On Offensive, Defensive, and Neutral Game States

TLDR: If you die or otherwise fall behind, don't teleport right back to the wave and all in the guy who just killed you in some attempt to 'earn back' that death. Just play from behind a bit and practice that skill and magically a death or two here and there will end up not meaning anything in the long run.

Whether you refer to it as ahead, behind, even or offensive, defensive, neutral or advantage, disadvantage, equal, or use some other set of phrases the concept exists in many games, including league.

There are (broadly speaking) three possible states a game can be in at any time, though distinction must also be made between the micro and the macro level.

In league each champion has a micro state and the overall team has a macro state. These two levels are separate but related. You can be doing well as an individual (I am ahead/winning my lane/ drawing pressure/ fed) and doing poorly as a team (we are behind/on the defence/being splitpushed on/down in objectives/being outscaled).

Knowing which state of the game you are in both on a micro and a macro level is key for making a solid analysis of what you need to do to increase your chances of winning (finding a win condition like breaking bot inhib and taking baron while they can't afford to contest) or decrease your chances of losing (preventing a loss condition like losing track of a splitpusher who takes your base while you are distracted fighting over an objective).

This knowledge of what to do comes from a combination of experience and inspiration, with experience being the more reliable long term pool of information to draw from and inspiration being a gamble that you might choose to take if your prospects are either very good and you can afford the risks or very grim and you can't afford to pass up any chance you might have.

So then, clearly experience is what you want to rely on in most cases as inspiration is only useful when you are already winning hard or are about to lose.

Experience in each of the three broad game states on a micro and macro level, including specific strategic circumstances that may come up only occasionally.

So where am I going with this?

From my observation, most League players seem to go out of their way to only look for experience being on the offence. They want to be winning the lane, winning the game, dominating the map and being a hero so much that they rush into trades and fights that may or not help them win the game, not because its a good idea but because they would rather lose quickly and move on from the game rather than exist in a neutral game state for any length of time or god forbid a losing or defensive one.

The second it seems like the other team is gaining momentum on them many players mentally check out. They aren't 'winning' anymore so the game stops being fun or interesting to them. They stop observing closely and looking for opportunities to turn the tide or for things they can learn to better improve their chances in future games. If both teams are dancing around an objective and roughly equal on gold and scaling there always seem to be a few players who can't stand it and rush to start the fight, preferring to risk the game rather than not be 'on the offensive'.

In many other competitive games like Street Fighter or Go, the concept of training your skills for handling these game states are commonly accepted as just part of what you need to do. You fight a less skilled opponent in order to train your ability to spot weaknesses and capitalize on them, you fight stronger opponents to learn where your own weaknesses are and how to protect them better while looking for an opening, you fight who you believe to be similarly skilled people to check where you currently stand and see if you are improving or not.

League players though only seem to want to do the 'attack the less skilled players weaknesses' part, especially on the micro level.

I'm guilty of this as much as anyone. I go into a lane or come from spawn thinking 'ok I need to play defensively and wait for openings to make clean free trades and only go for the safe kills' but then after only a couple of these 'clean trades' made in a defensive mindset I see the enemy hp bar get chunked below my own and suddenly become bloodlusted. I forget that I'm behind and the only reason I'm winning trades is through careful tactical positioning and waiting for openings and try to force a fight, often dying or losing my flash when I remember too late exactly why I was playing defensive in the first place. I barely gain any useful defensive experience in such cases as I only spent a minimal amount of time playing defensively before I took the first chance to go offensive and fall too far behind after the failed attack.

There are varying levels in this offence-defence spectrum. By being too eager to go on offence from a slightly behind position and failing you end up so far behind that you are in a different level of defensive mode - instead of looking for smart clean trades that can turn the lane you end up no longer even being able to approach the enemy laner or cs without risking death, so you are forced to fall back to your xp range and farm under your tower. Get too greedy for cs and you may even then get poked low enough to be dived and then you are put into yet another even more defensive position.

Being down by a kill or two would have been recoverable through smart trades and careful defensive play, heck the difference that a few hundred gold makes shrinks the further the game goes on to the point that if you keep up in xp and cs a 0/2 laner is about equal to a 2/0 laner by the time the midgame rolls around.

But holding your defensive position and keeping up in gold/cs while behind is difficult and requires focus and experience with how to handle that situation. Experience that you won't have much of if you rush in to try and make a 'revenge kill' or otherwise 'prove yourself' as soon as you can to try and pretend that the first death or two were 'flukes' or something. It's way too common for League players to piss away their opportunity to play defensively by trying to 'earn back' those first few mistakes they made. All they usually end up doing is putting themselves even further behind and losing the chance to gain the experience of how to handle a slightly ahead opponent.

Well this has gone on kind of long but I guess the bottom line is that League players usually focus too much on what to do when ahead and how to try to get ahead, to the point where they neglect practicing what to do when behind and throw themselves even further behind by playing like they are still trying to get ahead - when they should be playing to get less behind.... which are not the same things.

TLDR: If you die or otherwise fall behind, don't teleport right back to the wave and all in the guy who just killed you in some attempt to 'earn back' that death. Just play from behind a bit and practice that skill and magically a death or two here and there will end up not meaning anything in the long run.