User blog comment:Nidhogg101/A Treatise on an Extinct Facet of League/@comment-14802729-20140126182110

I can empathize with the OP. This game is constantly changing, with new champs, new items, new patches, and of course, new strategies implemented by creative players. Now for those who disagree, you are entitled to your opinion on the matter. But in the same way, others are also entitled to theirs. I don't think the OP's point is to disregard winning, but to not always play with static constraints that only limit gameplay.

Now, this is my opinion, so you can ignore it if you want, but all the haters out there can shut their traps UNLESS they have played at least for 10,000 hours and explored all possible meta-games, alternate builds, team compositions, and every other permutation possible with this game. One does not know until that person tries, and sometimes that attempt suddenly changes the whole perspective of the game!

Now here are my personal experiences where deviating from the norm has been successful, and has ultimately been justified in later seasons:

- I really hate getting ganked. The main cause of that was not able to see enemy positions before they saw me. So I started to buy wards on everyone champ I played. Now bear in mind that this was all the way back in Season One, and even before that season's finals. I believed I saw this from a random player while PuGing, so it's not an original idea, but i took it to heart. My teammates would even ask why I would get 2 wards, let alone 3 or 5. In most cases, I was the only one warding (even playing as the adc). I got ganked less, I set up kills for my own team (my KDA would be skyrocketing if I got an assist for every kill made possible for a random ward I placed), and even prevent other teammates from dying. Some people would laugh off my warding habit, others would say that I was grieving/trolling because it was a waste of gold (until they were saved or secured a kill by the extra map control), but I believed that this was the best way to prevent myself from feeding the other team, even if it was at the costof my own gold. Fast forward to the Season 1 finals, every team are warding like mad. Warding and counterwarding was as much of the game as taking down turrets. Now, it is an acceptable practice to constantly ward the map (despite how so many players fail do to so).

- A friend and I really just wanted to have fun playing, but still intent on winning, so we decided to support as Annie in bot lane for the hell of it (the Return of Annie-Bot!). Again, there wre those who nerd-raged against it, calling us trolls and whatnot. Now even though our damage output was not high compared to a solo mid Annie, her reliable stuns did make it possible to feed our team's adc and scare the opposition in bot lane for quite some time. Additionally, we were using money runes and masteries, so we picked up 4-5 pink wards each time we went back, and kept placing them on the map. Sure, we might not have had more than 2 major items for our builds, but the adc was happy, and we had superior map control. Fast forward to Season 3 finals, where we see Royal Club's Tabe use support Annie to devastating effect. Now we see support Annie on bot occasionally, but not seen as trolling anymore. Hell, that kinda pissedme off, because now we were inadvertently made as hipsters (we did support Annie before it became popular)!

-Anyone remember AP Master Yi? Yeah, someone had to look at his AP ratio's and come up with an idea, "Dude, what if... I build full AP on Master Yi, so his Alpha Strike is like so OP, and he can tank turrets in Meditate!" I'm sure the first team that saw his build were "lol" and "noob" before they got multi-one shotted with Alpha Strike.

These are just a few examples of how creativity made for a new dynamic in the game and gameplay. It may not have been obvious then, but I'm sure by now most players see the pros doing it, and now feel that they should emulate the pros.

Don't be afraid to experiment and test new ideas. Now yes, go to co-op first to make a first trial run and to fine-tune the details. Go normal when you feel that it's ready to be tested against live players. And if you pwn mass quantities of nerd-raging noobs along the way, then up your level and try ranked. Sure, there will be the usual douchebag who will talk smack, but it's most likely that he will lose the game for your team rather than you.