User blog comment:Nidhogg101/A Treatise on an Extinct Facet of League/@comment-3466579-20140126132512/@comment-9048637-20140126185105

'What if the "It's just a Normal Game" argument is just bullshit? Do you want to test something really wierd? Go play Coop games, for God's sake.'

Tell me, when was the last time you personally played a Co-Op game? I'm guessing it wasn't for a while. The problem with co-op games is multifold:

1) Most of the people playing Co-Op games are pretty low-level. This applies to Intermediate as well as Beginner. This makes it rather hard to tell whether your build and playstyle is actually any good, or if you're only carrying because you've been playing this game for a year or more now and they just got started a month or so ago.

2) Bots are not humans. Sure, they do some things better than human players (beware the infamous Annie Bot combo), but for the most part, they just aren't as creative or responsive. Again, it's very easy to get a ludicrously good score in a game against bots that you'd never manage in a game against actual players (and again, this applies to Intermediate bots as well as Beginner bots).

3) In what may be considered a particular case of the above, bots don't have junglers. They only ever do duo-top. Do I even have to explain how drastically this changes the complection of the game?

For all these reasons, I do Co-Op when I'm picking up a champion for the first time and want to get used to their basic mechanics, and never otherwise.

And anyway, why shouldn't people use Normal games to try unorthodox strategies? Particularly if they ask their team-mates beforehand? What's the point of Normals (post-30) if not to have fun and experiment as opposed to being driven to win at all costs? I'm not advocating to go full on trolling, but Jeez, lighten up. It's one thing to enforce the meta in ranked, where wins and losses carry a lot more weight, but in normal? What's the big tragedy if you lose because someone tried something different and it didn't quite work?