Benjamin Sanchez · @Zhergoth
4th Jul 2016 from TwitLonger
Baskonia Adventures
Ok so basicly i wanted to write this twitlonger to write my experiences in the Baskonia LoL team up until now, and to elaborate and bit on what happened in the house to explain a little bit of the... failure at gamergy (not trying to devaluate ASUS ROG's win over us, just explain what happened from our perspective). Out of respect, i will exclude Araneae and Homi from this as all of these things are nearly exclusive to the players, and i have nothing but positive things to say about Alvar and Homi. I'm going to break up this post in 3 chronological segments:
Pre LaCopa
Post LaCopa
Pre and during Gamergy
So first up, pre LaCopa. During this timeframe i can comfortably there were literally no issues up until the last day of practice before LaCopa. Basicly i was in the house still getting used to everything. I was playing kinda badly when i just got into the house, because of the change of environment. Less privacy, no more comfy 10 y/o nearly broken down chair and having my teammates next to me at all times whilst playing. Scrim performances were good, and all was good.
The first trip to Barcelona was all gucci, the team atmosphere was high (CALL ME MAYBE LUL) and we trolled a bit in our match vs ASUS. Making the content for LVP was a pleasure (the LVP people are awesome, huge props to them!) So the first trip and everything was all good.
The issues start popping up 1 or 2 days before we have to play at LaCopa. The meta shifted a little bit during that patch, and Fizz started to see play on Top lane. This caused a shift in our overall team strategy to favour early gankers and more resources to top lane early game. This triggered and unwanted switch in our team, which would have severe consequences later on.
At LaCopa, in our best of 3 we lose the first game because of issues that would dwell up later on us. It comes through the fact that our bot lane was super focussed on forcing on bot lane, which made us lose our first game against G2V. The second game was a grindout/outrotation game, so that's fine. The third game was a complete stomp, probably the hardest stomp in the LVP between top tier teams. It showed that our strategy of focus on top side with super aggresive champions worked for us. The Finals against GIANTS! was a completely fuck-up from EVERYONE on the team. Nobody can say that they didn't misplay against Giants, not even me.
So Post LaCopa, issues started popping up. Due to the shift of style in our team, it started showing that some of the players in our team were inflexible in how they played. Our bot lane was having a hard time adapting to the new meta even though that was becoming our playstyle.. I might have needed a bit too many resources sometimes, but me and itsi together were on fire, so we though it was the best course of action. it started showing though that without jungle support to back them up constantly in the early game, our bot lane was showing flaws in the early game. Getting caught out, falling behind early and even getting 2v3 killed with summoners started becoming regular themes in our games. This would create tension between teammembers, as our bot lane was requesting resources that we were putting into top side, even though most teams in that meta were trying to get top ahead (think of the AD fizz, swain and Irelia and Jax meta) As such, i would say this created a division in our team that consisted of Itsi, Diamond and me on one side, and our bot lane on the other. Due to this, negative comments started creeping up between members of the team.
So now we reach gamergy with a kind of shattered mindset, and very disjointed team atmosphere. We play against emonkeyz, and win 2-1, which to be honest was expected from our team. The issues showed in our matches vs ASUS ROG though. The most important BO3 of the season, and we were unable to bring up and coherent teamplay or shotcalling because of the division in the team. The first game we won early laning phase but lost the teamfight at dragon because we went full soloq. This caused us to lose the game. The game afterwards was just a display of the lack of synergy, as a lot of calls were not being followed on and our bot lane got the attitude of perma-forcing back because we were losing. This caused us to lose the game, our cohesion as a team and i felt like some people even lost respect for others. It makes me sad as we should have been able to figure this out as a team but we couldn't.
Alas we reached the end of my twitlonger. i would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that i've been involved with in the past 2 months. Thanks Alvar for being a great coach, friend and mentor. Thank you my team for playing together and living together like champs for the past 2 months. Thanks Baskonia for this opportunity and thanks everyone for the support.
Also thank you Diamond for the Jäger ;)
Right now i'm unsure about my future and what's going to happen, but we will see.