This.

Also, I don't really remember saying much of anything about wards. You (MeltedWater) must have taken like two or three sentences out of my 30,000 character post (I know how long it is because it won't let me post more, haha). I will almost always buy a ward or two as an AD Carry during the laning phase simply because - more often than not - I'm backing at different times than the support, and they are often out of wards. Or simply to have one as a "just in case." It's 75 gold. It's not going to destroy your build.

During mid and late game, sure, save your money and let the bruiser, jungler, and support take care of warding.

why i lost the game i just played:
i was gp got kills up top and had better cs then their top by over 100.
both bot and mid fed over 9 deaths each.
all 4 of them ff at 20
-_-

Why you lost the game you just played:

You got fed. You saw your teammates struggling. You didn't push and roam. The other team got out of control, because you didn't intervene.

I'm going to cover this exact subject later, thank you for reminding me.

I will say this, though.

There are three lanes. That means that the amount of lanes "won" will never be equal. I don't count the jungler lane because he is essentially all three lanes, he's not his own lane, as there are no towers in the jungle, and the game is about destroying towers. What this means is that if you win your lane, there is a 50/50 chance that mid will win his lane and another 50/50 chance that bot will win their lane. 25% chance that both lanes will lose, 25% chance that both lanes will win, and 50% chance that one will lose and one will win. This is, of course, if they are left to their own devices. You can't expect your other lanes to do well, as 75% of the time, one of your lanes is going to fail. If you win your lane, it's now your responsibility (it's. your. ****ing. responsibility. It means it's your fault (or you should think of it like that) if another lane loses) to help your other lanes out.

If you'd rather ***** about your teammates losing their lanes than win though, there's not much I can do to help you. This sounds stupid but it's actually psychologically true. A lot of people would rather be "right" about something bad, than have the opposite "good" thing happen. Take for example an unruly child. If this unruly child breaks the rules often, his parents get used to this, and they get angry at him repeatedly. One night they tell this unruly child to be home by 10:00. They talk repeatedly while he's gone about how they don't expect him to get home on time, all the punishments they're going to give him, etc. He gets in at 9:58. What do the parents say? "Well you sure cut it close, huh?" In an irritated manner. They actually WANTED him to get home late, so that their anger would be justified.

It's the same with "unruly teammates." You'd rather be mad at them than do something about it to win the game. If you're in that state and unwilling to budge from it, there's nothing anyone can do until you decide you'd rather win than rage.

For those of you reading, there is more to come on this subject in another topic, when I have the time and energy to do so.

EDIT: The one downvote suggests that (if it was indeed the guy who I responded to that downvoted this) you indeed aren't ready to hear what I said. How sad for you.

I have to say that this is extremely useful. You've done an incredible job. Well done.

I would really like to hear what you have to say about 'Why your team stopped snowballing and how to keep it going.'

A team of friends that I play with has really been struggling lately. We play nearly every night and have had the most horrendous losing streak I've seen since I started playing League about a year ago. Sometimes it's hard to see where we are making our mistakes, but I think I've determined that it is our mid to late game that is killing us. We tend to have a pretty strong early game, keeping wards up and laning well. When we hit about level 10-13, things start to fall apart and it's hard to identify what's going wrong.

One thing that I know is that our warding situation late game is abysmal. We're often completely in the dark because late game a lot of our turrets are knocked out and nobody can find the time to get out there and place them. We get nickel and dimed in our lanes until a 5v5 teamfight happens that we can never seem to win. I realize this is terribly vague, but if I knew more about what to ask, I would. I really want to see us improve, I'm just struggling to figure out how. Maybe some general advice would help me see where we're failing?

If it helps, our team comp typically goes Xin/Renekton top, Nocturne Jungle, Brand mid, Sona/adc bot. I don't give a specific ADC because the player that fills that role has yet to find one that 'fits' him so that may be part of our problem. Occasionally we will go blitzcrank/darius bot (usually nets us First Blood), Malzahar mid, but then we don't have a jungle, so we end up with sona and xin/renekton top. This is because a couple people on our team are still very narrow in their champions. These are unranked blind picks btw :-/. Any advice you have would be appreciated, I want to see us get better.

I was going to say that often people will pick a "support" that can also "carry," because they hate the traditional supports, and this often causes warding problems late game because they're trying to finish their build and wards get in the way. However, if you have Sona late game, I'm not sure why she's not warding. As a support you always want to keep one slot open for wards (preferebly two for vision wards as well). That extra bit of whatever for a future item build isn't doing as much as a stack of 5 wards will do.

Also, everyone (except perhaps the AD Carry, and possibly the AP Carry if everyone is taking care of warding properly) should be warding. It's 75g. The support can sometimes spend upwards of 1500g on wards, any other role will spend 375g except possibly the jungler. That's one kill, or 18ish cs, buy the damn ward.

Have someone (other than the support) be in charge of reminding people to ward, maybe he'll have a 2 minute timer that goes off and then he'll pop up chat and say "Hey guys, remember we gotta ward."

The snowballing effect is first caused by individual skill - you won your lane because you have good 1v1 (or 2v2) ability. However the teamfight is a completely different monster. Without a good initiate, focused fire, displacement, etc. then every teamfight comes down to luck rather than skill. I've lost teamfights where the KDR was something like 5/23, simply because our team had no cohesion.

Take this as an example:

Top Malphite, Jungle Amumu, Mid Gragas, ADC Ezreal, and Support Alistar. You have to know these characters strengths. This is a beefy as hell team, and most of your damage will be coming from Ezreal with a little burst from Gragas. Late game, though, Gragas is mostly used for his ult to peel the team.

Situation 1 - Alistar jumps into the fray, they start targeting him, he knocks up a champ and then knocks them back (say the AP Carry, who is Fizz) in an attempt to kill him. Fizz laughs and hops back on top of Alistar, and he goes down. Meanwhile Malphite ults into their team and hits three of them - the tank, the jungler and poor Fizz again. Their ADC was smart and grabbed LW, seeing this tanky-as-hell team, as one of their first items. Their team gets scared and starts moving away from each other, at this point Amumu Q's in and Ults, grabbing two of them. Fizz's cooldowns are done, so he simply hops over Amumu and Malphite, ults Ezreal and QW's him, then E's back to his team. Ezreal dies. Gragas attempts to peel, but now the team has no damage, and their ADC simply destroys the tanks.

Situation 2 - Amumu decides "Hey, my ult keeps them in place for a minute or two, I'm going to initiate." He Bandage tosses in and (since he decided to be the main tank he went straight resistences and health) tanks the team until they start hitting him, where he ults. Bam, they're all in a nice, neat, comfy position for...wait for it...DAT MALPHITE! BAM! All of them are flying in the air, so Gragas can easily peel two of them away for Ezreal to RAPE, while Alistar stays RIGHT NEXT to Ezreal so Fizz can't do ****. Fizz tries to dive Ezreal only to be Knocked up and knocked back away, Ezreal downs him in a matter of seconds. Ace, the team lost no one.

Can you see this happening in your mind's eye? You have to realize your role, and your role will ALWAYS be changing depending on your team composition. Alistar won't always be required to babysit the carry during a teamfight, and Amumu won't always be the first one initiating.

Taking your own team comp into consideration, I would honestly get rid of Renekton and go with Xin. Also, Nocturne brings little to the team late game, especially with a team where you have little CC. All your CC seems directed at ONE person, except Xin and Sona's ult. Consider switching Nocturne to a jungler with mass-CC like Amumu or Malphite. All of your champs have incredible 1v1 capability but without a team-disrupter, you'll go down like flies every time. You could also try Kennen top and Xin jungle, with Brand mid. This would actually work quite well as Kennen's ult would place them perfectly for both Xin to get in and peel them to your team, as well as Brand to unload hell on them.

Also, instead of blind pick, try draft-mode. It's more competetive and (in my opinion) a lot more fun. Plus it'll get you ready for ranked teams. Also, it gives you the opportunity to ban champions that seem to disrupt your team's flow.

EDIT: I just realized something else, you have no tank. You need one. I'd go with Alistar instead of Sona, maybe, on bottom, or even Malphite. Tweak the team composition so you have these things:

1. Lots of health. At least one straight up tank and another tanky champ.
2. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of CC. The more the merrier.
3. Burst damage. Xin fits this role well. This is for downing priority targets.
4. Sustained damage. This is your ADC. Sometimes your top or jungler will fit this as well.
5. MOAR CC!!
6. AoE damage. Brand fits this well and can wreck teams when they're bunched up together with his pillar + his ult.

There's probably more to include but these are the main properties. CC is so goddamn important though, as well as someone who can simply take hits all day long. You lack both of these, and is likely the reason you're losing. Wards are important, but it's likely the other team isn't warding as well as they should either, so you can't blame it on that.

Thanks a lot for the advice. I didn't want to blame it solely on wards, that was just the only thing that I could see. Although the team comp seems blatantly obvious to me now.

But anyway, this helps a lot and makes sense as to why we do well in lanes, but suck at team fights. None of us are experienced with Malphite, Alistar, or Amumu, but I'm sure one of us can pick them up and start practicing. What do you think of Maokai jungle? I'm pretty good with that.

I actually use Maokai as well, but again, he's got more individual disrupt than team, also snares don't stop abilities or attacks. His knockback is really useful for channeling champions like Malzahar, Fiddle (drain, not the ult), etc. but that's all the CC usefulness you'll get from him. His ult is very nice in a teamfight, however it's really easy to move the fight away from it. He's really useful overall, but you'll want more CC before you incorporate him into your team I would think.

Keep in mind my ELO is very low, and you're probably much better suited for mechanical questions like this to go somewhere like ExecutionerKen's help thread, etc. They have mondo experience with **** like that. However, I believe that people like me and FaerellG (Who have been in the muck and realize how different it is from higher ELO play) are better suited to tell you what "works" in low ELO, and what is holding you back.

For instance, things like Critplank and Crit Ashe still work in low ELO quite effectively, but if you tell a high ELO person this they'll laugh at you. My friend has something like a 75% win rate with Ashe and he goes double PD before he gets any damage at all, I believe. He might get PD and then IE and then PD though, I'd have to ask him. It works REALLY well, and actually high ELO tactics (IE to Zeal to Vamp scepter to PD to BT) are subpar in low ELO. They still work, but the scoffed at "old ways" work better, because low ELO doesn't know how to counter them.

I personally use Critplank, and he's effective as well, because most top-laners at my ELO have no idea how to counter his poke-and-run. If I tried it in high ELO I'd get ROFLstomped, though.

EDIT: My Ashe friend also gets MS3 Boots, instead of AS boots. It gives him that extra poke-and-run edge and it works really well for him until he gets PD's, at which point both the AS Boots and MS3 boots are next to useless anyway. Again, this tactic won't work in higher ELO/more experienced play, but try it where you are at a couple of times and see if it works. It might, it might not, but you'll learn quickly whether it does or doesn't and you can adapt to it.

Also (and I'll touch on this later as well) this ties into "Why things like AP Yi sometimes work." The short version is because people have no goddamn idea how to counter it. AP Yi is easily countered with a stun or ignite, but people see this MASSIVE damage from Alpha Strike, and then they focus him and see that the entire team is doing less damage than he's healing and they freak out. One stun sets Yi back incredibly far, and he gets eaten. There are also tactics like AD Malzahar (his minions gain his attack damage at a 1:1 ratio, essentially giving you up to 3 ADC's in one teamfight), AD Leblanc (her skillset makes it perfect for her to just dish out a ton of AD while she's snaring/stunning disappearing and creating clones of herself), Crittlesticks (fear + silence while I CRIT you? Yes, please), etc. These are all "troll" builds that actually work really well because people just don't know how to counter it. In less-experienced play you can ROFLstomp people with these builds. Higher ELO will be like "WTF?" as they destroy you.

Thanks for the input. Considering nobody on my team even has an official ELO (we're really just starting, only 2 of us are even 30) it's still good to start to know the basics of team unity and cohesion so you have been immensely helpful.

I love this thread.

My 2 cents.

1) Mood is the most important thing for me. If the team is belittling each other then I try to even out the mood with positivity. If too much of it happens, I get into a bad mood and play worse as a result. In my past 25 games prior to yesterday, I had won 21 and lost 4. Yesterday, I lost 3 games. The reason? My teams were so disgusting in those 3 games that I got into a sour mood and played worse as a result, making bad decisions and missing things I never should have. This may not have been the ONLY reason I lost, but it was a primary contributing factor, I believe.

2) I definitely get where you're coming from with Knowledge V.S. Action. Also important is parsing out things that you think are true, but aren't, as you pointed out. So I'd expand the idea you're presenting to encompass...

Understanding Concepts, Learning from Mistakes, and Putting Ideas Into Action (then deciding whether or not the action was correct). I guess it's not as catchy, but it truly encapsulates the entire idea of how to improve. Whenever you do anything in the game, you should ask yourself if it was a good idea. For example...

We all know it's a good idea to harass in lane. But do you harass as Ryze at level 1 v.s. the Cassiopeia who just pinged 2? No. Doing so will result in you losing on the trade.

Will post more soon.