Meta Slaves

Because I'm a space dragon! That's why!

Just because bans are meta doesn't mean I'm a meta slave.

Because in season 2 competitive started picking 1top 1jungle 1mid 2bot and the sheeps followed it so hard that it became a "meta" and Riot didn't even try to stop it,since then if you don't follow the meta you get banned.

Because that's whats efficient. If you break it and do well still then good for you [slayer-pantheon-thumbs]

Because people can't think for themselves and have to rely on others to do the optimization for them.

Every game has that... is this anything new?

I see meta slaves much like the Adeptus Mechanicus from Warhammer 40K. They worship knowledge and technology, and they believe that everything that can be learned has already been learned, but that information needs to be rediscovered, and any deviations from established "fact" is considered heresy.

Because of the events of the Age of Strife over ten thousand years prior, humanity's best knowledge and technology was lost, and whatever they retained was further lost and then corrupted during the Horus Heresy, when Chaos (the collective subconscious of the entire galaxy and all the good, bad, and ugly that comes with it) corrupted most of the knowledge of technology that remained, and even the technology itself. The Adeptus Mechanicus are in charge of creating and maintaining all of humanity's technology (read: using the equivalent of exorcism to appease the machine spirits), from toasters to starships, but they don't actually venture out to rediscover how something like a toaster works, only how to create it and that it functions; the equivalent of knowing that 2+2=4, but never being taught how to count.

Instead, they rely on finding Standard Template Constructs (basically an ultra-Wiki computer on how to do anything, and designed to be understandable to even the lowest of brows) to teach them how to construct lost technology, and while that has worked to a degree, most of the STCs were damaged over time or corrupted by the Horus Heresy (the equivalent of the entire internet's worth of trolls, ultra-anarchists and neckbeards storming every known database and sabotaging all the information, then most of the redundant backups of that information.), so the information on them is dubious at best, and the STCs themselves are impossible to find and might not even exist anymore.

It's widely agreed that if the Adeptus Mechanicus didn't treat technology like a religion and tried to rediscover the lost information on their own in a way that they didn't rely wholly on the STCs, humanity would be in a much better state than their current miserable existence and would probably be able to effortlessly swat away all the cosmic horrors in the galaxy. It's because of this that I have ironically named them the dumbest people in the entirety of 40K, even when comparing them to Orks (whose ramshackle technology only works because they think it does) and Ogryns (mentally retarded mutant humans caused by countless generations of inbreeding and are somehow literally mindless).

Tying this back to League, meta slaves don't think or deviate from the arbitrary stats they find on op.gg or whatever. They don't experiment with item effects to understand WHY they work, only THAT they work, nor are they willing or even able to adapt to what's right in front of them, so situationally important items like Last Whisper and Black Cleaver or even entire STATS are ignored when they face off against a team full of tanks (no one builds armor pen) or Soraka (no one builds Grevious Wounds), or an entire team of assassins and ADCs (which is what most teams are composed of these days). Much like the Mechanicus, despite worshipping the meta so much, they are very terrible at actually reading or even understanding it.