Sometimes it worth feeding the trolls
Basically i replied to a troll on another thread, who was telling me to "just play ranked or draft", which was completely unrelated to my original reply to the thread. Though, reading back through this i think it deserved it's own thread, because it was a very strong point about what part of the community riot has managed to alienate, and given the potential size of this sub-set of players, might not be in their best interest.
It's unedited, so it might seem a little out of context.
TL;DR riot removed player identity from the game through power creep and reworks which force the player into a single viable play style. This is why you see things about out of meta champions being played, instead of crazy builds. Not including tank assassins, because that was an issue with item and class design.
Why? That seems like a complete waste of time. I couldn't give two shits about my rank or "how good i actually am", i think it's just about priorities. I don't care about getting better that this game it's just something that happens naturally relative to how much i play, which is based on how much fun I have playing the game. Yet they keep trying to make the game around getting better, with enjoyment being pushed as secondary factor. Besides most of the ways that i prefer to play are nearly useless because of how powerful the tailored kits of meta champions are now, and just because i know how to play against these champions and beat them, doesn't mean i enjoy champions which have the capabilities to do so without massive misplays on the enemies' part.
I had actually been in the process of leveling up an AD malz smurf, who i was going to play ranked, when they decided to rework malz and turn him into an amalgamation of his former flexibility. I dropped him as my main and rarely pick him up from time to time, normally when i'm tired and a friend wants to play, since between my experience with the champion and his simplification with the rework, it takes almost no effort for me to play him effectively.
However this is exactly what made me stop playing world of warcraft. People would complain about cookie cutter builds, but i NEVER used one. I would create crazy shit, like, minion master DK, auto attack DK, or infinite mana resto druid. Which fundamentally changed the play style of the class despite keeping all of the same skills, by simply adjusting which talents i took and what stats i went after. If it was worse or better than the popular build was completely a matter of opinion, again, because it had different strengths and weaknesses.
This is what made AD malz so fun, a champion who was considered little more than a 45sec targeted kill button (granted that was a pretty poor way to actually play AP malz even before the rework), could be played in a way which turned the whole play style on it's head. Instead of upfront burst assassination, you had slow ramp up MASSIVE DPS which could be sustained for as long as you had mana. You would take CDR to effectively increase your atk spd, armor pen, mana, and GA to give your voidlings 4 seconds of extra time to attack. It use to be that if you were with a friend, or convince a teammate, you could get them to buy 
for an extra like 20% damage from your voidlings. Prime a 4th spell so that in a fight, you could rotate your abilities to get 3 voidlings out (with > 32% CDR). Instead of assassinating with your R, you used it as a clean up or peel tool. Assassin tries to pick you off? R them until a support gets to you. You start winning a team fight? R someone before they can flash, to pick up an extra kill.