Impact values on Valorant Champions
Tags: Predictions, Esport, Fps, Data Science, Valorant

Hello peeps. The year is almost over, so I decided to apply my model to the Valorant Champions Tourney that happened this month. Please keep in mind that a high impactful play not necessarily means a flashy and exciting multi-kill highlight where the guy had a sheriff and somehow managed to 1v5 against rifles. It just means a situation in which that player, on that specific moment, with the loadout his team has, managed to flip the odds by a great margin. If you watched Astralis era in CSGO you will know what I mean.

#1 → Nikita “d3ffo” Sudakov

D3ffo

One of the sharpest Jetts across the scene, D3ffo brought an antonishing +866.94% aggregated impact (+50.99% per match). This more than solidifies him as a key gear in that Gambit well oiled machine.

Fun fact: d3ffo’s best match was on a 6x13 defeat!

Having a hard match where nothing is working? Call d3ffo! He brought good performances on 6x13, 8x13 and 7x13 losses. Round #18 from that 8x13 Split against Acend was a perfect example of this. Unfortunately his last kill happened when the spike already reached the 8 beeps/second mark (more than 40s since plant)

Round 18 breakdown

Round 18 showcased an intense fight between both teams, with ups and downs on probability values. Probability on K point is high because the spike 8 bps situation is such a blurry zone where not even the casters can tell if an ongoing defuse will be succeeded or not

D3ffo’s play

Unfortunately, when browsing through his 8 most impactful matches I wasn’t able to find notable flashy or clutchy highlights from D3ffo. Most of his high impact kills seems to come from things like getting the first kill, killing an enemy which has a heavy loadout, shutting down an important role at the very round beginning (an Astra for example), shutting down the enemy operator, etc. Like I said before, something like prime Astralis: quiet, but efficient

#2 → Timofey “Chronicle” Kromov

Chronicle

Another russian soldier makes it to the top. Chronicle has been proving himself as a crucial piece to Gambit’s successful 2021. In the most important VCT event of the year, Mr Timofey brought a positive impact to the table in 12 out of the 17 maps he played!

Chronicle impact table across the tourney

Players that have high impact on tight matches (11–13) generally are also able to put a good performance even on unfavourable outcomes. A good example of this was on Breeze round #12. Even though Gambit ended up losing that round, Chronicle managed to bring 3 impactful kills to the table: he killed their sentinel (keznit), their controller (Delz1k) and their initiator (Mazino), heavily shifting his team win probabilities (+45.47%) throughout the course of the round!

Breeze round #12

Another high impact play happened on Icebox round 8, vs Vikings. With a beautiful 3K (again), Chronicle killed Sutecas (+19.7%), shut down the defender’s Operator Jett (+40.2%) and killed Sacy (+24.7%)

Probability variations on Icebox round 8

Enemy got first kill on your star Operator Jett? No problem.

Last but not least, his astounding ace on Bind. You can ace against a bunch of sheriffs and inflate your KDA numbers, but you can also ace in a crucial moment during a balanced gun round where anyone can win at any moment. Before Chronicle got his first kill, the round odds were in incommensurately unbalanced: 86% in favour of KRÜ. Combine this with the fact that Keznit pushed the odds 26% down after killing sheydos, we got an ace which had an aggregated impact of fucking 111.79% (5.01% + 26.32% + 35.18% + 33.16% + 12.11%)

Win probabilities on Bind round #21

#3→ Nikita “Derke” Sirmitev

derke

Are all Nikitas born with a godlike aim? Because we have another Nikita here! (what about Nikola Kovac?) Anyway, Derke managed to step up to the plate after being questioned as a solid Jett a few weeks before Champions

Derke impact table

Derke’s amazing play

After BuZz killed Boaster (point E), attackers only had a miserable winning chance of 9.82%. But the man himself showed up when it matters and pushed that chance to the skies by landing a beautiful 4k!

That’s all, folks! Unfortunately most of this work is manually done, constantly trying to match what number tables are showing with VOD videos is not as easy as it seem and like I said in the beginning, an impactful play found by the algorithm not necessarily means a flashy highlight, which makes it harder to choose interesting clips. After all, nobody wants to watch a play where the first kill happened at 4s and the second one at 62s, but that was still impactful when aggregating the round outcomes as a whole

That being said, I’m posting the full table below!

Full champions impact table. Since impacts can be negative, I have chose to aggregate instead of average in order to reward players who went further into playoffs. Despite all the “NA BAD LUL” comments, we still have some solid american representatives here!

Extra stuff

Favorite rifle vs Player Impact

Agent pick vs Player Delta Impact per match

Due to Riot API restricted scope all my current gamestate variables are limited to only be changed through kills or abilities that are directly involved with kills, which still naturally pushes frag-oriented agents to the top (Jett) and team-oriented agents to the bottom (Skye). By the other hand, we got Sage above Reyna, which is odd an interesting. Anyway, it is nice to see agents like Sova, Killjoy, Breach and Sage making it to the top

Being honest before running the algorithm I was not expecting Killjoy to be placed so high. I think she is an agent that, after she places all her gadgets on the ground, she has her eyes mostly on the game and on the angles rather than on secondary stuff like astral map (Astra) or spy camera (Cypher). But maybe this theory is wrong and we just witnessed rock solid Killjoys having an awesome performance?