How it works
Where the numbers come from, how they're calculated, and - just as importantly - what they don't mean.
The data
Riot's match API records, for every player in every game, how many times they used each ping type. Ping Census reads your recent matches, counts those pings, and compares them against every other player who appeared in those same games.
Twelve ping types are tracked: All In, Assist Me, Generic (G), Enemy Missing, Enemy Vision, Get Back, Hold, Need Vision, On My Way, Push, Retreat and Vision Cleared.
One hard limit worth stating up front: the API gives per-game totals only. There are no timestamps and no targets, so nothing here can tell you when you pinged or at whom. Every statistic on the site is built from counts per game.
Where the comparison group comes from
Every match contains ten players, so each game you contribute also contributes nine other players' games to the census. That pool is the baseline you're ranked against - it grows, and sharpens, as more people run reports.
Comparisons are always made like for like:
- Same queues. The baseline is drawn from the same queues your report covers.
- Same role, where roles exist. Supports ping far more than toplaners, so a single blended average would flatter some players and insult others. Below 300 same-role games the report falls back to an all-roles baseline and says so on the page.
- Never across game types. Summoner's Rift and ARAM can't be combined into one report, because Howling Abyss communication is a genuinely different sport.
Everything is normalised per minute. Raw counts would simply reward playing long games.
Percentiles, not averages
Ping rates are heavily skewed - a handful of extremely loud players drag any average upward. So the report uses percentile rank: "you ping more than 73% of supports in the census" is robust to those outliers in a way that "the average support pings 4.1/min" is not.
Ping types you've never used show as "Never used" rather than a percentile. Ranking you among people who also never do the thing produces a number that looks meaningful and isn't.
Wins versus losses
The report shows how your ping mix differs between games you won and games you lost, with 95% confidence intervals, and labels each difference as "likely a real pattern" or "could be chance". Ping types used fewer than ten times in the whole sample are excluded - a ratio built on seven events is numerology, not analysis.
These are observations, not advice. Pings are as much a symptom of the game state as a cause of it: danger pings go up in losing games because losing games contain more danger. Nothing here says pinging more will win you games.
What the archetypes are - and aren't
Your archetype comes from a set of clearly defined rules over your ping mix and volume. You can read every archetype and its exact thresholds.
They are entertainment, not psychology. No validated instrument maps ping counts to personality, and the data can't distinguish a helpful "danger!" from passive-aggressive question-mark spam. Treat "The Doomsayer" as a nickname, not a diagnosis.
Freshness and sample size
- Reports use your most recent games, up to a few hundred per queue.
- Data refreshes from Riot at most once a day per player; in between, the stored census is used.
- Under 20 games, no profile is generated. Under 50, the win/loss section stays locked. Small samples produce confident-looking nonsense, so the site declines instead.