This is a unique situation in which the series upset the balance in League of Legends.
Arcane turned out to be a success, the production is ranked number 1 in popularity on Netflix in many countries while outperforming the best-rated Squid Game to date. After the first three episodes, it also turned out that the characters featured in the series suddenly began to gain popularity in League of Legends as well.
The pickrate of many characters suddenly increased. The same applies to the frequency of banning them. Something like this hasn’t been around for a long time, and Riot probably doesn’t know how to approach it.
Balance in LoL disturbed by the series
Vi felt it the most, and she is really hard to get right now. She is either picked or banned.
But that’s not all – you can clearly see which characters received a warm welcome. This is what the graphs for Jinx look like:
This is how it looks like for Jayce:
Other characters like Ekko, Singed, Ryze, Caitlyn were also seen in the series. On the other hand, Viktor does not show such huge jumps compared to the rest. Everything looks similar to Heimendinger, i.e. slight increases in pickrate.
It can be expected that the heroes will either gain or lose popularity depending on what happens in the next episodes of Arcane. This is quite an unusual situation for a competitive game in which people were driven by the desire to win rather than wanting to play their favorite character from the series.