Nubbe Centre

[Ashe]

Eh, I do that too. If you're not gonna win and it's not even close, why not?

I one hundred percent agree with what Kaden said. That being stated, one thing that does cause a problem is the "self fulfilled prophecy", that goes as follows. The 20 minute marker arrives and a team of Mordekaiser, Jarvan, Taric, Mundo, and LeBlanc have absolutely dominated the early game, pushing their way to all three inhibitor towers while a team of Tristana, Cho'gath, Master Yi, Kog'maw, and Lux have not taken any enemy towers. The first team is up on kills at 14-4.

There are a few things to take into consideration here. First is team makeup. The first team is very strongly suited to a heavy "push the shit out of these towers early game" strategy. They are not gear dependent, but and have lots of ability to just kill any singled out defender early, allowing them to gain specific lane domination if they are roaming enough. Most of their kills came from repeated 4/5 vs 2/3 ganks while the other lanes tried to farm, given that the second team benefits much greater from gear in the late game.

A lot of those kills didn't happen in actual team fights but instead in the early game, where one fragment was larger than another. The second team does have Kog'maw that will be able to chip away at their tanky dps as well as Tristana and Yi who can get a Black Cleaver and Bloodrazor. The second team will scale much better into the late game, and is only behind on kills because they are much worse in small fights than their opponents. Positioning will be absolutely key in the larger team fights if they make it there.

So now we have to figure out... Will the second team be able to at least slow the rate of decay down enough to stabilize and then begin outscaling their opponents in time to prevent a loss by attrition? Or are they hopelessly outclassed in general?

This doesn't matter because as soon as 20 minutes hits, Kog'maw sends a surrender vote that goes 3-2. He doesn't afk or rage, but "knowing the loss is inevitable", he goes on tilt and doesn't pay much attention to his positioning or timing in fights, getting him regularly caught by Taric's stun into a quick death while doing next to no damage. He sends a surrender vote every 5 minutes because "the team is just too far behind, they are too fed, my team sucks too much". Finally, they do lose, and Kog'maw walks away with the impression that "Ugh, why couldn't we just surrender at 20 and move on to the next game instead of sticking around for the obvious loss?" oblivious to the fact that his demoralizing presence and terrible positioning from this frustration played its part.

Does this mean that team 2 was going to win if Kog had his shit together? No, we can't really say that. We don't know if team 2 had ignites for Mundo, had other ways of affecting the fights, had good ward placement and positioning outside of the Kog's moves, etc. It could have been decisive, it could have been salvageable, but having Kog basically "give up" at the 20 minute mark and stop caring, even if he didn't afk, didn't help things at all.