Nexus Blitz Numbers: Double Jungle, Win Rates, and More!

On August 15th, 2018, Riot Games released their fun and exciting new game mode, Nexus Blitz, before eventually ending the experiment on September 12th. With the re-release just around the corner in patch 8.24, we’re sharing some unique statistics from the 1,434,861 Nexus Blitz games that were played in North America, so you can prepare for the new version next week!

We began this analysis by gathering the daily number of Nexus Blitz, ARAM, and Ranked games played during the month that Nexus Blitz was out, including counts from before and after this period. We smoothed the plots by using a rolling average of 7 days in order to make it easier to see long-term trends in the data. (Without smoothing, the play counts spike each weekend.)

These are some interesting numbers—on one hand, despite a staggering 100,000 games of Nexus Blitz played on the first day, the Ranked and ARAM play counts did not drop. This suggests that Nexus Blitz brought in people who do not play regularly and caused others to play more, which means if Riot’s goal was to increase player engagement, they were likely happy to see these numbers. On the other hand, Nexus Blitz play rates dropped consistently over time. We were surprised to see fewer people playing Nexus Blitz than ARAM after only 10 days of the new mode. Thankfully this didn’t deter Riot from releasing a new version for us to enjoy.

Now for the exciting stuff. With the introduction of a double jungle meta in Nexus Blitz, did you ever wonder which jungler duos performed the best? In the tool below, you can explore win rate data for all 9867 jungle duos that were played in the first release of Nexus Blitz. Want to know who to pick with Nunu? Try Kog’Maw, Karthus or Kayle, but stay away from Corki and Akali! Is the mega-CC combo of Nautilus and Alistar viable? With a win rate of 68%, looks like it is! See what OP combos you can find and try them out with your duo partner once Nexus Blitz returns!

(As a bonus, we also took a look at individual champion win rates and pick rates in all 3 game modes during the time Nexus Blitz was live.)

*Special thanks to Nami Sumida for her work on the data visualizations. Check out some of her other projects here!