Riot officially confirmed what players suspected. There is a lot of difference between men and women when it comes to choosing characters.
These are not the results of any of the surveys, but direct data from Riot. Developers, while talking about creating different characters and genders, also mentioned one of the main differences between men and women playing LoL.
It turns out that men hardly ever look at the gender of the characters they play. This breaks down to roughly 50%. The hero’s skills, his position in the meta, etc. are of major importance here.
Women see it differently
The topic of women emerged on the occasion of the issue of publishing female characters all the time. We recently wrote about the fact that 7 out of 10 characters turned out to be female heroes. Riot explained it mainly with the desire to equate the number of male and female characters.
It was only added later that this was not the main reason at all. The point here is that by not producing a female protagonist, Riot turns somehow away from the female part of LoL. How is that? It turns out that 97% of women choose only female characters.
This does not mean that women do not pay attention to skills etc. According to what Riot writes, they just look first and foremost at female characters and choose the ones that suit them best, looks don’t necessarily matter here, or at least Riot doesn’t suggest anything like that.
Riot later commented that this was one of the major differences between male and female LoL players. Certainly it is quite interesting, because it is not paid much attention on a daily basis.