The

GAMER’S GUIDE
To Mastering

VISUAL
ATTENTION
Your definitive guide to improving your information
gathering skills in League of Legends

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WHAT IS VISUAL ATTENTION?

Visual attention describes how we use our limited resource of attention to process
information that we pick up from our eyes.

Let’s go one step further and break down visual • If your lane opponent has just used a medium or long
attention specifically in League of Legend cooldown spell.
• The cooldowns of you and your allies.
Think of visual attention in terms of: • And more that we don’t have room to mention and can
How quickly do you gather information? be character specific.
How much total information do you gather?

Quick information gathering means zipping your eyes Information Processing

between your opponent’s position, the creep waves,
their health, as well as nearby ally positions. Mastering your visual attention in League is, therefore,
keeping track of all the different items above while
The more you switch your focus between these shooting your eyes between alternating parts of the
different factors, the more up-to-date you will keep your screen to get this information consistently.
knowledge of which minions you need to last hit next, if
the opponents are out of position, as well as which It’s all about finding the right balance between keeping
allies could make it in time to back you up if a fight track of many things and updating specific information
erupts. consistently.

Here are just some of the different factors you can The more things you keep track of, the harder it is to
monitor: update all of that information every couple of seconds
since your attention is so focused on absorbing infor-
• Which opponents are missing based on the minimap. mation rather than trying to process it.
• If the enemy jungler has been spotted on the
minimap. On the other hand, the less you keep track of, the easier
• Where the minions are pushing in each lane. it is to keep it up to date, but the less actionable your
knowledge is, since there’s still a lot of uncertainty left.
• Which lanes you have priority in.
• Where your lane opponent is positioned in lane.
• Where you are positioned in lane.
This component of visual attention,
• Where your closest allies are. that balances consistently updating
• Where the minion wave is. old information as well as gathering
• Which minions are low health and need to be last hit. new information, is what we call
• The size difference between the minion waves and information processing.
which direction it will push.

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 INFORMATION PROCESSING

Then it hits you. A small, shimmering light moves

What does this look like in-game?
across the screen as you see that both you and your
ADC are stuck. You’ve been hit by a Light Binding from
To better understand what this means, let’s walk Lux. Then Lux hits you with her Lucent Singularity,
through an example. nukes you with her Final Spark, and with the damage
split between her and the enemy bot lane your screen
Say you’re playing Thresh in bot lane and you notice the turns grey before the Light Binding wears off.
enemy ADC is out of position. They’re further up the
lane and far away from their support, and the minion
they’re standing behind is about to die. What on earth just happened?

You elegantly time your hook, and you pull yourself in. You started the fight with a masterclass display of
They Flash away but you flay them back and toss your mechanical prowess, yet within 5 seconds the battle
lantern to your ADC for them to close the distance. turned from a sure victory to an almost instantaneous
loss.
Your ADC jumps in with you, and the enemy doesn’t
know what hit them. Within about 1.5 seconds, their The problem here is that your decision making ability
health bar dropped from 100% to 5%. They cast was hindered by the lack of game-state knowledge you
summoner heal for a final stand as you continue your had, ultimately due to how you decided to use your
chase to close out the kill. visual attention in the moments leading up to the fight.

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 INFORMATION PROCESSING

How can we see this for players? 139.10s

94 Fixation Frequency

We’ve spent the last year performing eye tracking

studies on players of all Elo’s, from Bronze to Challenger,
and have developed an analytical method that allows us
Information
Processing 0.30s
Fixation Duration
to track:

How much information do you take in?

How often do you update that knowledge? Why is this Important?

Let’s take a look at the statistics of two of these players. Kirei changes his attention about 139 times per minute,
spending an average of 0.30 seconds looking at each
First we’ve got a Bronze player. Below you can see what point before switching his attention again.
their Information Processing looks like.
That also means that about 18 seconds every minute
are spent in transition (or focusing on things for such a

108.80s short period of time that it looks like a transition - yes,

10 Fixation Frequency Challenger players do this).

The higher transition time also indicates to us that his

Information
Processing 0.50s
Fixation Duration
eyes are likely moving further across the screen, away
from just the central part that most low Elo players focus
on which contain your character and the creep wave.

From our eye tracking analytics, we’ve found they look at However, we don’t just want to rely on hunches, so we’ve
about 110 different spots every minute, spending an tested this as well. We can also monitor how much of
average of 0.50 seconds looking at each point. the screen a player looks at every minute, and we can
see that high Elo players spread their attention out much
For those of you that did the math and noticed that there more than low Elo players.
are 5 seconds missing here, these 5 seconds represent
the transition phase when the eyes dash between
different parts of the screen before they focus again.

Let’s look at their Challenger level counterpart, Kirei, a

jungler for the Misfits (MSF) Academy team. This is
what their information processing looks like.

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 INFORMATION PROCESSING

Take a look at the following two images

This image shows you where

a Silver player spreads their
attention in the early game,
the bottom one is for a
Diamond player.

This image shows the high

Elo player looking at
approximately 13% more of
the screen in the 5-15
minutes mark when
compared to our low Elo
players.

So what can we do with this information?

First, we observe how you spread your attention across the screen and consistently update your mental game state.
We can then give specific advice about how you can improve your allocation of visual attention to maximize the
different sources of information you have, while also keeping that information up-to-date.

Because making good decisions is the key to climbing in League of Legends, and you need good information to make
good decisions, training your information processing skill can have huge effects on your decision-making abilities.

5
 TUNNEL VISION

If Information Processing is the key to your ability to

make good decisions, then Tunnel Vision is your biggest
982.40s
enemy to making good decisions. 11 Zone of Frequency

What is Tunnel Vision? Tunnel

Vision
3.60s
Zone of Duration

Tunnel Visioning is when you spend a

Kirei tunnels once every 982.4 seconds, and when he
longer period of time fixating on the
does tunnel he tunnels for 3.6 seconds.
same small point.
In other words, in a 30 minute game Kirei spends about
During that time you close yourself off to any other
6 seconds tunneling, 15 times less than the Bronze
outside information, which is exactly what the Thresh
player…impressive, huh?
player we talked about earlier fell prey to as they focused
all of their attention on timing the hook.
Kirei, in fact, doesn't even have the best stats among his
teammates. Take a look at the scores of Doss, Kirei’s
How can we see this for players? MSF Academy support teammate.

Let’s take a look at our two players from earlier.

First, we’ve got our Bronze Elo player, this is what their
1834.00s
Tunnel Vision score looks like 2 Zone of Frequency

76.00s Tunnel
Vision
3.20s
Zone of Frequency Zone of Duration

65
Doss tunnels about once every 1834 seconds, and when
Tunnel
Vision
4.10s he does, he tunnels for 3.2 seconds. In a 30 minute game
Zone of Duration
Doss spends about 3 seconds tunneling, 30 times less
than a Bronze player.
The player tunnels about every 76 seconds and when
tunneling spends, on average, 4.1 seconds focusing on
just one spot. Why is this important?

To put this into context, in a 30 minute game, this player Low Elo players are not even aware of the degree of how
spends over a minute and a half just looking at a single often they tunnel in-game.
point on the screen.
That’s because keeping track of your attention can be
What about our MSF Academy player, Kirei? very exhausting and it’s easy to go on autopilot as the
This is what his stats look like: game goes on.

6
 MAP AWARENESS

High Elo players have spent a lot of mental effort

Map Awareness
training themselves to not zone out and have built
habits that let them gather a lot of information very One of the main sources of information in League of
quickly. Legends is, of course, the minimap.

Unfortunately, even with doing replay reviews, there’s Therefore we’ve dedicated a whole special analysis
no way for you to check if you went on autopilot or section just to understand how well you use the
when you tunneled during the game. You’ll have to rely minimap.
solely on your memory of that part of the game.

What is Map Awareness?

Outside of the obvious fact that tunneling during a
teamfight is disastrous, keeping track of your tunnel
vision is a very important step to maximizing the use of
Map Awareness is how consistent you
your visual attention. The less you tunnel the more are at checking your minimap
you’ll be updating and gathering new information.
Map Awareness is one of the most critical skills in
Through analyzing how often and when you tunnel, we League of Legends.
can then give you actionable advice as to what parts of
the game you’re most prone to tunneling and how you Not only does it keep you up-to-date about which
can work on improving your focus and concentration to enemies are missing in lane or which allies may be
work your way out of the bad habits. nearby to come gank for you, but it’s also great for spot-
ting where the enemy jungler is so you can adjust your
aggression in lane accordingly.

In addition, the minimap can also be used to

Estimate the position and path of the enemy

jungler by mirroring and monitoring the path your
jungler took.

Identify lane pressure by looking at the size of the

minion waves as well as which direction they’re
pushing in.

Understand zone pressure by looking at what

parts of the map you have vision control in.

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 MAP AWARENESS

Needless to say, the minimap is a treasure trove of Map Awareness

Why is this Important?
information if you know what you’re looking for. As we
mentioned before, proper decision making requires
It’s likely no surprise to you that our MSF Academy
high quality information, most of which can be extract-
player is much better at consistently checking their
ed with a quick glance at the minimap.
minimap than our Bronze Elo player.

However, only glancing at the minimap every other

The most obvious difference is that the MSF Academy
minute isn’t very useful. The game state in League
player checks their minimap almost 8x as often as our
changes quickly, and the information you got from your
Bronze Elo player.
last glance will very quickly be out of date, so it’s
important to keep that information up to date by check-
There is, however, an additional, and more subtle
ing regularly.
difference in the amount of time each player spends
looking at the minimap.
How can we see this for players?
You may think that it doesn’t matter if the look duration
Let’s take a look at how our Bronze player uses the
is 1.2 seconds or 0.7 seconds, but this difference
minimap.
indicates a more important underlying quality.

17.80s The MSF Academy player looks at the minimap with a

3 Check Frequency
purpose. They know what they’re looking for and hence
have to spend less time when they look at the minimap.
Map
Awareness 0.50s If you want to learn more about this you can learn even
more about it in our video here!
Minimap Fixation Time

Our Bronze player checks their minimap, on average, Of course, just looking at the minimap for shorter
every 17.8 seconds and when they do, they look for an periods of time won’t make you a better player, but
average of 1.2 seconds. tracking how long you’re looking at the minimap for is a
good indicator of how quickly you can gather
Take a look at our MSF Academy player information from it.

2.30s
95
Check Frequency

Map
Awareness 0.70s
Minimap Fixation Time

They check their minimap every 2.3 seconds and look

at it for an average of 0.7 seconds.

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 FIGHT PREPARATION

The ability to fight is the sole metric that some players We can see this player checks their minimap an
judge themselves by. While that's not a good way to look average of 15 seconds before the fight starts, and goes
at things, teamfighting is a key indicator of performance. into 24% of their fights aware of the game-state.
Preparing for those fights is even more important.
Going into a fight aware is defined as having checked
your minimap at most 5 seconds before the fight
What is Fight Preparation? starts.

Fight preparation is using the minimap

to understand the game state in the
moments leading up to a fight. 100.0%
99
Percentage of early fights aware

When going into a fight, or when being engaged upon,

it’s very important to have a clear understanding of who
is involved and what other potential threats are.
Fight
Preparation 1.50s
Average time checked before early fights

There’s a very big difference between going into a fight

having checked your minimap 15 seconds before it
starts versus having checked it 1.5 seconds before.
Why is this Important?
If you’re working off of information that’s 15 seconds
old, then that top laner that you saw pushing the wave The differences between our players are extremely stark.
earlier could now already be halfway down to mid lane
and will flank you in a fight you thought was a 1v1. The MSF Academy player doesn’t go into a single fight
without being aware of the current game state and, on
average, has checked their minimap 1.5 seconds before
How can we see this for players? the fight started.

Taking a look at our Bronze Elo player, this is what their fight Understanding the game state and assessing threats
preparation stats look like. are necessary to plan and anticipate events in the
upcoming fight.

24.0% From the above data, it’s easy to see that our MSF

0 Percentage of early fights aware Academy player is able to much better assess the fight
they’re going into by being more aware of the current
threats. They can quickly decide if they need to disen-
Fight
Preparation
15.00s gage or if they’re safe to push on.
Average time checked before early fights

9
 PICK AWARENESS

One of the biggest mistakes most players make is

getting picked off too often. Surprisingly, even the best
0.0%
91
Percentage of times picked off unaware
players are susceptible to this flaw. The biggest cause
for this is getting caught unaware.
Pick
Awareness
2.70s
What is pick awareness? Average time checked before picked off

Pick awareness is a player’s gamestate Why is this Important?

awareness before they got picked off.
For our Bronze Elo player, them getting picked off is
Being picked off comes either from being out of likely due to a mixture of their lack of game state
position due to poor or reckless decision making, or a awareness as well as overall poor decision making.
general unawareness of the risk level involved in taking
a specific path. As you can probably imagine, depend- Even if the player checked their minimap more often it’s
ing on which bucket you’re in, you need to practice likely that they’ll still get picked off regularly because
different things to get picked off less. they aren’t using that information properly to adjust
their pathing. Fortunately, we can track how often you
are getting picked off as well as precisely where you’re
How can we see this for players?
getting picked off and the relative game state at that
moment.
Let’s take a look at the pick awareness performance of
our Bronze Elo player
Then we can give actionable advice on how you can
either increase your awareness, or how you can better
60.4% use the knowledge of the gamestate that you have to
make the correct decisions. For our MSF Academy
0
Percentage of times picked off unaware
player, we can see that they are aware of the gamestate
every single time they get picked off, and that they last
Pick
Awareness
11.60s checked their minimap an average of 2.7 seconds
Average time checked before picked off before being picked off.

The main working area for our MSF Academy player is

As you may have guessed by now, our Bronze level therefore not increasing their game state awareness
player is somewhat oblivious to the game state based but making better use of their game state knowledge
on how rarely they check their minimap. and assessing threat levels of certain game regions as
well the risk of taking certain paths. It’s likely that most
We can see that in about 60% of the times they got of their picks are due to reckless decision making to
picked off they were unaware of missing enemies, and take a slightly shorter path in rotation, rather than
they last checked their minimap an average of 11.6 being caught off guard by a missing enemy. Some of
seconds before being picked off. their deaths can also be because they experiment a lot
in solo que and are always testing their limits.
How does this look for our MSF Academy player?

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 WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN FOR ME?

The way you allocate your visual attention has massive All of these are just a few of the many ways you can go
implications on your in-game performance and what about expanding your League of Legends knowledge
rank you are able to achieve. foundation. However, this same approach is not
possible to assess and improve your visual attention.
Understanding League of Legends theory and trying to
improve your decision making in different states of the Beyond trying to recall how you perceived certain
game is important, but if you don’t properly train to in-game moments, up until now, there hasn’t been a
correctly manage your visual attention, you won’t be way for you to understand how you are managing your
able to make much use out of that knowledge during a visual attention.
game.
That’s why we decided to partner up
League is a game of decision making. To make the right with Tobii, so that we can directly
decisions you need to train effectively on two fronts. You analyze players’ eye movements from
have to improve your game knowledge & understanding those gaming with a Tobii eye tracker.
of the meta, and you have to be able to consistently
acquire and update your information in-game by Now you can understand why you died to a gank: did
managing your visual attention. you see it coming but decide to stay, or did you see it
too late and were already dead by the time you realized
The way to go about training your League of Legends what was going on?
decision-making abilities is relatively straightforward.
In addition to collecting your gaze and game data, we
There’s a host of resources online, such as: also needed to develop specialized analytics to
properly combine and interpret the data.
YouTube channels from amateurs to pro players
along with Challenger level streamers. We’ve extended our research and
implemented our findings seamlessly
Meta tier lists and long blog series about many
different game aspects.
into our desktop application where you
can see the results side by side with
Replay reviews and/or coaching sessions to the rest of your standard LOL data.
review your mistakes and get direct feedback on
your decision making. If you’re playing with a Tobii eye tracker and the
Mobalytics Desktop Application we can give concrete
Mobalytics GPI to get specific breakdowns and advice on how you’re using your visual attention, how
advice towards improving individual skills. you’re processing information, and what you can do to
maximize your use of information in League of
Legends.

11
Give yourself that edge to make Season
10 your season to climb!

Mobalytics and Tobii have also created a partner

package where you get 3 months of Mobalytics
Premium Free when you purchase a Tobii eye
tracker. That way you can make full use of the
whole set of analytical features we’ve specifically
designed to help you climb and improve in League.

Claim the special package

and get your eyetracker