How To Play Fantasy League Of Legends

Another season is upon us, and with it comes a lot of people interested in playing Fantasy League of Legends on DraftBuff!

With this guide, we'll get you up to speed on Fantasy League of Legends on our app, and answer any questions you have on the scorings & game modes.

Gamemodes

On DraftBuff we offer three types of game modes for playing Fantasy League of Legends. These are regular fantasy leagues, also known as Snake Drafts, Draft Royales, and Brackets.

Fantasy Leagues (Snake Drafts)

These are leagues that you can set up and play with your friends, up to 8 players. After the league is filled, you take turns drafting players- only one version of a player exists at any one time. You will be paired up with another player from the league every week, and your players will go head-to-head to see who comes out on top.

At the end of the regular season, we hold a Playoffs where the top 6 players will face off in a tournament-style format to decide the ultimate winner! Alternatively, if you’d rather just have it be decided on overall points/record, you can disable this setting.

These drafts are best played with a group of friends or people you can keep in contact with- if you need a hand finding someone to fill a final slot in your Snake Draft or if you’re looking to join one yourself, be sure to hit up our Discord channel and put a message in #looking-for-group!

Draft Royales

If you’ve played traditional Fantasy sports beforehand, you’ll be familiar with this setup. You’re given a set number of coins every week, and every player is allocated a certain value based on various factors such as their performances last year and overall skill level. These values change slightly every week based on how well they perform- if you pick up a player for 45 coins and they pop off that week, expect them to be a bit more expensive next week; similarly, if they have a poor week, you can grab them again for cheaper the next week.

We also have Buffs that you can attach to your players in order to give yourself an edge on players that have similar rosters to you. These can be things like increasing the value of their kills and assists by a certain amount, or making their deaths equal less of a points hit. Many of these also have risk elements to them though, so you need to weigh up which one to use carefully! More information on the Buffs can be found here.

Draft Royales can be set up by yourself, or you can join one of the many Royales that our DraftBuff partners run, which will allow you to play against thousands of other players. These official partner Royales will often have prizes such as in-app currency or RP cards. We always Retweet these Royales that have prizes, so be sure to follow us on Twitter so you don’t miss out!

Brackets

Brackets are a great game mode to play alongside a Snake Draft or a Draft Royale around tournaments, especially if you fancy yourself as the esports Nostradamus. In these, you will be asked to predict the outcome of every match in a specific tournament, such as MSI or Worlds. This eventually includes the knockout rounds, and how many games it takes each team to win the series. If you play the Worlds Pick’Em every year, you’ll be familiar with this format.

These brackets are notoriously difficult to get exactly right, but they have the best prizes- for anyone who predicted the Worlds matchups with 100% accuracy last year, they were given a jersey from a team of their choice! Big stakes, but equally big rewards too.

Scoring- how are my points calculated?

For League of Legends, we use the following values by default. In your personal leagues, you can edit the values as you see fit, but by default and in official partner Royales they will be as below.

For players:

• Kill: 3 points
• Death: -1 point
• Assist: 2 points
• Creep score: 0.02 per creep
• First Blood: 2 bonus points
• Triple Kill: 3 bonus points
• Quadra Kill: 5 bonus points (does not stack with Triple Kill)
• Penta Kill: 7 bonus points (does not stack with Quadra Kill or Triple Kill)

As you will also be drafting a team, they also have scoring criteria:

• Tower destroyed: 1 point
• Dragon secured: 1.5 points
• Baron secured: 2 points
• Elder Dragon secured: 2 points
• First tower destroyed: 2 bonus points
• Win the game in less than 30 minutes: 3 bonus points

But my LCS players play three times! Do they secure more points?

This is where things start to get a bit technical, as in some leagues, teams will play more matches than others.

So for example, in the 2021 season, the LCS teams will play 3 games a week, whereas the LEC teams will only play 2. Without any sort of metric by which to calculate points evenly off of, this would mean LCS players are a lot more valuable to pick up than LEC players, for instance.

We’ve recognized this and in reply, we’ve implemented a feature called normalization.

This means that every player’s points are measured on a baseline of two games per week. So for any LEC players, whatever they score is what they get. But for LCS players, they will have their points normalized. The formula is below:

Points scored ÷ 3. Then x that number by 2 = player’s normalized total.

Let’s put it into an example:

Perkz (Cloud9, MID) plays 3 games this week.

Game 1, he scores 23.03 points.

Game 2, he scores 19.12 points.

Game 3, he scores 32.01 points.

We add all these together, which gives us his ‘raw’ total for the week- 74.16 points.

Now, we divide this number by 3, to get the total points he earned per game- 24.72 points per game.

Finally, we double this number to work out a final sum of what he would earn this week if he had played only twice- 49.44 points.

This keeps things fair for all players, so you aren’t instantly doomed if you face someone with an all-NA team, and that you don’t instantly win if you face someone with an all-EU team that week.

We understand this can be a bit confusing for some, so if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask in our #support channel on our Discord, where we’ll help you out ASAP!