This article will focus on multiple elements of OMG's decline, but cites Uzi's acquisition as a major one. - - - OMG brought a breath of fresh air to League of Legends, being the first team to regularly "figure out" World Elite and become an Asian threat, winning their first spring split.  OMG's play-style was hard to identify when they initially entered the scene and was sort of a hybridization of Moscow 5's beginnings and Taipei Assassins' play at S2 Worlds. OMG set itself apart as a dominant and flexible force, focusing elsewhere to find its success in a region where over-saturated AD Carry talent made for predictable prey for the up and coming team. In the early days, there wasn't much domestic mid lane competition aside from Misaya and Zz1tai.  This changed when cool arrived on the scene. The earliest iterations fans saw of the team internationally was their debut at Season 3 Worlds, where Cool was infamously credited to solo killing Faker. Gogoing became regarded as the first true carry player after PDD's retirement, and Loveling was a creative, highly skilled jungler who normally showed his best on the international stage. Expanding on the hybrid method mentioned earlier of OMG's play-style, OMG were one of the first to capitalize on the meta shifts that deprioritized AD carries . San and Pomelo were very safe bottom laners that got the job done, but weren't considered mechanical geniuses, while the former support now known as Loveling made one of the most successful role switches to date, becoming an outstanding jungler.  This isn't to say their bottom lane wasn't solid, of course.  After all, San's marskman prowess was forged in the fires of the realm that then held the best AD talent the world had to offer. Even if San was considered average domestically, he would then be considered world class internationally. The real meat and bones of the team was on the top half of the map, where OMG were at the highest echelons in that regard.  Loveling, Gogoing, and Cool: These three had some of the most calculated coordination with jungle invasions and dive tactics; if your vision control wasn't excellent, you were screwed.  The team wouldn't just dive you and take your turrets like the Koreans would at the time, though. They'd make sure to put you through hell via resource starvation. This did have its flaws as it wasn't as easy to collect objectives such as dragons and towers early on, but in late Season 3 and onwards the meta would favor the way OMG played due to adjustments and overall buffs to towers, paving the way for better capitalization of zone control around towers.  OMG was an advocate of minion denial like no other team; they'd shove waves, roam, commit to a dive, and sit behind a minion wave, often times resulting in the opposition missing one or even two full waves and risking not only lack of gold, but severe discrepancies in levels, This tactic was solid and especially hard to counter since OMG favored heavily punishing junglers with early damage and wave clear champions in the solo lanes, which would leave opposing teams with the choice of missing farm to stop snowballing map dominance, or trying to farm and often failing anyways.  Naturally, this took awhile for teams to figure out, and is part of why OMG was king of China before EDG was born.

During this unstoppable reign, the team favored champions like Gragas, Orianna, Kennen, Renekton, and towards the end of Season 3, Rengar for Loveling (although he was an extremely dominant Lee Sin as well.).  This provided strong wave management, slippery top laners, high kill potential junglers, and high mobility.  The majority of the team's resources were funneled into these three players while OMG's bottom lane was left to be self sufficient, often freezing lane and coming in to teamfights to finalize the concoction.  Even stretching across Season 4, in a region where bottom lane was regarded as most important with everyone playing around the AD carry, OMG may have been an anomaly, but they were also a well-oiled machine. In the eyes of the Chinese, this certainly wasn't the "correct" way to play, but that didn't stop OMG from placing top three in LPL for 2 years straight and accomplishing playoffs at both World Championships.

Enter Uzi

If we break down the description of Uzi as a player, the result is the antithesis to OMG's recipe for success.  In fact, conformity to the standard may have spelled the death of the team. Uzi is the polar opposite of San, where he has always been the primary focus of his team with the majority of resources allocated to him.  Contrary to popular belief, Uzi on his own historically hasn't been as threatening as other superstars that come to mind like Deft or Namei. Instead, teams find the most success utilizing him as a very powerful weapon that needs to be managed properly.  Feed him ammunition, pull him out of danger, and micro manage him.  If you can successfully do all of this, you will shred your enemies to pieces.  Perfect this, and he looks like the greatest player to have ever touched League of Legends. It's safe to say that Uzi likely takes as many emotional resources from the team as he does in-game ones.  Uzi has always been incredibly picky, stating after Season 3 Worlds that he only trusted Tabe as his support, and would not lane with someone he did not trust.  This was a period where Uzi was experimenting with mid lane, and went on record to say that he was considering making a switch to the jungle. Thankfully, he eventually changed his mind and went back to his favorable position, but it goes to show how much teams are willing to accommodate towards him. Thankfully when Worlds comes around, teams seemed to have perfected utilizing Uzi as a weapon, making him seem nearly flawless in his play.  For this reason, he's often heralded as the best AD Carry in the world by western fans when he makes it to this stage due to the absolute lane dominance and pressure applied by the player and the forcefield that surrounds him, always making sure to keep an extra eye out for when the puppy is loose to reel him back in and out of danger. Ultimately, making Uzi untouchable is a team effort which often of which fans often give a disproportionate amount of credit and value to Uzi himself. To further extend this point, we only need to look at Uzi's domestic performance. Make no mistake, it's not like Uzi is bad or even average without this mastered support structure, but the difference is significant.  When the gears aren't in place and the tools aren't fully sharpened, it's easy to distinguish Uzi's faults from what would constitute as "stellar AD Carry play."  This could mean an ally doesn't intercept a skillshot for him, or shield him, or provide an escape lantern, or just about anything that a well-prepped team does at Worlds to make Uzi look like an unstoppable killing machine. Uzi may always be a top 3 AD Carry domestically, or even in the world if we're being generous,  and we can't claim it's all smoke and mirrors at Worlds, but the evidence is in his showing over the years collectively rather than the highlight reel.  Despite a more observed eye to the home region, domestic viewers were also huge fans of Uzi. Credit should be given where it's due, but although Uzi may be an incredible player, when you piece OMG's strengths with Uzi's flaws, it quickly becomes no mystery as to how things could go downhill for the team.

The downfall

In what one could argue to be the most significant change to ever occur in a League of Legends roster, Uzi was out of StarHorn Royal Club and into OMG. For those following Chinese League of Legends since its inception, this was a pick-up of immeasurable magnitude.  Public minds went rampant with opinions and theories.  Perhaps the easiest and most common pitfall of logic to fall into was the simple thought of "OMG dominated so hard with a mediocre AD Carry, imagine how hard they'd dominate with an incredible one!" Of course, the keen mind has several other thoughts available at its disposal. How is OMG going to adapt?  Will Uzi mature and learn to play with less resources?  After all, his previous team's greatest successes came with a more even gold distribution.  Of course, we all know resources are not unlimited.  That is, Uzi will not have the strength of "Worlds Uzi" without the gold of "Worlds Uzi", and gold doesn't formulate out of thin air.  There is a scarcity of this resource in League of Legends, which means you must take it from one location and put it elsewhere.  There is no addition of a higher threat AD Carry without the redistribution from threats in other roles.  This brought the scariest question to the forefront: WIll OMG lose its identity? And so it began.

Before front-loading all of the blame on Uzi, we must first acknowledge that under performing did have to occur in other parts of the map for the drastic drop-off that took place at the end of the season to formulate.  However, we must look to the other hand as well, where context is important.  In a vastly overworked circuit with new talent and four new teams, OMG started out strong in a sea of teams, like them, experimenting to find what worked. OMG flourished in this setting, and their weaknesses were not as easily exposed.  However, in the later part of the regular season and especially in the playoffs, OMG started to seem like less and less of a threat. It wasn't just the capitalization from other teams that were the fault of OMG's downfall, either.  OMG's vulnerability came from obvious lack of comfort within the team. Uzi was an X-factor and no one knew what to do with the team on a grand scale or how to utilize the team's resources.  Unsurprisingly, the team's coach received large amounts of criticism, and from the evidence presented, for good reason.  While we shouldn't pretend that Gogoing, Loveling, and to an extent Cool weren't underperforming, we have to look at all the variables to this equation before concluding the primary source of problems. Uzi no longer had a support naturally at ease with matching his aggression.  He no longer had a team that was comfortable coddling him and pulling him out of rough spots.  The backbone of his team was shrouded in unfamiliarity.  Where once their self-sufficiency and trio synergy dominated the fields of justice, they now no longer held this merit. The trio were shackled into a run-of-the-mill tactic seen all too often within the walls of China, and OMG paid dearly. Cool suffered the least of the three, but the wounds were still very much visible,  Gogoing and Loveling fell victim to the forced reallocation of resources.  The "under performance" of the two was subject to misinterpretations to the fundamental way viewers saw how the game was played. Gogoing was crushing at Worlds, it's really hard to believe he simply fell so far out of favor since then.  Loveling was always a brilliant mind who, unsurprisingly, became predictable and flimsy.

If we look at the bigger picture, these two were victims to a poorly applied, beaten to death tactic that no longer set them apart from the rest of the region.  Loveling as a jungler, who was once comfortable with having more resources provided to him of almost any competitive jungler , was now stripped down to pennies and scraps, while Gogoing was left to the role of being self-sufficient instead of being a big substantial force for the team. It is unrealistic to expect players to do equal or more when they HAVE less.  In the same way we can't expect an athlete to run fast, lift heavy, and jump high when taking away his nutrients, we can't expect a jungler to carry and be the beef for his team when essentially cutting his gold intake in half.  A scholar without his books will not enjoy the fruits of knowledge and will follow the herd without the street-smarts to fit in and survive in the harsher environment.  In the same way, we cannot expect Loveling to thrive with a concept foreign to him of predictably prioritizing bottom lane, a well-studied tactic when Uzi is on the team. No longer is the team feared for its roam squad of destruction.  OMG is a shadow of its former self that tried too hard to imitate the strategy of other teams in a region full of talent who have had infinitely more practice in doing so.  It's ignorant to suggest that other factors, such as increased vision game and vastly improved talent pools directly and indirectly via Korean imports, tore apart OMG's once powerful presence in China. However, it also takes an untrained eye to not admit the faults of Uzi joining the squad in perhaps the most disappointing roster pick-up riddled with foolishly established high expectations. You succeed by either mastering the essentials or by innovating heavily. Teams must find the fine line between pushing boundaries and expanding your repoirtoire and sticking to your guns and strong points.  Just as in Starcraft, someone who practices micro intensively will not succeed in out macroing a well practiced macro player, OMG wil not and can not flourish in "protecting the ADC" when everyone else has been doing that for years.  By overzealously conforming, the team must lament the wasted tool that is their stroke of genius.

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