Off meta play is de facto bannable

Please examine the red responses in the linked thread before continuing. And please realize this is not a statement of how the game should be, rather it's a statement of how the game is given a number of official statements.

My read on this is that we now have enforced meta, not by a single policy, not by a declaration by Riot, but by a confluence of other policies and realities with how most people play the game.

Pay specific attention to this quote: > {quoted} > Winning is not the end all be all of League. We want players to have fun but not at the expense of teammates. Ideally this means players will coordinate among themselves in a given match and react to the unique circumstances they end up in. If a player is consistently forcing “their vision” on the rest of the team and refusing to adapt to their needs we reserve the right to intervene.

I'll not comment on the strangeness of "the team's needs" not equating to "winning the game" - that's not what I want to focus on here.

We can glean these three pieces of information from that thread:

• Given: You are to seek teammate consensus if you have a "strange" play style.
• Given: Informing your teammates of what you are doing, even throughly and nicely, is not good enough.
• Given: Even if successful, if it annoys other people, it's still not good enough.

These were all directly stated.

And now one assertion of my own:

• Given: Most people are going to play "the meta", since most people are getting their information from community sites like Lolking, Mobafire, and so on - outfits where people post guides, analyze high level play.

This leads us to an inescapable conclusion:

• Therefore: If you don't play the way the rest of your team wants you to play, no matter how nice you are about it, or how effective you are, you will get the dropped on you.

Now extend this out to something besides simple role selection. Some hypotheticals:

• Teemo main? Not any more you're not.
• Choose something "off" to counteract a flavor-of-the-week pick that's a poor matchup against the enemy team comp? You better not.

.. not unless you like the taste of cherry-flavored that is.

Put another way: Riot claims that off meta play is not bannable, but if you have to ask permission first, you're never going to get to play off meta, which is indistinguishable from it being bannable.

If that's how they want to structure the game - fine - we can all adapt. But someone needs to retract that FAQ about offmeta being bannable. It is, and has been proven to be, and will lead people to making decisions that put their account at risk.