I know I’ve flip-flopped a bit on TT in the past – excited to frustrated and back again – but my final verdict was that it’s a fun map, but only until you get sick of seeing the same few characters. Well let me say, with the release of draft mode and the ranked 3v3 queue, TT is back to being fun.

I was particularly curious about the 3v3 draft games because it’s where I’ll likely spend most of my time in the ranked team queues. I never have five people consistently playing with one another, but three is much more manageable, and with draft mode it’s a lot more fun. I like that I can remove Shen/Jax/Shaco from the equation and see where people end up. Granted, there are still quite a few toons that people consider top tier for TT available, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the variety I’ve seen. Hopefully that will continue as my ELO continues to rise.

I also just noticed today that you can’t ban toons that the other players can’t pick. If they haven’t unlocked everyone, you’ll only have the toons they’ve unlocked to ban (plus the week’s free rotation). It’s nice that you can’t then waste a ban on something your opponent would never have anyway.

Where are you guys spending your time? Solo, 5v5, or 3v3?

A couple months back I went on a massive losing streak. I dropped something like 23 games over the course of just a couple days. It was awful, and now it’s back.

I should say that there is a bright spot. Over the past two weeks or so I’ve been blowing through some wins, all the way from my typical 65 games or so above .500 to nearly 80. It was a great run. But today for some reason, I just can’t win. It’s not like I’m cutting it close either. We’re talking losses that are decided in the first five minutes of the game (I know some of you guys don’t believe that can happen, but when multiple turrets are down and you’re looking at a ten kill deficit, it’s over). In most cases I have teammates that are feeding rampantly, or choosing completely ridiculous comps. I’ve tried to dodge the worst of them, only to be paired with either the same players or see very similar comps.

I start to wonder if Riot doesn’t update the ELO system on a weekly basis instead of dynamically, so my ELO shifts to create these streaks. I know I’m not top ELO, but I’m close. In fact, on my higher win streaks I was getting paired with top ELO players regularly. I think because I’m a higher ELO, though, I tend to be the guy meant to “balance” my team. The other team will all be mid-high players, while my team tends to look like mostly mid players with me and maybe one mid-high ELO player. It’s a pretty raw deal, and usually ends with a loss for me. In one particularly bad TT game today I asked if my team was new to the map. My Jax had played TT precisely once.

Since the launch of Twisted Treeline I’ve gone back and forth about playing on the map. For a while, I was in love with it. While people were still learning the faster playstyle, it was easy to pick up some quick wins. After a bad losing streak, I swore off TT, though it was hard for me pinpoint exactly why.

I’ve since gotten back into TT and been mostly successful, but it hasn’t been without frustration. I think I finally have a bead on the design behind TT that makes a loss there so much more frustrating than on Summoner’s Rift. The problem behind TT, or more appropriately, the design dilemma, is that the map has to encourage more fighting to produce a quicker game. It isn’t enough that the lanes are shorter, the towers less durable, and the gold generation quicker. The map has to produce confrontation, and the way Riot chose to do that was by heavily prioritizing the two major jungle creeps, Grez and the dragon.

This is actually why TT is so frustrating in comparison to Summoner’s Rift. On SR the buffs are definitely important, but the map is much larger, so sacrificing position in order to acquire buffs can mean the difference between defeat and victory. Teams that ignore buffs can still win the game if the opponent focuses too much on the buffs without thinking about positioning.

Twisted Treeline, on the other hand, is small enough that you can get the buffs without stepping out of position, especially since many of the stronger heroes on TT have ways to get over the walls. The big problem, then, is that players play TT just like they play SR – getting buffs when its convenient but not prioritizing them. This puts the team at a huge disadvantage, so big, in fact, that I’d say you don’t have a chance of winning if you lose those buffs three times in a row. The buffs not only increase your team damage output, they provide enough experience and gold to set your team way ahead, in both level and itemization.

The problem, at least in my mind, is that the importance of the buffs is discreet. Everyone knows that buffs are good, but most players don’t know how good. One way to fix this would be through some sort of spotlight on map basics. Another potential balance change would be to offer bonus gold for killing the wearer of the buff. It wouldn’t have to be the full amount, but something to help a team that either doesn’t know how important the buffs are or hasn’t been able to properly control the map catch back up. It would significantly slow the snowballing effect that is such a problem on TT.

Have you guys seen the same trouble on TT or is something else typically the cause for your loss?

I’ve never been great at moderation – when I get interested in something I tend to be completely absorbed, which is why I usually only give my time to a single game at a time. That also means I want to get the most out of whatever game I’m hooked on, if only because I don’t focus my time on any other titles. For LoL that’s meant developing a set of rules for my playtime to hopefully maximize my enjoyment. I’ve written about some of those rules here – avoiding TT when I don’t have a full premade, trying to choose the best team comp possible, playing toons with strong CC – but the rules don’t always work. I had my worst losing streak a few weeks ago and I’ve been struggling to bring up my ELO ever since. I took a week off to visit with my family, but having come back, I realized I had to try something new – I had to throw out all the rules.

So far, I haven’t seen huge success. I’ve still had the mix of good and bad players, both on Summoner’s Rift and Twisted Treeline, but I think I’m having more fun. I’m playing some toons I haven’t played in a while, including Shaco, who I used to be completely addicted to, and trying to play some new strats to pick up some wins. I had forgotten how much I love Twisted Treeline – the pace is just so much more enjoyable than SR – which was easy to do with that last losing streak.

Moral of the story is this, though. When the rules stop working, it’s time to get some new rules. I could beat my head against a wall all day trying to play the most OP toons in the most favorable situations but the bottom line is that there are too many variables outside my control for the variables within my control to make much of a difference. I know I’m a solid player, and as long as I’m playing smart every game and focusing on assisting my team and farming as heavily as possible, I’m sure I’ll be just fine.

I decided to stay up last night and grab a few solo queues on TT to see how I would fare with Kennen. The first game went pretty well. I was holding my own, not necessarily dominating (they had a Shen/Poppy/Warwick so it was tough to burst a target down) but I wasn’t dying and I was picking up the occasional kill. Our own Shen wasn’t using his ult early enough, though, and we ended up losing a long game after some intense teamfights. Overall it was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately that kind of game isn’t the norm for Treeline. Most games I see are landslides in either direction, even if they take 30-40 minutes to finish. It’s a problem I think will be hard to balance if only because 3v3 is much less forgiving to players prone to making mistakes. In the next game my opponents weren’t nearly careful enough with me early game. Only one had cleanse and the others were short on CC.

You can see the results in the screenshot I posted. Take a look at Fiddle’s farm compared to my own. He was so far behind by the time I had 4 kills that there was just no coming back.