Can we discuss how numbers are suffocating the importance of decision making and strategy?
I have this game, where my team has 150k+ mastery points, against lane opponents with 4-8k mastery points. My team should have a major advantage.
However, this game was disgusting to watch. They all lost their lanes early and died within the first couple minutes of the game. I stomped Lissandra and constantly forced her out of lane, but she just took the CS hit and recalled any time she got hit, instead of risking death.
Lucian kept dying to incredibly stupid aggressive plays, Malphite kept getting ganked and dying while pushed to the enemy turret with zero wards, Vi kept committing suicide at bottom lane after Lucian's failed dives, and Nami was slightly better than all of them, but any time I landed a binding, no matter who I landed on, she would immediately ult at them; bound Lissandra and she's in Hourglass? Nami ult. Jax with my ult on cooldown? Nami ult.
These players were indistinguishable from bots with terrible AI. They kept doing the same thing over and over, even though that thing was consistently failing.
I'm focusing on the the Lucian, because he was going just balls to the wall and dying, over and over. I may have gotten brain damage from watching it; he died seven (7) times in 15 minutes. He permanently pushed to the enemy turret and even tried to dive a few times, even though they were behind by more than 1000 gold.
You can see on this kill map that most of his deaths were at the enemy turret or middle of the lane (however far he managed to retreat after screwing up), and only even got close to his turret once, so all of these deaths were unavoidable; it's not like he was being 4-man dived:
To illustrate how ridiculous his deaths were, on one occasion, Lissandra roamed bottom and I pinged her and started to follow. But she missed her engage, so I just went back to lane rather than risking getting caught between her and Jax in the river. After her failed engage, she literally sat in the river brush, on top of a ward, for more than an entire minute. I pinged her every now and then to remind bottom that she was there, but during this time, Lucian attempted to all-in Ezreal, dashing into him while Lissandra should have even been on his screen, and she engaged on them and got a double kill.
Basically, these players had no decision making skill or strategy, yet they somehow still have 50%+ win rate, because the stupid shit they're doing actually works when they have a number advantage. As long as they have a bit of a gold lead, these idiotic players make them win games. Their match histories support this: on most of their losses, they have 8+ deaths and <1 KDA, but their wins have high KDA and often 8+ kills. This is a recurring theme in almost every game.
I think this is very likely a side effect of damage being so high, and I don't think it's healthy for the game, overall. When most of the players on both teams are lacking decision making skill and the ability to adapt their play style to the situation, the outcome boils down to which team happens to get an advantage in the first couple of minutes.
