User blog comment:Asperon Thorn/From the Crown of Thorn: Welcome to the Jungle/@comment-3360527-20110818021446/@comment-3358335-20110818041808

I do agree that all of those things are important, and have said as much either directly or indirectly. However, all of those things can be done without a jungler. Ganks, buffs, etc. Getting buffs in the jungle is not the same as "jungling." As I don't think it is an exclusive Jungle task I didn't feel it truly belonged here. If anything I left out counter-jungling, but that was intentional because this is to address why we do it not the extensive finer points of what a jungler can or cannot do.

As far as map awareness goes, I believe teams that have a jungler trend towards have more map awareness by having someone roaming (again I have said as much here and more in my blog on wards). But it is not exclusive. I just got ouf of a ranked game in which we did not have a jungler (bad call on our side, nobody was really suited or practiced at it with the characters we had so we decided to forgoe it) But with clever use of wards and a lot of lane swapping, we took control of the river and later had far more map control then they did.

I have also been in games where even with a jungler and wards members of my team do not see what is happening right over the wall. . .bad map awereness on their side.