John and I played a rather nasty game of League of Legends yesterday, and it sort of stuck out to me among the several games we've played over the last couple of days. To start out with, even though I've probably now played enough games to be considered a level 30 player (if you combine both my EU and US accounts), I don't really consider myself to be an excellent level 30 player. "Sometimes rather good" is more the term I would use to describe myself. The reasons for this don't particularly matter for the topic of this post, so I won't get into that now. I'm here to describe this one particular game and why I think it's significant enough to talk about.
First and foremost, it was apparent to me that the team was either comprised of at least two to three individuals who where "together" (meaning they were probably friends in real life and had voice chat going on), or they were just a handful of very, very good players. More on that later.
The game started out rather weird, because we noticed that two of their players -- Shaco and Amumu -- had chosen Smite for one of their summoner spells. I suppose having two junglers is POSSIBLE in a 5v5, but it's highly rare and this was the first time that I had seen or even considered such a thing. So right away, I was rather suspicious of this team.
Despite this, the game started out rather well for our team because we managed to get first blood off of their Dr. Mundo in our lane. (I actually don't recall who got it. I think it was John, but I'm not sure.) Mundo simply underestimated us, and it was a mistake that he never made again. Like I said, this was a team of very good players.
I would assume that Shaco wanted to get a couple of levels in the jungle before he decided to harass us -- which was another factor leading to our successful first blood. After that, however, things got a bit nasty. I'm not entirely sure the reasons -- it could be that they were indeed together and Dr. Mundo was very angry at us and asked his friends to come help him, or it could be that they simply viewed our lane as a very big threat to them, or it could be that they just really wanted to push our lane -- but after that first blood we were under constant attack from Mundo, Shaco, and surprisingly enough, their Amumu.
There were a few reasons why the middle of this game went very badly for us. The first was the whole jungling thing -- if done right (which, I suppose they were doing it right), it means that most of their team would exceed ours in regards to level and gold. That means being stronger than us due to simple brute strength in level advantage and in item quality from the gold. Adding to this problem was the fact that one of their champions was a leaver (or disconnected, or whatever), meaning that their whole team was leveling faster than ours. In mid-game, all of them were 3-4 levels higher than me, and that was unbelievably frustrating.
I don't do a whole lot of damage to begin with. I do a decent amount right away, and then it's basically down to nothing. This means that my 1v1's go one of two ways: Either the other champion gets scared at how much damage I do right at the start and runs away, or they know my champion and keep fighting me (in which case they WILL win). Head-on fights are not what I'm good at, and I'm fine with that. But it means that if the ENTIRE enemy team has a 3-4 level advantage over me, then I am utterly useless.
Back to this match, though. The ganks that they were pulling off where utterly over-the-top. Shaco was appearing out of nowhere (as he does), and Mundo was being an overly aggressive bitch. The surprising part was Amumu, who was constantly hiding in the brush right beside our outer turret. I have never been harassed so badly in a game, and them dedicating 3 members of their team to our lane was very surprising. Especially so early on -- naturally it's normal for a lane to get pressured after level 10-ish. But this was only at level 5 when it started happening, if I recall correctly.
From that point forward, I was totally shut down and really couldn't contribute anything to the game. (Aside from the occasional annoyingly negative comments that were getting on John's nerves. Sorry about that, love.) I eventually just shut my mouth and tried to lane and jungle as best I could to try and catch up in levels. We held our own -- remember that we had 5 to their 4 -- so even though they had level advantages they couldn't make a TON of progress. One on one we were losing horribly, and sometimes even 2 on 1, but they couldn't take on our whole team.
Slowly, we began to catch up in levels. When I hit level 18, I finally started getting kills again, and things slowly started to get easier for us. As abruptly as anything, we killed Baron, killed them all in a huge team fight, and rampaged through their base to end the game. I was surprised that we were able to turn the game around, but looking back it of course makes sense. Had they been able to apply the needed pressure when they had their level advantage, I'm sure they could have won. But we lasted long enough to level the playing field, and it was finally 5 equally powerful champions against only their 4. Simple math won the day.
I really don't know how the game would have went if it had stayed 5v5. These guys were very good, and very nasty. I'd like to think it would have at least been a close match, but who knows. What I do know, however, is that I feel as though we went up against a very good bunch of players, and it feels pretty good to come out on top after seeing how well they played. We'll place this match under the category for the times when I was "sometimes rather good".
No comments:
Post a Comment