A Few Often-Misused Terms
**Meta: ** Broadly speaking, this refers to whatever is most likely to help you win a game against opponents of equal skill during the patch being discussed. It can be used to describe particular team strategies (like Taric mid gold funneling a Yi jungle), builds (like first-building BotRK or Ardent as a priority), and other things like jungle pathing, etc. But it is most often used when talking about champion picks. That does not change the meaning though. It still refers to the picks that are most likely to help you win a game. Often, people mistake it as meaning, "what people normally do," but that's not entirely correct. It only seems that way because normally, people like to win.
It's very important to remember that discussions about the meta must refer to a specific point in time, or rather a specific patch/patches. A discussion about the "new" champion being insanely OP is pointless if you're actually talking about Xin Zhao as if he were just released. That is to say, as time passes the meta is constantly changing. A recent notable example is how it became meta to choose fighters (and certain champions who usually go top lane to counter melee fighters) at bot lane instead of marksmen, thanks to heavy nerfs to marksmen's early game in a state where high-level play only saw short games. The combination of those factors made it so that picking champions who could get their power spikes faster than marksmen was optimal. Something that isn't meta can become meta thanks to the ever-changing nature of this game.
Off-meta (or non-meta) and Trolling: As the phrase implies, this basically refers to strategies, builds, etc. and picks that are not meta. That means choices that are sub-optimal for the patch(es) in question. For example, Nidalee in the jungle hasn't been meta for nearly two years now, boasting the lowest or second lowest overall performance of any champion for many, many patches.
It's important to note, though, that jungle is still the most effective place to play her if you so choose. Playing a non-meta champion is perfectly reasonable as long as you are playing them in a reasonable role for them to be played, to the best of your ability. Even champions not in the meta for PICKS still have a meta way to build and play them.
However, the phrase is often misused to defend strategies, builds, and picks that are in fact acts of trolling. Where the confusion seems to lie is that some people mistakenly equate trolling to intentionally feeding, when inting is only one of the acts that would be considered trolling. But making conscious decisions to make yourself far less effective is also a form of trolling.
And those decisions can come at any point, even if everything up until that point wasn't trolling, as I'll outline here:
- Pick phase. There are several things you can do to troll during the pick phase, including: banning an allies' declaration when they have First Pick, threatening to intentionally feed if an ally doesn't swap roles with you, and most importantly intentionally picking a champion that isn't suitable for the role you've been assigned (whether or not that was a role you wanted). This can be something as simple as choosing Azir (at least currently, since there may be changes that make it effective) when you've been assigned jungle, since he has extremely low level 1 defenses and can't apply red buff with his soldiers.
- Game start. Let's say you picked a reliable champion for Support. That's all well and good. But then you intentionally choose not to buy an income item and go out of your way to take your lane opponent's CS. That crosses the line into trolling. This is especially a problem when people get Autofilled and think they're entitled to ignore the draft mode's role assignment.
- Any point during the game. Now let's say you picked Bard, you bought your income item like a good boy, place shrines for your ally to heal at, ward well and ping your MIA's--- for the first fifteen minutes. But then you decide you don't want to play any more, so you stop healing allies, refuse to use Magical Journey to save them, and actively help the enemies catch your allies by using Tempered Fate on them when they'd otherwise make it out safely.
- When your surrender vote fails. So your refusal to heal allies and intentional misuse of Tempered Fate wasn't enough to get two of your allies to agree to the surrender vote. You decide to continue doing all of those things, but also to sell all of your items and replace them with Tears.
The point I'm trying to get across is that even if you've made good decisions aside from the trolling, they don't negate the trolling. That goes for decisions made after the trolling as well. Honoring your allies and acting nice in the end-game screen doesn't undo you running down mid. And working hard to have 0 deaths as the Bard I described in (3) doesn't undo refusing to help allies and using Tempered Fate to actively hurt them, either.
Often times, such trolling is punished under the "Intentional Feeding" label. But that's really not correct. It is still against the rules, but it isn't technically that rule they're breaking. The report and punishment should be labeled something else, to show that it in fact covers other forms of trolling aside from intentional feeding.
I hope this was informative, and you can discuss things more clearly on the boards, as well as prevent yourself from getting rightfully punished due to being ignorant of what trolling actually covers. Have a nice day.
Edit: I want to clarify that when I say, "against the rules," I'm referring to the fact that all the rules in the Summoner's Code are implicit in nature. They don't explicitly state that, "you aren't allowed to run down mid," etc.
