Dev Blog: Mobalytics Challenges, A New Way To Improve Your League Skills

Dev Blog: Mobalytics Challenges, A New Way To Improve Your League Skills

One of our core missions at Mobalytics is to help all gamers get better at their favorite titles.

As such, we’ve created an all-in-one-companion that strives to empower different types of League players in their individual journeys.

For example, Players that want to dive into stats and analytics can do so with our Gamer Performance Index (GPI) and Profile.

Summoners that want to master their favorite champion or research new ones can do so with the Tier List and Champion pages.

For those that want in-game scouting and insights, we created the Live Companion and Overlay.

Our latest feature, Challenges, is designed for the players that like to learn by doing.

In this dev blog we’ll cover how Challenges work, our philosophy behind the feature’s development, and much more so stick around!

Note that this is the first version of Challenges and we have a lot more coming in the near future.

BTW, if you can’t wait and want to try them now, just go straight to our Challenges page.

Jump to a section:

• So…what are Challenges?
• Why we made Challenges
• How Challenges work
• The future of Challenges

So…what are Challenges?

Challenges are a new way for League players to test themselves on fundamental skills by accomplishing a list of in-game goals.

These fundamentals are Aggression, Farming, Fighting, Objectives, Survivability, and Vision, which are six of the eight skills in our Gamer Performance Index (GPI).

Mobalytics recommends Challenges based on a player’s role, rank, and their strengths and weaknesses as a player.

Once a player accepts a Challenge, they must successfully fulfill the Challenge’s conditions in three out of five of their next games.

Once they do so, they’ll see their skills improve! If they fail, that’s totally okay – they can either try it again or switch to another Challenge.

Why we made Challenges

If you’ve been with us for a long time, you may remember that the GPI used to give you advice from our Challenger experts based on your scores.

Although many players in our community liked Challenger advice, we realized that it could sometimes be difficult to concretely translate the advice in-game.

Challenges represent an evolution for our GPI that replaces Challenger advice with Challenges devised by our Challenger experts (that was a challenging mouthful).

They allow us to more effectively guide players in-game rather than needing the players to interpret the advice into action.

Another major reason why we created Challenges was to give League players a new way to measure whether or not they’re getting better.

When it comes down to it, there’s a lot of losing involved in League. Even the “best” climbers in ranked often hover around a 55% win rate, which is only slightly better than a coinflip.

We all know the feeling of popping off and playing a nearly perfect game but you still manage to lose.

On the flip side, we also know the feeling of playing horribly but still getting carried to a win.

Challenges give you tangible goals that allow you to perceive whether or not you played well outside of the coinflip of a match’s actual result.

In tandem with GPI their scores, a player can more easily measure their growth as a player as opposed to simply focusing on win/loss streaks and their rank.

Just take a look at some feedback we received from one of our Closed Beta testers:

You love to see it! The changes and growth in their fundamental skills are clearly illustrated by their graph.

Lastly, the third main reason why we created Challenges was due to players having ranked anxiety and preferring to only play Normal matches.

By completing Challenges within the context of Normal games, a player can still get a sense of accomplishment and growth without the label of a rank.

How Challenges Work

Let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of how Challenges actually work.

If you’re signed into a Mobalytics account, this section of our dev blog can act as a guide to attempting your first Challenge!

First off, understand that you can activate Challenges from multiple places throughout the Mobalytics platform. Two examples are from within the GPI or at the main Challenges page.

In the screenshot below, you can see what this looks like from within the GPI:

Just hover a card to see more details about the Challenge, here’s a quick look at its various components.

Many of these are self-explanatory. Based on your rank, role, and GPI skill scores, you’ll be given Recommended Challenges that would give you the most bang for your buck in terms of seeing the most immediate positive impact in your gameplay.

Let’s take a look at the Gold level for Top laner Duels and break it down further.

Gold Duels Challenge:

• Win 2 or more duels
• Have 5 or less deaths 
• Get at least 6 CS per minute 

As you can tell, although the focus is on the Duels score, the Challenge still requires you to keep your number of deaths and CS score in check.

This is our way of making sure that even if a player is using Mobalytics to improve their skills, they will still maintain their expected responsibilities within the context of what they should be doing for their team.

The last thing we want is for you to derail your team’s potential success by tunnel visioning on completing your Challenge!

If you’re down to give it a shot, just hit the big Activate Challenge button to get started! In order to complete it, you would need to fulfill the listed goals in three of your next five matches.

Once it’s active, you’ll have a status counter during the duration of your Challenge.

Before your match, this counter will be displayed within the Live Companion’s Pre Game to remind you of your goals. After your match within the Post Game, the counter will be updated with a breakdown of how your match’s performance compared to those goals.

Games with a success will be marked in green while fails will be marked with red.

If you manage to get three wins, congrats, you did it! Based on how well you accomplished the Challenge, you’ll also be given a star score.

By completing a Challenge with a perfect three games in a row, you’ll be given the max of 3 stars. If you needed all five games to succeed in three matches, you’ll be given 1 star – for four games, you’ll earn 2 stars.

So if you’re a completionist (we’re looking at you Overcooked players), you can go back to earn every star possible!

Based on the Challenges you complete and the stars you’re given, you’ll be able to progress to higher Challenge levels.

The higher ranked Challenges will of course be increasingly more difficult to ensure you improve. Remember Duels for Top laners?

Let’s jump ahead to see how Diamond compares to the first Gold example we looked at.

Gold vs Diamond Duels Challenge Comparison:

• Win 2 or more duels (Gold) –> Win at least 3 duels (Diamond)
• Have 5 or less deaths (Gold) –> Have 4 or less deaths (Diamond)
• Get at least 6 CS per minute (Gold)  –> Get at least 7 CS per minute (Diamond)
• Win at least 50% of your duels (Diamond)

As you can see, not only do previous goals become harder, but the number of them will also increase over time!

Quick Tips and Tricks

Now that you understand the basics of how to activate and progress through Challenges, let’s cover some useful functions you should know about.

How to explore all Challenges

Recommended Challenges will always be close to your current rank and skill level, but if you want to switch to something drastically easier or harder, you can do that!

To do so, just head to the filters section at the main Challenges page.

Once you’re there, check the box “Show all challenges” and you’ll be able to sort by any rank, GPI skill, or ranking.

How to pause or cancel a Challenge

By clicking on “…” you’ll be able to see more options for a specific Challenge.

Pause is useful for when you want to switch between game modes (such as from ranked to norms). We recommend sticking to the same game mode until a Challenge attempt is complete to maximize your results.

If you’re having a lot of trouble with a Challenge or want to work on something else instead, you can deactivate a Challenge with the Cancel button to open up space for a new one.

Lastly, if you aren’t doing so hot, perhaps with an 0-2 start, you can press Restart to start anew. Keep in mind that going on a 3-0 run is possible though!

The Future of Challenges

As we mentioned in the intro, this is just the first iteration of our Challenges. We’re already working on some big changes that will be coming in the near future and further down the line.

• Overlay Integration
  • Within a month or so, you’ll be able to see your Active Challenges and your progress for them in real-time while you play!
  • This will complete the loop of Challenges guiding you before, during, and after your matches.
• Partner Challenges
  • As you know, we have awesome partners and collaborators from streamers to esports teams.
  • Keep an eye out for some guest events where you can complete Challenges for awesome prizes…anything is possible!
• Class Challenges
  • For our first version of Challenges, we tried to make the set of goals within roles as relevant as possible.
  • Of course, we understand that there is a wide range of playstyles within a role, such as tank vs duelist, so we’ll be scaling Challenges to eventually accommodate those nuances.
• Champion Challenges
  • Within every role, there are always some off-the-beaten-path champions that break the conventions of what you’re used to. For example, Pyke and Ivern offer much different playstyles than what you’d typically expect.
  • As such, our goal is to eventually have champion-specific Challenges that cater to every champion’s unique playstyle.

What do you think of Challenges? Let us know in the comments below! To activate a Challenge now, just head to Mobalytics.