Addiction to the Meta, and Why it's Bad

The other day I was playing Ashe for the first time in a while and I commented to a friend that it had been ages since someone had tried to force me to solo mid with her. My friend was pretty confused about this; the idea that a ranged carry should take mid seemed ludicrous. I had to explain to him that for part of last year the standard meta was for the ranged carry to solo mid and for the AP carry to take bottom lane with a support.

But, for various reasons, the meta shifted and we ended up with the current, standard meta we all know so well:
- Bruiser at solo top.
- AP carry with some crowd control going solo in mid.
- AD carry  in bottom lane covered by a support.
- A jungler who has some abilities that help with ganking. 

This is the standard meta because it works, and because it's the standard meta everyone expects everyone else to abide by it. But this is a silly way to approach the game, and there are two reasons why.

The first reason why blindly sticking to the meta is bad is because it often leads to teams forcing players to adopt roles they can't fill. For me the most common example of this is the jungler. Jungler is a far more difficult role to just jump into. If you don't have the right runes and masteries, or if you aren't completely clued up on what your jungle path is, you will fail as a jungler. This means that you will be underpowered in the mid and late game, which is bad. You might even end up unintentionally feeding the enemy players, which is much worse.

I sometimes get shouted at for saying this (at least before Honor was introduced) but I would rather have no jungler, than a bad jungler. No jungler means fewer ganks and less gold and XP for the top laner, sure. But the 2v1 at top also means you can hammer the enemy top laner, and deny them gold by forcing your creep waves up to the turret. It also means you can try and take the turret early, which can free you to apply heavy pressure in the other lanes and potentially set you up for an aggressive push to the finish.

There are of course many reasons why this is less good than the standard meta, and I'm not denying that. Like I said above: the standard meta is standard because it works. But surely the 2/1/2 composition I'm describing above is better than a situation where your jungler dies alone in the grass and never recovers?

But there is also another reason why blindly following the meta is bad: it stifles innovation. The MLG this past week followed a few of the trends that were set up in the World Championship finals. The one that is relevant to this article is lane switching. Over the course of those two tournaments we saw AP carries soloing top instead of mid, we even saw AD carries soloing lanes, hearkening back to the old meta I mentioned at the start of the article. 

Does anyone else remember that game where Moscow 5 opened with two junglers, solo in every lane, so that they could ambush the enemy jungler and get a 3 on 1 gank at mid, all within the first few minutes? Two months ago if you had suggested taking Zyra or Lux as support champions people would have reported you for trolling. How quickly things can change in just two months, right? Personally, I'm holding thumbs for Teemo (I'm just not holding my breath).

My point is this: if you blindly stick to the standard meta you are opening yourself up to two vulnerabilities. Firstly, you can get beaten by a team that plays exactly the same meta, but slightly better than you do. Secondly, you are left being thoroughly predictable against opponents who have the guts to try out new things.

People stick with the standard meta because it's easy and reliable. But easy and reliable don't win tournaments, at least not for very long and not in the face of opponents who aren't afraid to think outside of the box.

Andrew Verrijdt