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The Summoner's Guidebook: Cleaning up after your LoL messes
Two weeks ago, we covered initiation in the Summoner's Guidebook, and last week we covered zoning. Those two elements comprise the early and middle parts of a teamfight, but if you want to win in League of Legends, you need to finish strong. As a fight winds down, wounded players begin to disengage in order to lick their wounds. Some characters just want to pull out early to wait out cooldowns, while in other cases it's purely a matter of health. Sometimes a player will get zoned out of a fight so far that she cannot contribute meaningfully to the teamfight at large. At this point, tough decisions start to crop up. Do you split off and give chase, taking away a large chunk of health from your team to secure the kill? Or do you allow the enemy to get away, giving away potential gold and/or allowing the enemy team a chance to come back? This decision is a non-question for a lot of players, but we should really be thinking about it when we are fighting. There are a lot of questions we should be asking ourselves before we drop out of a fight to chase, but all too often our eyes get filled with the sight of blood and everything else vanishes. I know you can do a little better than that.
The Summoner's Guidebook: League of selfishness
Even though League of Legends' new Honor Initiative has greatly improved the conduct of summoners as a whole, I've become very frustrated with "selfish" player behavior as of late. I've been playing a lot of ARAMs inbetween Dominion matches lately, and both game modes give rise to the same problems: impatient players who are too hungry for blood. Killing enemy champions is given a lot of incentive in LoL, and players often put themselves in awful situations that end up putting their whole team at risk of defeat just to get a single kill. This "blood in the eyes" phenomenon is pervasive across the entirety of League, but it is especially common in ARAM. This week, I'm going to look at this kind of selfish behavior and cover some ways you can focus on more team-friendly actions. No, this doesn't mean giving me all the kills. It just means playing for the benefit of everyone and not just for your own personal pride.
