League of Legends streamer and notorious Shen one-trick xPetu devoted his entire Master’s thesis to proving the developers’ philosophy on balancing items wrong, explaining how item win rates actually work, and deconstructing the idea of the meta as a concept. xPetu’s been a high ranked player for years, but it’s partially due to his signature pick, Shen, having incredible build flexibility. He’s one of the best players in the world with the Ninja, and his builds often look like troll builds compared to what most players would think is correct to buy.
Most people aren’t building Rocketbelt on Shen, yet here we are. In other words, a Shen one-trick staked his Master’s thesis on proving he’s right about how a certain champion should be built, explained why he’s right, applied that knowledge in a way that could fit any champion, and built an entire app around it . And yes, he graduated.
He explained the concept of inflated item win rates on characters, something that’s abundantly clear to most veteran LoL players. The most obvious example is Mejai’s, an item that’s only bought when players are already ahead in level or gold and tends to be used to snowball a match. However, he argued this thought process should apply to a much wider net of items concerning when and why they’re purchased.
He presented the idea by challenging Riot game designer Phreak’s philosophy on item balance. “Generally speaking, if you dig in and say, buy his third most common st.