Hello all,
This is an opinion piece I wrote on how professionals influence on the scene and how it negatively affects players and regions alike (specifically from a NA standpoint). I would like to get some feedback on what the community thinks about what I view as a major issue. Please discuss.
I think your point is valid, but it's not at all what I expected to read based on the title.
In my opinion, imitation inhibits innovation because it's too easy to see exactly what someone else is picking/building/using for combos/etc... That there is no advantage to innovation.
In the real world, if you innovate you take on a lot of risk, but if you're successful you enjoy all of the rewards for a designated (significant) period of time (thanks to copyrights, etc).
In league, if you innovate you still take on lots of risk; you'll lose many games by playing non meta champions without predefined kill combos or other such advantages. Simultaneously, your incentive of reward is completely taken away (especially at the competitive level). If one of your innovations works out and beats/breaks the meta, you get what, 1 game with that advantage? Then everyone sees it and starts banning that champion saying it's OP until riot has no choice but to nerf it since no one gets to play it anyways. An innovation at lower levels of play probably won't work at higher levels. So that 1 win you get from an innovation better come at an important time - and overall it's just not worth the effort to innovate when you can be copied so easily, the effort is better spent on mastering mechanics created elsewhere (I.e. copying them).
I mean, in typical sports athletes don't advertise how they're training, they hide the competitive advantage. You can't really hide anything in league though, the whole scene is advertising everything pro players try in their games.
To your point though: I think using an Eastern created meta isn't the reason the west loses to them. The West loses because the east work harder, have better support, and probably have a significantly larger playing population to draw talent from. If I were to come up with a 'meta' that could beat the current meta hands down, I would be able to sell it to a pro team for more than they value one win though. Which is because as soon as they use it once in competition to crush their opponents, they'll either have the champs banned or the other teams will switch to that meta too. Maybe if it was now and the team could keep it a secret until world's next year so they have a year of practice in a meta no other team has seen, then it might be enough of an advantage to win, but it's a huge investment of time to take on the risk that riot doesn't release a patch which breaks the meta they've been practicing. Even if it lasts until world's, it's not like the other teams have never played the champions being used - they'll likely adopt the meta or try a new way to counter it and it may not even work.
The only way innovation will ever really happen is if there's reward proportional to the risk of failure, and with the way league is set up there's really no reward for innovating.
