Can we please have a dynamic meta again?

So I've been thinking about this a lot this season due to things like the strong performance of EU over at MSI, the second season in a row of TSM underperforming, the fact that several veteran Korean players were top tier last season before seemingly hitting a brick wall this season, etc.

I'm seeing a pattern that has developed over the past several seasons that I find VERY problematic. I think a lot of it has to do with the broad reworks across entire classes, or entire item sets, but I also think A LOT of it is intentional by Riot. The pattern is that rather than working towards a universal sense of unified balance across styles of play, Riot seems to have decided on a single style of play that they deem "correct" and just pushed that forward, rapidly removing options. Let me illustrate with examples:

In my mind the best season by far was the season Samsung White Won worlds, it had the best balance in terms of both champ selections and styles. Yes, like every season there were individual champions who are very overtuned, but the overarching strategies and styles were balanced. You could go Mundo top lane and just slow farm your way to the ticking time bomb of unkillable meat shield, but you could also play Irelia or Jayce and hard carry through the side lane, or play Ryze and abuse a melee tank for an early lead while scaling into oblivion. Three very different styles/strats, but all nearly equally viable. In that same season you'd see Faker lock in Zed, only to turn around and lock in Orianna next time around. You had junglers taking Elise and ganking the crap out of the early game, but you also had Nunu go the control style jungling route and scaling his hyper-carry up, or Kha Zix with the scaling assassin life. Bot lane you could take Tristana and scale up for late game team fights, or you could play Lucian and hard bully/kill your lane, or you could go for nutty poke with Ezreal or Corki, or you could go for stuff like Twitch and Vayne. Split push comps, front to back team fight comps, pick comps, siege comps, you name it...they all worked. And this isn't across the whole season either; that level of diversity was seen AT THE WORLD TOURNAMENT.

Now let's look at the current iteration of the game (other iterations have been equally problematic but let's just look at one example for recency/time sake). Right now the list of things you need to do as a team has become very short, but the few things on that list have become INSANELY important. You have to do well in lane, you have to be able to skirmish, you have to be able to fight over scuttle, you have to be able to deal significant damage, etc etc. It's become this very narrow focus of the game which has become highly centralized on aggression and fighting. Now I like fighting as much as the next guy, it's exciting right? But you know what is even more interesting than fighting? Diversity.

And that's the core of the issue, dialing back the emphasis in other areas of the game to make just a handful of elements heavily highlighted. Over the course of an entire season of LOL I will watch at least two matches each week, plus nearly every game of WORLDS. And then on top of that I typically play at least a handful of games in a week. So when I consume that much LOL, over the course of several seasons, you can imagine the frustration of having what was initially an insanely robust game, become super diluted. I'm assuming this is mostly due to the demands of more casual consumers of the game who just basically want to watch highlight reels and short games, but I can't pretend to know what Riot's market research looks like.

I want the game to have fundamentals again. I want to be able to win through lane dominance, through picks and split push and skirmishes, through 60/40 or 50/50 plays, through early game aggression. By all means yes, I want that. But I also want to be able to win through vision control, through controlling side waves to limit windows of opportunity for my opponents, through macro and rotations, through front to back team fighting, through low kill scores games that had beautifully executed pressure plays and sieging.

But Riot has dialed back the importance or potency of these elements in favor of yolo aggression. Again, aggression and taking 50/50 plays is not bad sometimes. But it's just yuck when that is all you see all season long and all the top teams have to play that style. Sure Team Liquid puts their own scaling team fight twist on things, but they still adhere to the overarching concept above. Need a tank jungle? Gotta be Sej for unparalleled early game for tank junglers. Want to play a control mage mid? Gotta be Azir cuz he's the only one with enough consistent wave clear to have pressure early game and some mechanical prowess to make plays. Farm heavy junglers? Nope. High emphasis on vision control? Nope. Opting intentionally into a slow bleed low econ top lane, knowing that you are sacrificing in favor of more pressure elsewhere? Nope. Everything except for this one overarching style of play has become ridiculously exploitable.

I'm not saying TSM is good, and I'm not saying I want their style to become meta. Agnostic of team allegiance I'm saying I want to go back to a level of diversity we once had. Even if it means longer games, or having a higher point of entry for newer players. I want to see mechanically gifted guys win worlds, but I'd like to see veterans who rely on game knowledge, cool headedness, and strategy be able to compete for the championship as well. I want LOL to be an aggressive fighting game, but I also want it to be chess. Now a lot of people will complain about what that kind of meta would look like, but look back to the seasons where SKT won their first championship, or when SSW won and tell me those worlds tournaments weren't exciting. While aggression and confidence are fun to watch, I'm also an analytical player who enjoys pick/ban phase and listening to analysts almost as much as watching the game. I'd love to revert back to a longer list of core fundamentals, and find some semblance of balance between the yolo fighting/bigplay style and styles we have seen from the middle seasons up through now.

Who's with me?