That little bit of freedom — troll if you wanna call it that, romantic if you wanna call it that — was like the last variable element in LoL. Kinda sucks that they're just cementing it this way.

That's because the game has to work commercially to keep going. Honestly, both the current LoL players and the new ones coming in are comfortable with the EU meta we all know—it's familiar and easy. Random lane swaps out of the blue like we saw recently? Literally no one can keep up with that. People just feel pressured having to learn an extra playstyle on top of everything else.

At this point, the EU meta is way too glued in place to change it. It's not like they haven't been telegraphing what role every new champ is gonna play for years now. Plus, roles like top, mid, and bot have their own good and bad matchups into each other, but the meta can still shift with changes to the map or just the patch (e.g., Darius/Vlad non-marksman bot meta, Ornn/Sett/Garen tank mid meta). But jungle and support? Nope. Junglers have the irreplaceable role of objective control and smite fights. Support item's been a source of trauma for Riot more times than I can count — Spellthief's top inting, or the double Spellthief's bottom with Bloodsong Lucian. The reason new metas like that pop up is either to counter the standard EU meta or because they're just straight-up more efficient and effective. You see the same thing next door in Blizzard's overpriced clock game (Overwatch) where people call it dive comp and end up running D.Va, Winston, Lucio, Zenyatta every single game. Like I was saying, if supports start taking smite and we go into a double-jungle meta, you could legit see both supports like Camille or Bel'Veth with Hail of Blades, Ignite, and Smite just chasing the enemy jungler the whole game, while every lane turns into a pure 1v1 with zero jungle interference, and that being what pro play looks like.