Do you have a friend who’s always AFK at the beginning of the League of Legends game, talking to their mum, having a smoke break, or grabbing a drink? Yeah, me too—and it seems that these players actually make up the majority of the League population.
According to Hextexchlab, a fan-made site that uses Riot Games API to analyze data from League, a little over 98 percent of matches played on the EUW servers had AFK players at the very beginning of their games.
To determine whether or not players are AFK at the beginning of the game, this fan looked at the exact moment players bought their starting item.
“In Patch 13.18 on EUW, all players were ready to play when the game started in only 269,897 games, which is only 1.75% of the games played during that time… It takes 36 seconds to have all players ready in 50% of the games, and at minions spawn there is still a player AFK in 20% of games,” the report reads.
At first, this might not seem like a big deal, but AFKing early in the game has huge implications. First, you can’t really ever invade because you don’t know if you’ll be outnumbered. You also can’t defend against an invasion because you’re a man down.
On top of all this, being AFK at the beginning means you might miss out on the essential experience and gold earned, which could cost you the game later on.
For example, let’s say you’re playing Zed in midlane against Talon. This is a quite volatile match-up and I normally expect you to trade kills. But let’s say Zed was AFK and missed the gold and experience for the first three minions. Because of that, Zed will lose the level two power spike, Talon might all-in them and Talon’s lead could only snowball from that.
So, the conclusion and solution here are simple—don’t go AFK at the beginning of your games. This clearly has an immense influence on how your game might play out, and you could be putting your team at a disadvantage just because you were too lazy to grab a drink in between queues.
