I got quite a bit out of watching worlds; my interest was not entertainment, but rather education. I felt that on the whole, team strategy was something I needed (and ONM as a whole needed) to beef up on considerably if we were to continue succeeding as a team beyond our first open division season. So I sat there, watching every match, observing every single detail that I could, and I came up with a few observations.
1. Stalling only works if you can guarantee you won't make any major errors
A lot of my own strategic ideas prior to worlds followed this formula:
Stall > ??? > Profit
Take CLG.eu vs Azubu Frost game 3 as a good example of what my point is going to be here. CLG.eu is the definition of the team that stalls out until the 40 minute mark, then just rolls over their opponents. There's one important thing to note about CLG.eu, though; they are probably the most solid (not necessarily best) players in the world. They sit, they hold their own, they don't give away massive advantages in general, and they can thus pull off the stalling game. Their loss in game 3 vs Azubu came down to two factors. One is top lane (which we will revisit later on; they banned out Wickd pretty easily), and the other was a single (yet large) mistake they made while holding mid tower.
The relatively scary Singed (whose value was quickly falling off at that point due to the increasing strength of Ezrael on CLG.eu) flanked them from behind. Unfortunately, at this point, that same Ezrael that CLG.eu needed to deal with Singed got a bit too far forward - Azubu's Skarner reacted perfectly, managing to get the Impale down onto Ezrael, leading to him being blown up by Azubu while CLG.eu was unable to react due to the Singed being in the middle of their team, under their tower causing all sorts of mayhem. They lost the fight (I believe it was actually an ace, 5-0, but I don't entirely remember) and off of that lost the game rather easily.
You can stall all you want, but I've come to the simplest of truths - if you can't guarantee you won't make any major mistakes, it might not be the best strategy.
I mentioned top lane being a factor a couple paragraphs ago, which leads me to this important fact:
2. Champion skill is scary
I came to a realization watching that same game 3 after they successfully banned out Wickd two days in a row - the fact that he's scary enough on those champions
to
be banned out is in and of itself a notable thing. I realized that in my attempts to be every some ridiculously flexible jack of all trades, I would make stupid errors rather consistently. I'd forget simple, easy things - ranges, damages, attack speeds, etc. I'd farm poorer. I'd die in situations where I shouldn't, I'd fail to get kills that I should have, and on the whole I was a poorer player.
So I made a really tough decision and decided I'd just restrict myself to a pool of 5 champions.
No more Morg, no more Cass, no more Ahri, no more Gragas. Just Karthus, Anivia, Twisted Fate, Diana, and Orianna. To be honest, that's kind of setting myself up for failure - I have one champion I played consistently prior to this switch (Karthus), one champion I recently picked up (Diana), two champions that I played either on release (Orianna) or when I was learning the game (Anivia) but haven't played much since, and one champion that my team wanted me to learn that I hate more than anything I've ever played and makes me want to rip my own eyeballs out through my eardrums (Twisted Fate). And I've been improving since. My TF is still weak (picked him up, decided I'd need something to learn or I'd be bored), and I don't really find many opportunities to play Diana, but on the whole the improvement is noted. I no longer just lose lanes on mechanics (getting outfarmed), and I've managed to rekindle the desire I had to play this game that I lost prior to worlds. My improvement and comfort level increase with each successive night of practice - I feel more ready for whatever might happen in the future of ONM than I have at any time prior. And that brought with me another new idea:
3. Having a plan before the game is extremely important to success
When I cut down to 5 champions, the entire team did the same at very least with the idea that we could all own every champion in our respective champion pools for complete flexibility in pick order. What we did from there was we sat down with a spreadsheet that everyone on the team had access to, and we each came up with comps that would work off of that pool of 24 (we have one champion to run both as jungle and top lane for flexibility there as well). We came up with reasoning why it'd work and from that we'd have a plan. And we came up with some pretty neat stuff.
My favorite is a
ridiculously
niche, special-situation comp that we have not yet in a number of games of practice managed to run. We pick Shen top, Shyvana jungle, Sivir AD, Sona support, and Anivia AP. Shyvana starts red with a leash from Shen while Anivia starts blue with help from Sivir/Sona. Sivir/Sona go mid, Anivia heads bot for a 1v2 lane. The goal is to force mid tower super super early, then shift bot and take that tower down. This gives us a huge amount of control over dragon with the Shen ult from top as well, and hopefully we can snowball from there. There are a number of problems with this comp that are the reason why we haven't run it:
1. It only works on purple side
2. It only works if we can get Shen, which is hard especially as purple side
3. It relies on my ability to 1v2 successfully unless they shift bot>mid
We have a series of more reasonable comps that I don't really want to divulge any information on (I'm a big fan of Dignitas-esque secrecy in strategies - I don't really think that anyone
would
find this out, but better to be safe than sorry) at this point in time. A lot of other, reasonable comps. This allows us to go in, know what we're doing, and never get put on the spot. We go into a game, know we need to pick X right away, ensure they don't get Y, and go from there.
4. Communicate everything
Everything.
Look at CLG.eu (to continue beating a dead horse), more specifically look at the camera on CLG.eu during the games. They were pretty much all talking constantly - there was nothing going on on that map that one member of the team saw that the entire team didn't see. Look at their teamfighting, where they were quickly calling out targets and adapting immediately. I've noticed something playing with the various MS groups over the course of my time playing this game (and having the unique experience of a very low number of games of solo queue under my belt) - we don't communicate anywhere near as much as we should.
We go into lane, and we are three islands. Jungle shows up every now and again, tries to do something but doesn't put on any reasonable pressure, and goes back to farming. We're making a concerted effort to change that as far as ONM is concerned - I like to think in my head that if I'm starting to lean into annoying territory with near-constant updates on whether the opposing mid might even be thinking about roaming, I'm probably doing my job right. Deaths get prevented, we have knowledge of any objectives they might be actively trying to take, we can react to the situation a lot better.
I feel like before we were also trying to have one person shoulder the burden of decision-making for the entire team - we've moved away from that. We've gotten enough on the same page from working with each other that that's no longer really necessary. One of us comes up with an idea, we quickly decide whether to go with it, we move on. We don't have massive meltdowns over things going wrong anymore. We are an actual team.
Between these four things, I feel like I've had almost a revolution in my idea of the way this game should be played - whether or not I'm right on these remains to be seen.
