So it is generally understood that the level of play in pro league has improved over time, in the larger sense, like a rolling 4 years kind of scale, it goes up and down year on year and split on split.
Watching T1 v LNG got me to thinking about this, because T1 were playing as a team in ways which resembled 2015 SKT, any time they lost something in one place they got 3 things in trade elsewhere, and this is unusual now, it's something which has largely been lost.
The level of individual and mechanical play has improved, don't need to explain it, it's obvious, the classic example is the Insec and how basic it has become but it's in everything, one on one modern players win every time. However, in my opinion teams have become worse at being teams recently, an Insec doesn't stand out anymore, but T1 taking Guma's death in bot and turning it into 3 wins elsewhere did, so why?
It's so easy to learn individual play from the past, someone realises how to chain something together, they do it publically in a pro game, people copy it, until there's a rework it'll apply forever and it will probably be something which can be transferred to another champ with a bit of tweaking, or at least it will inspire the idea of thinking how to chain things together in that way, it's low effort to see that there are learnings available so easy to motivate practicing it.
Team play, macro, decision making, all of that, because the game is changed deliberately in ways which make watching older teams do these things less directly applicable I think it has caused players to dismiss the idea that there is as much to learn, if we cannot play in the way older teams did because there are plates and dragons are different and there's a herald there isn't anything to learn here, but what if there is. The learning is less direct, the ideas can't be applied in the same way anymore but that doesn't mean they can't be applied, you cannot make the same trades, but you can think in the same way, you can know your timings better than your enemy and use it to build traps where it doesn't matter if one of you gets outplayed and dies, and it's so rare to see that recently. Teams just seem dumber now, the ways teams thought in the past might help.
There are other reasons too, roster turnover doesn't help, I'm wondering if there is a worldwise issue in scrim culture being focused on either winning, or testing comps over testing movements and rotations around the map, knowing how long it will take for one team member to die and what that translates to in plate damage, whatever it is, teams don't seem to value this in the same way anymore.
To summarise, we got brains in our hands but none in our heads, and it's kinda sad.
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