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You don't need Meta to Climb. (With explanation)

ModCaptainMårvelous··36 votes·11,982 views

Now, before you downvote, hear me out:

For the point to make more sense, let's consider climbing a mountain, with the peak being whatever rank you want. Be it Silver, Diamond or even the pro scene.

Now, when most people climb a mountain, they need the essential tools. Ice picks, hiking gear, ropes, maybe a guide. We'll call this the meta of mountain climbing. (And for league's sake, this is any meta, not just the one right now.)

Most people have to use the meta to climb mountains....and there's nothing wrong with that! It's the safest way, after all, and it gives you the best chance not to fall off the mountain and break your neck. However, for some people, the meta isn't necessary at all. Most often these are the gurus of mountain climbing and the absolute sickest people. These are the guys climbing with old, possibly unsafe gear (Off-meta champs), using their most reliable gear (The one-tricks who have mastered their champs) or the absolutely fucking bonkers madmen who are climbing the mountain shirtless with forks for fingernails (That one insane fucker who always hits diamond/challenger doing weird shit).

Using that climbing gear isn't necessary. However, to climb without the gear, you have to be a god at mountain climbing....and the fact is, a lot of us aren't. And yes, there will always be a good player who uses meta to climb to massive challenger gains. We'll refer to them as the villain of the 80's sports movie who has state-of-the-art gear that is climbing the mountain to close down the ski lodge so he can build a mega-mall where you and all your friends would hang out.

Ok this metaphor is off the rails.

Anyways, point is, you don't need meta to climb. However, meta is probably the "easiest" way to climb if you're comfortable using it. Some people won't be comfortable and make up the difference with their old mains/picks they mastered inside out. Others will insist their attack-speed-on-hit-Garen will get them to the top before tripping on their shoelaces. I think it's an important distinction to know that it's totally possible to climb without meta but you have to be good. And frankly, most of us just aren't good enough to make up that skill difference. But hey, nothing wrong with that.

39 Comments

SociaI Justice12 votes

Now show me a challenger volibear player.

Alzon4 votes

You can’t. The Zillumeanati conspires to keep all armored bears out of their stomping grounds.

AirKingNeo1 votes

this post was made by buff volibear gang

Woodakoodashooda7 votes

TLDR: You don't NEED gear and equipment to climb a mountain, but you'll be in for a bad time if you don't use gear and equipment for the task. The gear and equipment being the meta and the mountain being the ranked ladder.

ModCaptainMårvelous11 votes

More so TL;DR Not everyone needs gear to climb the mountain but most people will. There's nothing wrong with that and having to use it doesn't make you a bad player. However, if you are willing to strap forks to your fingers and climb like that, everyone is going to be super fucking impressed with Johnny Fork Fingers hits the top.

Tin of sardines3 votes

{quoted}

More so TL;DR Not everyone needs gear to climb the mountain but most people will. There's nothing wrong with that and having to use it doesn't make you a bad player. However, if you are willing to strap forks to your fingers and climb like that, everyone is going to be super fucking impressed with Johnny Fork Fingers hits the top.

actually,some mountain will kill you if you don't bring a minimum gear. meaning you only can climb so far. one such example is Everest, you can only healthy climb to the top with oxygen supply. without that and something to deal with the freezing temp, you are good as dead. even if you brought the other gear.

Fondling Gems3 votes

Actually there have been numerous summits of Everest without Oxygen canisters, but I feel that in this metaphor minimum gear equates more to using a build that can actually accomplish some kind of task rather than the champion/role you play.

You can play Vayne Jg or some shit but AP Vayne JG without grabbing any of the items/keystones that give you an AP scaling is the equivalent of climbing Everest in the nude without food or water.

Tin of sardines1 votes

if you try to climb that mountain without clothes, I say you are dead before Base camp, it's harsh cold. and I intended to said that without both (oxygen bottles and proper clothing) you are good as dead.

also, one must note the following, after a certain altitude you can have hallucinations due lack of oxygen. so without bottles you run a risk of misjudgment, something you don't want to do in those condition. no to mention that the best remedy (and only one is such scenario) is to go down the mountain.

kind reminds me of top gear, where the old trio tried to drive over Guallatiri volcano. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOcJOn0nxnU

Woodakoodashooda1 votes

{quoted}

More so TL;DR Not everyone needs gear to climb the mountain but most people will. There's nothing wrong with that and having to use it doesn't make you a bad player. However, if you are willing to strap forks to your fingers and climb like that, everyone is going to be super fucking impressed with Johnny Fork Fingers hits the top.

If I could afford a name change and I wasn't attached to this one, I'd change it to Johnny Fork Fingers.

Just a clone bru5 votes

This man was on drugs or weed or he fused the two

Tin of sardines1 votes

nope, is just expired weed. to do it you need:

Origanum vulgare leaf Olea europaea oil a slice of bread. one PUBG frying pan. some heat source good enough for cooking.

put the PUBG frying pan in the heat source, add a hair of Olea europaea oil and wait a moment. pick the bread and add Origanum vulgare leaf to it. put the bread in the PUBG frying pan, and press it, like you are frying it.

when you start to notice the hallucinogenic smell, you are close to done, just wait it to get a bit stronger. at the ready point, you aunt will ask is you are doing Expired Weed in the kitchen, when that happens you hit the perfect point.

now enjoy, knowing that D.E.A. probably can't arrest you.

P.S.: isn't suppose to be a drug, it actually use just some not that fancy condiments and oils, should be safe for consume. but we didn't applied for approval with regulatory authority. and the name is a internal joke involving a slight crazy aunt.

SuicidePlank4 votes

That's rare, first time I encounter a fun-to-read post with a nice metaphor on the NA board.

Zero Shingetsu1 votes

{quoted}

That's rare, first time I encounter a fun-to-read post with a nice metaphor on the NA board.

I post here enough that you should've seen this at least once before...

SuicidePlank1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Zero Shingetsu,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=9LL8bXuJ,comment-id=00000000,timestamp=2018-12-04T08:14:43.874+0000)

I post here enough that you should've seen this at least once before...

I am EUW so I rarely ever look into NA board, just recently more frequent.

Janakin3 votes

if you're comfortable using it

Exactly. But the way the game looks now is no longer like mountain climbing, but more like formula racing.

ModCaptainMårvelous6 votes

You could always just put a jet engine (DH) on top of your old jalopy (Karthus)

Yeah the car will explode but you're gonna win.

Tin of sardines1 votes

maybe 1000 horse power engine? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDdo5-f75R0

uhm.... need more struts, also is too slow, adding moar boosters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjCMVx_NRXQ

Somber Rites2 votes

{quoted}

You could always just put a jet engine (DH) on top of your old jalopy (Karthus)

Yeah the car will explode but you're gonna win.

I laughed harder than I should have, thank you for that mental image.

SeeMeAsAMule1 votes

More like pingpong. They one shot you and you spawn and one shot them back. Even formula 1 has mechanics and tactics that is way too complicated. This game has none anymore. Just one shot some1 and after 15 secs find out that my R is up again.

Midg3t3 votes

You can repeat this all you want but if you dont make an example of yourself this post holds no value.

XeroKimo1 votes

I mean he doesn't have to be the example right? There are people on youtube that post crazy builds, or doing something that's not normal for a champ and climb with them, and some of them, though rare, become meta at some point, earliest example I can think of is taking annie bot as a support.

I'm a fill main, I main no champion nor role, and if I get many games in a row where player does poorly in one role, I start spamming that role until I get tired and go back to filling. Though to everyone d4+ won't see d5 as much of an achievement, it's still a feat to be able to climb this far

Midg3t1 votes

{quoted}

I mean he doesn't have to be the example right? There are people on youtube that post crazy builds, or doing something that's not normal for a champ and climb with them, and some of them, though rare, become meta at some point, earliest example I can think of is taking annie bot as a support.

Like who? All those yt vids which showcase 'crazy builds' are either:

  • from PBE (playing new champ with various builds) --> doesnt mean shit since a lot of players are unable to play properly due to high ping and elo differences
  • done on smurfs in low elo --> means shit cuz you're playing against opponent who are waaaay worse than you
  • 1 game where the player won with that build --> 1 game isn't enough to prove anything

here's the classic example of 2nd point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gA_Gejd9c4&t=123s OCE Challenger smurfs in plat with this build. 26 mins of winning with it many people would say 'OMFG this is sooo OPPPPPPP!!!!111!'. But, when I checked the match history of that acc, he had barely over 50% winrate throughout 50+ games with mediocre KDA.

So if the challenger player was average at best with this build in elo far below his, is it rly working, or he was just winning because of his far superior knowledge compared to other players in those games?

I'm a fill main, I main no champion nor role, and if I get many games in a row where player does poorly in one role, I start spamming that role until I get tired and go back to filling. Though to everyone d4+ won't see d5 as much of an achievement, it's still a feat to be able to climb this far

Congratz :D

Poske3 votes

Omegalul as high elo player this is innacurate

Despite peaking multiple times as #1 LB world I can no longer reach challenger with her because she is to weak since Revert

High elo adc mains are pretty much forced to play Kaisa / Xayah / Draven / MF

Now sure you can reach Diamond1 With any champion on any server (FK even master if you are NA) but you cant reach higher

There is a reason there are 0 XYZ mains of champions in certain elos

Asud2 votes

You are kinda wrong buddy. At first i liked your post, because you think in a good way, but i'll give you example now why this isn't totally correct. I consider myself to be a Syndra main. I bought her because i hated Heimerdinger so much, and never regretted it. At the start of season 8 Syndra was garbage. Pure garbage. Runes weren't good for her. Items weren't good for her. Meta wasn't good for her. No one played her, and if they did they lost. Faker or not, you just could not carry a game on that champ. It couldn't help that i knew matchups, it couldn't help that i played my main. I couldn't win games that i used to win before. Why? This is why: domination was bad for her as she could only utilize electrocute and even that had huge cooldown. Any other option was even worse. So she had no runes. Also she is snowball oriented as most mages outscale her lategame. now she could not snowball, as she had no damage and everyone had resolve secondary. Her second step is swift kill level 6 with ultimate, but if you want to set up a good ult, you need lost chapter so you dont go OOM after using 3 qs. But lost chapter now costed 1300 gold instead of 900 it used to cost, so now you couldn't even get it before lvl 6 unless you got some lucky kill. All the games i won were games where my team was at least decent. None because i carried. So my point here is, there are always some 10-20 forsaken champions that are pure troll picks for ranked. If you pick those you basically tell your team, hey guys imma lose this one for ya. Sad but true.

Zero Shingetsu1 votes

I hope everyone sees this, because it needs to be seen. My entire League life is off-meta builds and I get ripped for them every time. (Well, at least 92% of the time. Roughly.)

deadlychuck1 votes

And frankly, most of us just aren't good enough to make up that skill difference

And there's where riot fucked up. Riot smoothed the mountain face, added more overhangs, and <insert other mountain related difficulty here(... I live in florida Idk mountain climbing)>. I don't even think it was intentional, I think it was just that all of the players using these mountaineering tools yelled at riot to make the climb harder, but not to make it harder for them to climb, rather than imposing rules on themselves to make it harder. So when riot agreed and made the climb "harder" they also starting offering climbers better tools to scale the mountain with. Those who prefer the challenge got hit the hardest since the players using the tools as handicaps didn't suddenly stop relying on them. But without them, you feel the full brunt of the increases in "difficulty"... They increased that disparity in meta and off meta. Which had a substantially larger impact on the player mentality than the actual game balance, at least initially. They started trying to balance around the assumption of draft pick, which meant that normal blind pick became an unplayable shitshow of people taking advantage of the champions who require targeted bans/counterpicks, which meant that offmeta become unplayable against a team full of S tier champions. This was objectively a design error. If you balance blind pick, draft pick implicitly will be balanced too. This comes down to asymmetrical information access.

You can rank up with whatever you want, but riot, through their capitulation to increase both difficulty and tools, has cultivated such an over competitive and elitists mentality in the community that it's not considered socially acceptable to do so because of the disadvantage that you put your team at... the whole "well it's not fun for the other players in the game" argument. Even in normal draft you're fucked, because so much of the playerbase considers it to just be a practice mode for ranked and takes it just as seriously.

So all in all, blind pick is an unplayable imbalanced mess, and draft, both normals and ranked, are hostile to anything off meta because it either decreases their chance to win or they consider it to be worthless for practice experience.

The lowest win rate champion right now is Corki. But you will catch less heat for playing corki "properly", than you would if you were to be playing something like AP varus, even if your stats show a > 50% win rate. If riot doesn't endorse it, it doesn't matter riot cultivated a community that will flame you for it, and even then you can expect it to be neglected or outright targeted for removal if it's showing successful results. When riot reworks whatever champion that you might be playing something off meta with, you can be pretty sure that they're not likely to give a fuck about anything other than the intended and endorsed way to play the champion, because it's actively easier for them if they just remove any kind of player freedom in champion use.

Tin of sardines1 votes

if you what adjectives for something hard to climb, just do some research on K2. of course can be made easier, but that is the whole point, isn't?

deadlychuck1 votes

No I think you're missing the point. There's many players who choose to cripple themselves in ranked, willfully not taking advantage of the things that they know are optimal, because they find it more enjoyable.

There are also players, primarily new players, who are just ignorant of these things. This isn't the majority of players not taking advantage of optimal choices though. The data is far too accessible for anyone not using it to be doing so unintentionally.

Riot made the assumption that everyone who wasn't playing these things was ignorant of them and would always want to play what was more optimal. But all they accomplished with such an assumption was making the experience of playing something off meta and non-optimal less enjoyable, because they raised the absolute difficulty of the game, but didn't provided better tools to players so that the functional difficulty isn't any harder.

How about this example, it should be a really easy benchmark to comprehend.... It use to be much easier to carry a match without leveling up any abilities, than it would currently be. This isn't caused by players getting better at the game, because you can assume that anyone attempting such a feat would have also improved proportionally since then.

This is because they increased the difficulty, by giving players tools that are more powerful and easier to use. Where as someone actually seeking a challenge can always find ways to self-impose rules to make a game harder.

Tin of sardines1 votes

I think I didn't made my self clear, I read some article before finish the post. K2 was and is a very harder mountain that can be made "easier" with modern tools.

new "climbers" use rope that is already there, have camps already setup. and use anchors points already put by others.

they don't challenge them selves, not like those before them. no, they that the "easier" road.

at least is that the option of someone how climber the mountain without using all this support. and that make them angry, since that someone using those commodity make the same claim as them.

as to have "climbed a deadly mountain" without having to face those challenges that actually put you life in risk. they probably see people how climbed the easy way a having used the elevator, not the stairs.

but that is making easier something harder, a bit different from what you say (making something not that hard, even harder).

deadlychuck1 votes

That is actually illegible...

Though I think I might have a rough idea of what you're saying. You can always choose to use the harder method of climbing even if there exists tools that make it easier.

The difference here however, is that the absolute difficulty of the mountain doesn't really change, where as the base difficulty of a the game is controlled by riot. If you free climb up a mountain now without tools, it's no easier than someone free climbing it in the past before the tools existed. However, the basic difficulty of the mountain is also flexible and riot has raised the base difficulty of the game by abstracting power away from the core mechanics, and actively changing fundamental aspects of the game shifting the influence of the game away from the core mechanics to these abstracted mechanics.

As a result, the mountain itself became harder to climb, as these metaphorical modern tools became available. Making free climbing the mountain now numerous times harder than it was in the past.

CauseSCIENCE1 votes

Queue Edward Scissor-hand montage (Rocky's theme plays in the background)

Critical Strike Kled, in case you were wondering.

Tin of sardines1 votes

{quoted}

Now, before you downvote, hear me out:

For the point to make more sense, let&#039;s consider climbing a mountain, with the peak being whatever rank you want. Be it Silver, Diamond or even the pro scene.

Now, when most people climb a mountain, they need the essential tools. Ice picks, hiking gear, ropes, maybe a guide. We&#039;ll call this the meta of mountain climbing. (And for league&#039;s sake, this is any meta, not just the one right now.)

Most people have to use the meta to climb mountains....and there&#039;s nothing wrong with that! It&#039;s the safest way, after all, and it gives you the best chance not to fall off the mountain and break your neck. However, for some people, the meta isn&#039;t necessary at all. Most often these are the gurus of mountain climbing and the absolute sickest people. These are the guys climbing with old, possibly unsafe gear (Off-meta champs), using their most reliable gear (The one-tricks who have mastered their champs) or the absolutely fucking bonkers madmen who are climbing the mountain shirtless with forks for fingernails (That one insane fucker who always hits diamond/challenger doing weird shit).

Using that climbing gear isn&#039;t necessary. However, to climb without the gear, you have to be a god at mountain climbing....and the fact is, a lot of us aren&#039;t. And yes, there will always be a good player who uses meta to climb to massive challenger gains. We&#039;ll refer to them as the villain of the 80&#039;s sports movie who has state-of-the-art gear that is climbing the mountain to close down the ski lodge so he can build a mega-mall where you and all your friends would hang out.

Ok this metaphor is off the rails.

Anyways, point is, you don&#039;t need meta to climb. However, meta is probably the &quot;easiest&quot; way to climb if you&#039;re comfortable using it. Some people won&#039;t be comfortable and make up the difference with their old mains/picks they mastered inside out. Others will insist their attack-speed-on-hit-Garen will get them to the top before tripping on their shoelaces. I think it&#039;s an important distinction to know that it&#039;s totally possible to climb without meta but you have to be good. And frankly, most of us just aren&#039;t good enough to make up that skill difference. But hey, nothing wrong with that.

it's good that you soon realize that...

it's very clear, some get to the chopper and parachute into the top. while other try to climb a freezing mountain with bare hands and some supplies.

Other wise I would make your comparative fire against you, by the way, have my upvote.

TeCoolMage1 votes

keep in mind it's better to climb with old gear you know than new gear you don't. It's not like mountain climbing where the mechanisms are simplified, the functionality is improved, AND there are ethical/legal reasons not to recommend 'unsafe' gear. Many champions are statistically worse but not objectively so.

Madsin251 votes

IMO players don't understand what the meta even is most of the time.

IMO all champs are good just some have been put into the gutter on purpose so they avoid pro play,

BestPudgeNA1 votes

Got it i'm gonna work on become a professional Basketball player on a diet of cookies and milk for every meal.

Eleshakai1 votes

I think this is an exaggeration, honestly. But I like the thought.

The reality is that the meta only REALLY matters at high ranks. At Bronze, silver, or even gold - and possibly even plat... having something you're comfortable with will serve you way better than just 'playing what's good' the majority of the time.

I played enchanters/mages during one of the tank support metas back in the day because I was not much good at most tanks. And I climbed despite that. I don't think I'm good, or particularly adept at them... it's just that until you hit diamond, knowing the champion you're playing is FAR FAR more important than the champion 'being good'.

AirKingNeo1 votes

Is that why when Singed is nerfed, the Singed players fall out of Challenger? Same for Jax, same for pretty much every champion.

The Ićę Witch 1 votes

Most players follow the meta because everyone else is doing it. Truth is people like that are scared to think outside of the box.

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