The Power of Shotcalling and Good Teamwork

WARNING: VERY LONG POST WITH NO TL;DR

This moment that I am about to describe is, to me, one of the greatest and most satisfying experiences in the game. It all begins with a game where your team is losing. Allies are beginning to turn against each other and start blaming each other and you see the cracks that will surely lead to a large and ominous "Defeat" blazing across your screen.

Rather than succumbing to the name-calling or blame game or responding to my mid-laner telling me to "Never build devourer again.", I instead focused on what we needed to do to come back and win the game. While my team was at our inner bot lane turret fighting, I took advantage of a minion wave mid and my tower-taking and I took both of the enemy's outer mid turrets.

After that I started to make the calls for our team. I would ping the objectives that we needed next and without a word my team would follow my instructions and we began to steadily even the gold disparity. Every objective we took was immediately followed by another ping or instruction from me as to what we would do next and incredibly no one disputed or ignored me.

Finally there was an opportunity where I knew we had an opening for Baron and our damage was enough that I knew we could burst it before the enemy team could respond. I called Baron and we took it quickly. Recalling we healed and pushed for the win.

Looking at the match history, at 26 minutes we were down by 7.6k gold. This was the point at which I took the two mid towers and our comeback began. By the end of the game (38 minutes) we were 6.9k gold ahead. For you math geeks like myself that means that in the span of 12 minutes our team was able to increase our gold by 14.5k.

I LOVE games like this one. They are rare I'll admit but so incredibly satisfying when they occur. What I learned from this game was that I should have been more vocal early about what our goals were and what objectives we should work for as a team. There was no reason for me to wait until we were so far behind to start making calls. I guess the moral of the story would be to always understand the value of objectives compared to kills (our botlane had a combined score of 2/15/23), not to be afraid to call the shots for your team, and finally to never give up or think a game is lost until it's over.

Thanks for taking the time to read my long-winded post! Hope to see you on the rift!