Boards›Player Behavior

Trolling vs off-meta

SnakDatSmilesBak·6/5/2017, 8:00:13 AM·3 votes·1,652 views

Riot, long story short, I think you need to update your stance on this. https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/EtXQhs5J-weore-updating-our-policy-so-unusual-play-styles-dont-get-14-day-bans

How do we know if someone is going off-meta for the sake of going off-meta or if that player actually has a plan in mind? How can teammates tell if a player is using these new policies as a way to sabotage the game while remaining untouchable?

For example, one of my games had an ap lucian. Now I'm not against off-meta picks. I love winning with them (just look at my match history FFS). But when I make an off-meta pick, I have a goal in mind and multiple reasons that the pick works. Ap Lucian offers absolutely nothing that a different pick can't provide better. I think that's what makes an off-meta pick a troll pick or not.

Isn't this ap Lucian sabotaging my chances of winning by swallowing resources while providing almost nothing useful, except mediocre magic damage poke? It's like going top as garen and building straight magic penetration. Sure it's "good" when you use it, but how often are you gonna use it?

If the player is given gold and experience by being given the mid lane, does he not have a responsibility to try to be as useful as possible? That goes for any role. Purposely gimping damage for no apparent benefit constitutes trolling by griefing because that player is making it harder for me to win than it should be on purpose. (Yes I know this is inductive reasoning but that doesn't make it wrong.)

  1. If somebody's entire playstyle is demonstrably weak for no reason then it is griefing.

  2. All picks need to bring something useful to a team, any kind of utility as long as it's useful and realized to its best potential is ok (meaning the player tries their best to make the pick as useful as possible).

If you have an argument about why I'm wrong, take a look at those guidelines. Take a moment to read what you are arguing against and to understand what that means for ranked.

I think those two guidelines will help differentiate between troll picks and off-meta picks. Real off-meta picks have a method to their madness. There's a Korean challenger player who plays yi in mid lane. Think about the popular champs people take mid. Now consider yi's quick damage potential and his alpha strike. Like I said, there is a reason for real off-meta picks and it's not to be a special snowflake.

59 Comments

Chønklord6/5/2017, 8:31:51 AM4 votes

The problem with your line of argument is that not everyone who plays league knows all the ins and outs of a champion, their build variances, etc.

Maybe they wanted to try AP Lucian because they saw some youtuber do it;

Maybe they weren't aware that AP isn't strong on an AD scaling marksman (other than some small Ap ratios on one or two abilities);

Maybe they genuinely had the notion that playing AP Lucian might somehow be OK in terms of damage;

You can't fault every player that tries something differently on their champ pick in-game, simply because you believe it to be sub-par at best, or complete garbage at worst.

I mean, I still get people throwing their shit over picking Udyr top, Darius supp or Tank teemo. All of which work for me and have been helping me climb out of Silver. (Literally have had players say they are flat out going to int feed, or report me because they didn't like my choices).

The community is overloaded with young, immature, emotionally volatile tweenagers who have Trump-sized Ego's and very little social maturity or mental fortitude when it comes to facing the unknown, and/or assume they know the only and best way to play X champ. By catering to their selfish, self-absorbed entitled spoiled mentality, you stifle creativity within the community and progress for meta changes and cripple any chance of off-meta playstyles or player decision over his/her gameplay.

As long as they're trying to win, are not intentionally feeding, actively participating in the game and doing their best without exhibiting toxic, griefing behavior in chat, there's nothing wrong with any pick in any position with any build.

Project Xayah6/5/2017, 9:01:50 AM1 votes

From where I stand, an important distinction between "trolling" and "off-meta" is communication. When I say communication, though, I don't just mean "post your intentions in the lobby chat and ignore your team". I mean actual discussion and explanation as to why you're making those choices and how you plan to make them work. If your team still isn't convinced about it, then just do something else (try something a bit more "meta" for that match if you have to).

When push comes to shove, it's the community (not Riot) who decides what falls into the category of "trolling" by what they report. A good example of this would be the "Support Singed" player from several months ago, who received hundreds of reports over the span of a month, if I remember correctly. If they had communicated better with their teams, made different choices when they were met with resounding "No!"s, they likely wouldn't have been considered a troll.

That said, there is still a distinct difference between ranked and unranked matches. People will always be less inclined to try something different in ranked, so it's always best to try new things in unranked to show it can work. Then, and only then, should you take it into ranked.

Breaku6/5/2017, 10:25:09 AM1 votes

I won't stop playing ADC Soraka.

Friendly Ram6/5/2017, 1:56:12 PM1 votes

support j4 brings two forms of bonus damage, 2.5 forms of cc, and free wards to bot lane.

MUSHROOM MIDGET6/5/2017, 5:47:02 PM1 votes

no he doesnt have any responsibility to you. a player can play whatever character and build he decides to. its up to him.

if he is not trolling and is trying an offmeta build then thats his choice he should be able to play it however he wants. and if he is actually trolling then he is still going to be able to troll just as easily if you had forced him to build AD lucian.

Funkin Dunkin6/5/2017, 7:14:40 PM1 votes

Well in my case you would see a long history of Skarner top with the last 3 years having a 50% or better win rate with him in lane. I don't use him jungle. That's how you determine if it's off meta.

SecondAirbane6/6/2017, 3:01:05 AM1 votes

an off meta pick would be like a teemo pick or any weaker champion in the list

AP lucian is INDEED trolling he doesnt scale at all with AP

NickMP6/6/2017, 9:17:09 AM1 votes

To me, making the right pick, whether it be Champion Pick or Items, Summoner Spells, Masteries or Runes, is a form of skill, not intent, mostly because if you really want to just boil it down, sometimes going for a specific build/pick is a bad idea, if you're bad at dodging Blitzcrank hooks on say, Ashe, picking Ashe into Blitzcrank can be a stupid idea.

But at the same time if you're support is bad at dodging hooks and you're good at it, in this case picking Ashe to encourage the Blitzcrank to try and pull you and focus less on your Janna or whatever could be a great decision as you'll be free to punish him while it's on cooldown and can also in a way protect your own support who may have otherwise fed.

League of legends is a complex game where even the tiniest situational difference can feel like an earthquake.

Likewise, if you understand how to play with an off-meta build(which is usually as simple as just playing the Champion normally with situational differences based on items, such as baiting stuff because you have Zhonya's on literally anybody so your CC-weak Yi can clean house etc.), you may still not understand which situations are best or downright suicidal to pick it in, sometimes people don't perfectly understand why meta builds are strong.

This lack of understanding can also make it hard to decide which items to build, regardless of whether your pick is meta or not.

I'm fairly standard AD Zed, I want a defensive item, I've got my eyes on Guardian Angel or Edge of Night, while the enemy has some hard CC for EoN, they also have some filler abilities like Ezreal Q and Ahri W to get rid of the shield, and also have some decent auto attack threat that EoN may not save me from, additionally they're support's been warding flanks quite well so I need to be careful of getting too close while dewarding with Duskblade or I may get jumped before I can get EoN's channel complete anyways.

I don't play Zed, but this is a good example of questions I often ask myself, and knowing the answer to questions like this is a form of skill.

Likewise with off-meta builds, just like the previous example, you need to understand what items you want in what situations, as well as what situations your pick is weak in, but if you currently don't know the answer to those questions and you still make your pick, you aren't trolling, you're simply inexperienced or lacking skill, which isn't an offense.

If you can't put why you like your pick into words, that also doesn't mean you're trolling, it just means you may not understand the build well enough to put it into words yet, or you may just have trouble explaining your thought process to people.

So what means somebody's trolling? Personally I just ask myself if they made their pick in sincere "Good Faith", if they made a bad decision on their pick in Good Faith, it was still in good faith, just a bad decision, which is simply a lack of skill. Though I also like Riot's wording, "did they exhibit "Intent to Win"?" I don't think it's much different to how I see it, so I still use my term.

To me a good way to show Good Faith is to have made your pick before in normals with some practice, at least a little, to me this basically confirms Good Faith, though the lack of it doesn't disprove it. (People first time !@#$ all the time in ranked, this isn't trolling, but it is the majority of the time a mistake or unskilled decision.)

I looked through this Lucian's past games and he does have 1 AP Lucian game in a normals a month ago, it's literally the only Normals game I can find on his op.gg, and he gave a solid 9/5/10 performance with lots of damage done to enemies(second highest on his team only losing to his allied Jax by 500) he does have 58 Lucian Ranked games, as well as 84 Ahri games, Ahri was available so I'm kind of surprised he didn't pick Ahri, he did have an Ahri loss recently though so he may have wanted to play something else, so it looks like he just wanted to try out something he did in a normals game in ranked.

Combined with the fact that he once again gave a pretty solid performance with plenty of damage done, I'd have to say he made his pick in good faith, would he have been better off going AD? Maybe, but even if so he wasn't trolling, he would be making a mistake, which Riot doesn't punish.

[EDIT - made a minor correction to the Zed story]

Ah O Yeah Harder6/6/2017, 6:49:29 PM1 votes

We just had our jungler go Ahri Jungle because she was autofilled and because she wanted to Fizz jungle but it got banned.

Long story short, Ahri jungle had 37 cs at the 12 minute mark (enemy jungler had 87), Ahri was 0/3/0 (enemy jungler was 3/0/2), Ahri wasnt getting any dragons either.

I somehow managed to carry that game with our swain mid. The rest were just feeding the whole game.