge was that manual analysis was done before the draft and the best pick or ban would be changed based on other teams' decisions. Moreover, manual draft prediction is very difficult due to the huge number of possible matches to choose from and the different strategies adopted by opposing teams.
SAP helps you transform
What if Team Liquid could analyze the best selections (including picks and bans) for the upcoming draft in seconds, taking into account over 6,000 professional esports matches from the past year? Champion Power Attributes What if we took into account an additional 1.6 million amateur matches to assess the change in strength and also factored in the impact of game patches from publishers in our analysis? With SAP, this becomes a reality. .
By using SAP AI Core to train generative AI models that take data from past games and put them into the context of the next game, Team Liquid can choose the best draft picks to maximize their chances of winning. Get ban suggestions.
The solution is built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and data is stored in SAP HANA Cloud to accommodate 1.6 terabytes of game data from past games. The result is an intelligent draft bot training, an application running on SAP BTP that visualizes predictions and provides Team Liquid with current win rates for each pick and ban.
Manual analysis is a thing of the past
With an AI draft bot, Team Liquid can train in seconds for a draft situation against any pro team they compete against. This is achieved by incorporating multiple influencing factors based on an unprecedented number of matches. Coaches and players benefit from the opportunity to conduct what-if analysis, derive valuable knowledge from data, and simulate new strategies. This is also reflected in the time savings compared to previous manual analyses. Team Liquid saves approximately 10,000 hours a year using SAP solutions.
SAP Business AI, which relies on SAP BTP and SAP HANA Cloud, gives Team Liquid the opportunity to further improve its game by leveraging data to make more informed decisions. This is where fun and business meet.
This is the perfect way to embody the power of AI for business, not just for gamers.
Philipp Herzig is Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at SAP.
