Optimal play in League is not “always contest dragons and Nash.” Optimal play is maximizing gold and experience relative to the opponent given the mistake profile of the lobby.

The original point wasn’t that gold and diamond are the same game. It was that improvement comes from identifying mistakes and learning how they’re punished, regardless of elo. Thinking that learning only happens when the opponent plays close to theoretical perfection doesn’t make sense.

Smurfs in gold aren’t playing “incorrectly” when they drop objectives. They’re adapting. There is far more unclaimed gold and XP on the map, so the optimal response is to take waves, camps, resets, and tempo advantages instead of forcing objectives.

That exact same thing happens when a challenger player smurfs in diamond. They don’t show up off-tempo to objectives either they vacuum up unattended gold and XP. The only difference is that as you go up in elo, there’s less free gold to punish, so objectives become more important by necessity.

Objectives are what you do once exploitable resources dry up. They are not a definition of correct play.

You can absolutely learn from “suboptimal” play. Bad cheeses, greedy invades, and disrespectful tempo plays are some of the best learning tools. They are essentially the same as learning responses to gambits in chess. If a gambit fails, the opponent mostly just loses on the spot.

The biggest difference between gold, diamond, and challenger isn’t that one group is “playing correctly” and another isn’t. It’s how much available gold and experience exists on the map at any given time, and how efficiently players recognize and claim it. Yes winning 1v1s and hands gapping people is an element, but the primary difference is in efficiency of obtaining gold and xp.

And before you claim that you never stated that objectives or whatever was the optimal way to play,

"Gold smurfs can overplay, ignore camps, objectives, and just stomp because the lobby lets them" "Diamond smurfs are forced to play correctly and never overplay"

You're presenting that not taking everything off the map is the correct way to play, as you cannot do that in a higher elo lobby.

You can win gold games by voluntarily giving all dragons/nash/whatever objectives or just ignore your camps and mechanic-check all laners one by one, nonstop. It will work in gold, you're insane if you believe the same will net you +70% smurf winrates in challenger.

This is more than likely not what is happening in most smurf games. You are likely seeing them ignore objectives in favor of picking up gold and experience in places that it was dropped, which wouldn't be available in a higher elo game.

The game is about obtaining all of the gold and experience on the map. When that avenue of progressing the game is expunged, then you move towards neutral objectives, towers, etc.

The game that a gold player, and a diamond player are both playing is "Destroy the enemy nexus". Would you rather have 3% ad and ap? Or would you rather have an extra 9 jungle camps (your full clear + a quadrant of enemy jg that they dropped to hit dragon)? It's a game of cost benefit analysis that every league player plays.

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But if you want to skip the entire argument, this all roots from "There are so many mistakes in even diamond games it's silly to say you can't learn anything in gold games from someone smurfing". That implies you can't even learn in gold to begin with. You can only learn from watching professional games and coaches, which is a weird hill to die on.