What is a Vision Score?
Vision score is a post-game stat that shows how much vision a player has provided for their team, and how much vision they have denied from the enemy team. You can check your vision score by going into the post-game graphs to see how you stacked up against your own teammates (it’s especially shocking to see how little your teammates will contribute to vision sometimes) or by pressing the tab during an ongoing game and looking at the number on a characters trinket slot.
How is Vision Score Calculated?
While we’re not positive how vision score is calculated, there are some estimates that players have come to after years of testing. The best estimate is that 1 point is equal to 1 minute of ward vision provided or that 1 point is equal per minute of ward lifetime denied from the enemy team.
Champions with vision abilities, like Ashe with Hawkshot (W) or Quinn using Heightened Senses (W), also contribute to vision score as well. While the values for vision score contributed by abilities are unknown, revealing enemy champions or neutral epic monsters will increase your score more than revealing an empty area.
Also read: How to Unlock Agents in Valorant?
Vision Score Modifiers
While we’re not entirely sure the base points that different actions provide, Riot has been more clear about factors that will affect a ward’s vision score generation.
Staleness
A ward that hasn’t seen any enemy champions, wards, or epic monsters will gradually decrease in point value for the longer it has gone without detecting anything of value.
Redundancy
Wards near other allied sources of vision (your teammates’ wards, your towers, or lane minions, for example) will have their point values decreased the more redundant sources of vision in an area. However, Lane minions don’t reduce the vision score of wards in bushes, even if they provide a vision of similar areas.
Safety
Wards nearer to your base give a lower score, starting at the base value near your buffs and decreasing in value the closer you get to your base.
Pointlessness
Wards within the vision radius of towers, or wards inside your base provide zero points. This presumably stops players from spamming their wards in meaningless places to increase vision scores.
Baseline
If a ward is killed immediately by enemies, it will still give a score as if it survived for a minimum of 20 seconds.
Also read: Micro vs. Macro in League of Legends
How Can I Improve my Vision Score?
You can improve your vision score by placing more wards and placing them in more valuable spots. You’ll know a spot is good if you see enemy champions on your wards, and if you never see anyone walk by them (hopefully you’re keeping an eye on your minimap), you are potentially placing your wards in suboptimal places. It’s essential to try to remember to ward places you expect enemy champions to be – often near the river or other gank angles are great places to ward earlier in the game to prevent being ganked without knowledge the enemy jungler is coming.
It’s also a good idea to try to ward near rift herald and dragon if you are not in a position to take them yet, so you can see if the enemy team is attempting them and alternate your gameplan depending. Perhaps you’ll want to contest an objective because of information you’ve gained from your wards – like seeing that the enemy laner on rift herald has little mana and hasn’t recalled yet, so their items are weaker than yours.
On the other hand, perhaps this vision will give you the information that you can’t contest the objective you see the enemy team taking, and you can use that information to choose to attempt a play on the opposite side of the map at the same time, trying to take advantage of the weaker side of the map for the enemy team.
On the flip side, you can also increase your vision score by denying your opponent’s vision, so you’ll want to try to remember to use your sweepers or pink wards near commonly warded areas the enemy may want a vision of. Using a sweeper when you’re in the river or in the enemy’s jungle can be a great way to deny vision that would allow your opponent the opportunity to collapse on your position when you’re unprepared.
It’s also a good idea to try to sweep wards near gank paths for your jungler, so the enemy won’t see them coming, or to sweep out wards near-neutral objectives you’re trying to take uncontested.
You’ll also want to make sure you’re consistently using control wards – try to always have one on the map. Not only do they provide a permanent vision of the area around them, but they can also be used to detect enemies wards so they can function as a secondary way to sweep out wards if your trinket is on cooldown (or if you’re playing a champion that would prefer a different trinket over the ward trinket) – that means control wards can be used both for providing vision for your team or for denying it from the enemy.
You’d be amazed how often players will not buy control wards all game, or only buy one or two. If it’s not providing you vision of an important area, it might be time to move your control ward; it’s essential to try to always keep these placed in meaningful areas rather than just letting them sit in a bush in the river all game.
Your goal should be to improve your warding to provide your team with more information and to attempt to deny enemy vision in situations where it could be fatal to give information away unwittingly. If you work on both of these, your vision score will increase as a byproduct – keep working on your map control, and soon you’ll be climbing the ranks just from the increase to your macro skills around the map with the increased vision you have.
