League-of-legends – How much XP does it take to get to level 30

Zileas, design director for LoL, explains:

The system guesses how good you are based on who you beat and who you lose to. It tries to make matches where it thinks you have a 50/50 chance of winning.

It knows pre-made teams are an advantage, so it gives you tougher opponents when you are in a pre-made team. We did fancy math to make the pre-made teams vs solo players matching fair. I even ran it by two math Ph.Ds and they said it made sense!

You can read the full shebang here. Basically, a custom ELO derivative is used to rank players and power the matchmaking system, so that you are paired with similarly ranked teams.

General

• Custom games are only worth 75% of the IP you would have earned in a normal game.
• Co-op vs. AI games incur penalties based on summoner level and difficulty:
  • Level 10-19: Beginner games are worth 85%.
  • Level 20-29
    • Beginner games are worth 70%.
    • Intermediate games are worth 90%.
  • Level 30
    • Beginner games are worth 55%.
    • Intermediate games are worth 80%.

Win

• 2.305 IP per minute up until 55 minutes.
• 18 IP bonus for completing a match (~7.8 minutes worth of IP)

Loss

• 1.402 IP per minute up until 55 minutes.
• 16 IP bonus for completing a match (~11.4 minutes worth of IP)

Graph

Optimum Game Length

Riot Games has designed their IP system to reward playing the game to completion and to reward longer games:

Q: Will I be getting more or less IP and XP as a result of this change?

A: While you will get more or less in some games, the average XP/IP gain will be much more consistent. If you typically played very long games, you will tend to get more IP and XP; however, if you typically play short games, you will get slightly less IP and XP.

While you do get a bonus beyond the "per minute IP", that bonus is designed to compensate players for the time between matches:

Q: It seems unfair that I spend 5 minutes milling around in queue and in champion select, and don't get an IP/XP reward for that. Does this system help with this at all?

A: Actually, it does! All game types give a slight 'completion bonus' that is equivalent to several minutes of play. This is embedded in IP you earn.

That being said: provided you could get into another game in substantially less that 7.8 minutes, you'd make out slightly better by surrendering and starting a new game. You'd have to do this a lot to see a substantial gain, however. If it took you longer to get into the next game, you'd actually incur a loss overall.

In short, it'll usually be best to play to 55 minutes, then bail out if you're very likely to lose. At that point, you're essentially playing to see if you'll get 145 IP vs 94 IP. If losing seems like a foregone conclusion, then you're mostly playing for the experience at that point.

Sources

• Items in the general section: League of Legends @ Wikia
• Win/Loss Accrual Rates: Based on recorded values after the completion of games. There are some instances where (rate * minutes) does not exactly equal what I recorded from the game client when you round up, but overall the above rates serve as a good enough rule of thumb for my purposes.
• IP System FAQs

Reference

• League of Legends Release Notes v1.0.0.111
• League of Legends Release Notes v1.53