What influences a change of Meta?

Question

I've been wondering what influences a change of meta.

Im in understanding that the current,optimal team comp is solo/duo top (bruiser or tank),solo mid (ad or ap mid) ,duo bot (support and adc) and sometimes a jungler.

Yet im also aware that it used to be recommended at most times that the adc go lane mid.

So this has plucked up the question what leads to a change in the official meta?

Is it influenced by the community's preference, where riot decides to adjust the meta to Lol population's liking?

Or do we adjust ourselves accordingly to how riot introduces lane partners which can be examined through how they organise the opposing bot champions

Answer 1

The optimal composition is 2 sololaners, (usually, one bruiser, and one AP carry), 2 duo-laners( ad carry and support) and one jungler. The bruiser is usually top, the APC mid, and the dual - lane is bottom.

Switching lanes is a metagame, it was something very unusual a few months ago, and now it is quite common.

Metagame changes may come from several things:

1. Discovery: People start to realize that a character is awesome when played correctly. And in a month, this character is perma pick or ban. Thi happened countless of times: LeeSin was almost never played at first, neither was Skarner or nunu top. Until we realized their true potential.
2. New items: when an item is modified, the characters using it are either buffed, or nerfed. Take black cleaver and his buff several months ago. It made it very strong, so strong that you could play a team with 5 bruiser, each, with 5 blacks cleaver. In the same way, the new black cleaver made Rammus almost unplayable, while Chogath had became one of the most resillient tank.
3. New strategy: people once discovered split push. That was something that was almost never used right, until people realized they could use the TP spell of a character to split push, then go back to your team to fight 4v5.
4. Counter strategy: first there was a "normal" composition, which was beaten by AOE composition (Galio, MF, FiddleStick, Amumu, etc), which was then beaten by hypercarry team (team aiming to protect ONE hyper adcarry, such as Kogmaw or Vayne), which was beaten by assassin team (Akali, talon, kassadin) which was beaten by strong bruiser teams, etc...
5. Other seemingly meaningless updates: When Ezreal got his ultimate skin, it has such a great success that everybody started to play him, and Ez was back to being a monster ADC.

These are just a few changes that changed the metagame.

EDIT (thanks vogel): What I wanted to point out is that metagame changes often appear after a game update. Although changes are often initiated by players (mostly top players, to be honnest), but some of them are wanted by Riot (ie: nerfing oracle, to make the game more dynamic and aggressive, giving AP jungler items to make them viable in jungle).

Answer 2

There is no such thing as an "official" meta. Riot does not officially support any one style of playing the game. They do not enforce any specific type of play. Any consistent meta play you see is because it evolved that way over time.

In fact, the term "meta" specifically contradicts this notion. The meta game is "descriptive", not "prescriptive", in the sense that it is not dictated by any authority, but rather simply documented based on trends in the current gameplay.

The League of Legends meta isn't even stable. It may appear that way if you take a snapshot of the game in any given month, but over time it will inevitably change.

Riot cannot dictate the meta, because of the very nature of what meta even means as a concept. They may be able to guide it away from degenerate cases with the use of patching, but the point of the game is to have a broad array of viable strategies. It is up to the players to find which ones are effective, which itself creates a meta scene out of the control of the game creators.