‘97% of female League of Legends players play only female champions,’ Riot says

There’s a joke among gamers that when you come across a female avatar or champion in-game, there’s a good chance that the person behind the monitor is actually a male. But what about the inverse? When given the chance, do female gamers choose male avatars or female avatars? According to Riot, female League of Legends players play only female champions — and the numbers aren’t even close.

When responding to a comment on a Reddit thread concerning new champions being skewed in favor of female representation, Lead Champion Producer Ryan ‘Reav3’ Mireles explained that creating more female champions in fact wasn’t leaving out “half the playerbase” considering how female League players predominantly played female champions while male players were split pretty evenly between both.

“We aren’t abandoning half our playerbase by making more female Champions,” Mireles said. “Our data shows that female players primarily play female champions, in fact its something like 97% of female players only play female champions. Male players are evenly spilt between male and female champions, so Male players play 50/50 between male and female champions, If anything whenever we make a male champion we are abandoning most of our female players, since most of our female players won’t play male champions at all.”

Ahri from League of Legends/Riot Games

While the exact reason for why female League of Legends players play only female champion was unclear and debated at length in the very same thread, with reasons stemming from “female League players only like playing ‘pretty’ characters” to enchanters, the defensive caster support archetype in the game being a popular choice among female players and composed of primarily female champions to boot, Mirales followed up with another comment that divulged which roles female players actually gravitated towards according to Riot’s data.

“Actually female players tend to play ADC, Support and Midlane roughly the same amount,” Mirales added. “Jungle and top are the roles that have very few female players queueing for. It correlates strongly with data we have that shows that female players heavily prefer to play ranged champions rather then melee champions.”

What do you think of the fact that 97% of female League of Legends players play only female champions, according to Riot’s data? Let us know what you think in the comments.