So I'm working to improve my rank each season, and improving myself each game. I main top, so if I see my team making a call I know isn't going to play out well for us is it better for me to not help and split push my lane or help and try to turn the bad call into as good of a situation as I can?
All ways help your team at what they do. If the other team engages halfway with 10 more kills even if you have bad positioning and whatnot if you all work together you will win. I stayed in bronze for 3 years before I realized that and as soon as I did I shot to gold. HOWEVER if you think it's a bad idea ping fall back but be there to support them whatever they may do.
hard to say for certain as everything about this game is very situational... example if you're playing tryndamere, you can just let your team do whatever dumb thing and shove a lane. But maybe you're more of a teamfighting champ, then you probably want to TP in to help out, and sometimes it'll backfire sometimes you'll turn it around...
The best way to learn is to get experience, and the only way to get experience is to make mistakes.
Like Axel said, play to your champion's strength first, and then evaluate your options after that. Doesn't make much sense to keep split pushing on Malphite or Maokai because they are team fighting champions. Doesnt make much sense to TP in as Tryndamere or something when you can get multiple towers.
But after that preliminary deduction, you gotta decide for yourself to go against the grain or not. I actually got gold playing a top lane only account, which is kind of depressing since Ive been maining adc on this one forever. I just played to my champ's strengths first, and did my job. If i was on malphite or mundo or something, I joined every teamfight I could. If I was on Nasus, i took every tower they let me.
Even if you'll get the correct answer for that particular situation, OP, I guarantee that it's not going to be correct in each and every situation. The trick is to always make the right decision. Can you do it all the time? No. Can you do it consistently? Maybe. That's the beauty of soloq. When the skill is somewhat equal, it's all about the mind games. It's a game of whether someone does something brilliant or fucks up massively.
What I do, is train myself to predict the most presumable outcome of each action that I can make right now and I choose the one that I think benefits me the most. It may not help you with deciding whether to follow your teammate or not at first, but it should certainly help you to stop doing stupid stuff like going places for no apparent reason, than walking back and missing out on farm and exp. Your every action in game should be targeted towards a certain goal whether it's a minion wave, gank, or an objective.
