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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

I am happy to see this trend potentially ending. In my estimation, esports ultimately resulted in barbaric desecration of formerly-enjoyable multiplayer experiences, all for the sake of the all-mighty meta. Many titles were built for the express purpose of being a PPV event.

I believe Starcraft 2 and LoL evolved into some of the top offenders in this arena. Overwatch also had a scary phase with mandatory meta queues. These days, SC2 feels like you are playing an organ with 1 hand tied behind your back. LoL lost all of the wacky energy when you couldn't stack items anymore.

Competitive multiplayer gaming is effectively dead for me, and not because I don't like to get sweaty anymore. I will still periodically fire up something like TF2, just so I can remember how good it all could have been. I can play [insert role] all day on 1 server with other humans and no one will give me shit about it. Try playing off-meta in LoL and see how long your account stays active.

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Fully agree. Back in the day, I could just join a game of Dota 2 with my friends. Last time I re-installed, they first forced me to play through a tutorial so that I won't inconvenience other players. Then me and my mate got thrown into a public match with some really talented Koreans who promptly reported us for "intentional feeding" when we lost. I guess in the morning on a weekday, there just wasn't any other amateurs online. But that put a special flag on my account so then I needed to wait for a bad behavior countdown until we could try playing again.

All of that just because my Dota skills are hobbyist level. And apparently, that's not acceptable to the online community anymore.

>> In my estimation, esports ultimately resulted in barbaric desecration of formerly-enjoyable multiplayer experiences

> All of that just because my Dota skills are hobbyist level. And apparently, that's not acceptable to the online community anymore.

In my view, the problem here is that somehow the expectation has come to be that you play your multiplayer games with strangers. (This also causes other problems such as invasive anti-cheating software.)

I see very little benefit and quite a lot of damage resulting from this idea. Who cares about playing with strangers?

I play CS:go with strangers. As i am only playing casually once in awhile and being 40 with family and my friends being in the same situation it's often my friends are not able to be online (and wise versa) when i am ready to play.

Who cares? Anybody after about the 1h mark of playing with/against the same players. If there's a major skill gap, someone isn't going to be having fun.

I’m a bad LoL player - I find playing with strangers perfectly fine, FWIW. Can be quite fun

> Who cares about playing with strangers?

It's not a job. If I want to play, I want to fire up my gaming PC, start the game, press a "Match" / "Play" button, wait 1-2 minutes and start playing.

If I have to do organized events then I might as well not have sat on the gaming PC at all.

But I'll concede that there's a class of games in which this mindset means you're basically pissing against the wind and you'll have a very bad time. Hence I am avoiding them entirely but still wanted to give you my perspective.

Wtf? Does intentional feeding mean you’re pretending to be an amateur when you’re not an amateur, or what?

Essentially means to play poorly on purpose, with the intent on making the opposing team stronger, or to give them a strategic advantage against your team. People do this to ruin games for whatever reason, it's a phenomena which persists throughout many multiplayer games online.

It's especially a problem in Dota because you are not allowed to forfeit a rated game (!). In Dota, only professionals are allowed to freely forfeit matches, so some players resort to tanking the game when they become dispirited to end the pain more quickly (or when they just have to leave).

If you suddenly quit a rated match, Valve will punish you with time-wasting purgatory. Some people pay money to have others help them leave purgatory.

Being able to forfeit doesn't stop people from purposely tanking the game. It incentivizes them to do it more to get their teammates to also throw in the towel and forfeit.

The difference is when it does happens, it drags out longer, but it is less common.

You can now forefit a game if you are a stack of 5 players

The pro players thought I was deliberately trying to harm them by playing badly. And they call it "feeding" if you get killed by the enemy team too often. But I was just honestly inexperienced, because I only play games casually.

Doesn't the game use "skill" based matchmaking? If so, then those were bottom of the barrel "tryhards". I had a similar experience in CS:GO YEARS ago when I bothered to play matchmaking except instead of being reported, I got repeatedly team killed for playing the objective or something.

My experiences in overwatch weren't any good either. I remember the match that made me stop playing very well too. We lost, but I had gold in every category with my two friends taking silver and bronze. Essentially, the other two people weren't playing well at all and started spouting the most toxic shit I had heard in a long while. I guess fuck us because we were just playing for fun and still managed to do better than them? Like it wasn't a blowout or anything either.

I just don't understand some people I guess. Your post managed to bring that memory and reminded me why I don't play competitive games anymore lol. There are plenty of toxic players out there, but in my experience, a lot of them are pretty bad and are most likely projecting.

Ugh, that is demoralizing.

>A term in team-based video games used to describe someone who is not playing with the team and/or is playing selfishly. This person will usually stray away from the team/objective in a match. The enemy team will be able to take advantage of this situation by either being able to kill the "feeder", or pushing towards the objective while the "feeder" is unable to help. The word originates from games where special abilities can be obtained through dealing damage. If a person is getting damage dealt to them constantly, they are "feeding" the enemies ultimate.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Feeding

> Does intentional feeding mean you’re pretending to be an amateur when you’re not an amateur, or what?

No, but there is a term for that too, "smurfing".

The idea behind smurfs is for high ranked players to dunk on amateurs, rather than for high ranked players to play as badly as amateurs

Yeah, but in order to smurf you have to first tank on purpose to get into the lower-tier ranks.

Not that I've ever seen. Smurfs are all just new accounts starting with no rank

Play turbo mode. It’s all I play and it’s super casual and fast paced

I’m not sure, Dota has always had this kind of community even in the Warcraft 3 days. It has gotten worse but I think that is due to the popularity rather than the competitiveness.

If you've been away from the game for a while (even 1 or 2 years) a lot has changed. Unless you've written it off, I'd recommend playing with your friends versus bots and practicing some heroes, strategies, builds, and playing from the Dire side. Depending on how many players there are, putting someone on the opposing team who can point out your mistakes can be useful too.

I had a very similar experience playing PUBG again for the first time in years recently. Got through the first game and ended up coming 3rd or 4th, then when the next round loaded they banned me.

Unless you used cheats, it was probably a temporary ban. Perhaps people revenge reported you when they got killed?

> All of that just because my Dota skills are hobbyist level. And apparently, that's not acceptable to the online community anymore.

There is a reason for MMR system, so you can land at your skill cap. Also dota is not a game you relax to. Its like saying racing is something you do when you are sleepy and high.

Flatout 2 ;) I don't know anyone who takes that game seriously. Also, the physics are way too random/arcade for that. You play it to have fun with friends and relax.

Well I actually meant physical racing.

As in example of something you wouldn't considered doing as it not fun or dangerous if you do.

>racing when you are sleepy or high.

What about drunk? https://gamerules.com/rules/beerio-kart/

This is off the mark IMO, depending on your definition of esports.

As a founder of a competitive gaming startup, I can tell you that every single game publisher lives and dies on the casual players.

Most of these players have never seen a single pro match in their life, so the notion that popular games were built for PPV is misguided.

What these publishers realized is that giving people a rank makes them more dedicated to playing more and beating others, as well as a sense of progress. sprinkle some repetitiveness, awards, vanity stuff and the hook is even stronger.

It’s probably some intrinsic human behavior (monkey brain stuff), but it works well for their bottom line.

Do I miss the good ol’ Warcraft 3 dota days? Hell yeah. But I remember one times I set up a “community” match against several of my countrymen. My friends and I were demolished. It was obvious they knew something we didn’t.

We only discovered it when we moved to HoN - the meta.

The real fun was always custom maps - we kept playing those into our 30s.

But I do agree that wacky is fun. There’s still competitive mini games in Dota 2 that are super fun and wacky. Missed opportunity if you ask me.

This reply deserves to be responded to if you disagree rather than simply downvoted. I have been a fairly competitive gamer for about two decades and I too have seen the degradation in behaviour and the increasing requirements in time to enjoy many multiplayer games. Gone are the days of easily popping into a lobby a few days a week for an hour and finding an enjoyable match.

Agreed. Organizing a fun multiplayer experience now often takes some amount of work either to get good enough to catch up to the aspirants and those approaching their level, or to organize an insulated community of moderates/casuals.

And if you have time to devote to playing a game just in organizing such a community, you have to ask yourself if you'd rather not spend that time just playing the game itself and catching up?

I think these kinds of middling communities are groups of friends who enjoy a variety of games together at which point, you need to make sure you have the right equipment to play 80% of what the rest of the group is playing online or you'll be left behind. I am in a position where I can only play about 30% or less of the games my online friends choose to play with my current setup.

I don't really understand your complaint. I don't play lol. You can just go into SC2 and play matches no problem. And the game is far easier to play SC1 was, and part of the game is that it is challenging, its not the meta that made it so. I also never felt that way with dota, you can play any hero you want for fun.

And you offered no explanation how these experiences could be much better.

My take was that GP was essentially complaining that now you have to pay attention to strategy to be good and you can't just wing it. This has been the case forever, though. SC1 is that way, chess is that way.

No, the GGP is making the point that games designed for competitive multiplayer are not fun. Skill was always required. But fun is something the industry has forgotten how to do.

I think he is wrong about Sc2 though. The game is way easier to play than what is has been, and sure some decisions (12 workers at the start instead of 6) were for competitive gaming/watchability, but most of them were just help for casual players like me. I like being able to execute a build order easily, to gather my units with one press, to not have to learn to recognize if i have too much worker on a base and have it told to me, all of that did not help the competitive scene. I'd argue that they focused on 2 things: casual player experience and watchability. The only thing pro gamer gets to get is balance at high level.

SC2 has only gotten easier to play. Selecting multiple buildings, selecting more than 12 units, auto-mining, idle workers, select all army.

So you must be referring to how other players got better at winning, or the aggressive strategies players employ to win. Or maybe you don’t like some specific units that were added that you consider anti-fun. Whatever the case, unranked, co-op, custom games didn’t solve these problems for you as a player.

I’m curious what specific evolution you think SC2 went through that was undesirable.

I don’t think esports is to blame for competitive metas. That’s just the natural outcome if a large number of people want to get really good at the game. Meta’s aren’t artificial. Good luck trying to play chess at a competitive level without understanding the “meta”

> I will still periodically fire up something like TF2

When did you do that last time? TF2 got destroyed due to matchmaking killing of community servers and is a void of hat farming bots by now. Valve did too little too late for TF2.

Like 2 days ago.

>TF2 got destroyed due to matchmaking killing of community servers

Community servers are still there. I can still pretty much always find a full server on whatever map I feel like playing on at the time.

This has been my experience as well. I don’t even mind their matchmaking thing if I’m feeling lazy and want to wind up in a particular vanilla map set without thinking too hard.

The custom maps and community servers are as strong as ever, IMO. Check out the player statistics on steam.

> Check out the player statistics on steam.

Those are very misleading. The teamwork.tf stats show a lot fewer players (still a decent number) actually playing on servers, and you can verify those by adding up the player counts on servers manually.

Hmm ... maybe I were unlucky when I checked. After some master server crash or something.

Playing Ranked/Competitive game modes comes with the implicit contract to your teammates that you try your best and play in good faith.

I don't think necessarily you have to follow the meta. But it's like best practices. Better stay within them when you are playing with a completely new team.

There's other game modes in all those games to try wacky stuff and/or play just for fun it's unranked/casual and custom game modes.

You wouldn't sign up for a ranked league in real life to just mess around. It would be disrespectful to your teammates and you would rightly get kicked.

That's fine but the problem is that more and more people want to force you into playing as if you're on a grand final... in a random multiplayer queue with only a hint of a hidden rating.

People want to win every match and disallow experimentation to not endanger their record.

Natural result: a certain kind of people leave and find alternatives and never come back. Like yours truly here.

I don’t see this issue at all in Valorant. In unranked, no one cares what role you play and people routinely joke around with weird combos. Playing a few games a month makes no difference because your ELO will assign you similar skill levels.

Come to VR, where we're basically doing 90s style first person shooters again. Complete with TF2 maps ported right in!

What game are you referring to exactly?

PavlovVR has TF2 maps

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21251...

> esports ultimately resulted in barbaric desecration of formerly-enjoyable multiplayer experiences

This I agree with

> Starcraft 2 and LoL evolved into some of the top offenders in this

This I couldn't disagree more. Especially Starcraft 2 is the worst example you could have picked. The game has such a high skill ceiling that you can get away many playstyles until you hit the uppermost ranks. As a master player myself (the rank, I'm far from being a "master" at Starcraft 2) I can comfortably hold myself in Diamond league without microing or even looking at my units or even with only building/using a single unit type and crazy compositions. I got pretty low apm, and my playing looks nothing like that of a pro player (which does resemble your description of one handed organ/piano playing [1]).

"Meta" in a game like that only applies to people in upper Grandmaster and Pro territory, and in a Game like Starcraft 2, a low Grandmaster player and a pro player are very far apart from each other. It's not something the devs force upon you, it's what you have to familiarize yourself with to reach a certain level of gameplay. Now where that level lies is something the devs can influence.

What I just described applies to many 1v1 competitive games, take a look at fighting games too.

You basically imply that Starcraft 2 went wrong somewhere to please e-sports, but are you familiar with high level Starcraft 1? It's way more ridiculous in every aspect of the game and on top of the high skill ceiling you have to familiarize yourself with many quirks of the game to become a decent player, which makes it harder and less accessible in general, but the skill ceiling was just as high or even higher than that of Starcraft 2.

> League of Legends

This is a more appropriate example, because here you are getting forced into certain meta compositions and picks very early on. However this is as much a community problem as it is a dev problem. At no point is there any need for mid level LoL players to follow "the meta", but the community is very obsessed with following what "the pros" do, whether or not that makes sense.

> I can play [insert role] all day on 1 server with other humans and no one will give me shit about it.

Honestly I believe one of the main problems you are describing is matchmaking rather than game balancing. With modern style MMR/Elo ratings in team based multiplayer games, playing online is in general way less relaxed than the "good old" joining a server and chilling there with players of vastly different skill levels, which is part of what enables many unconventional playstyles.

The development of meta in general is inevitable if you match players based on their skill and give them access to forums and the ability to share knowledge. However as I said initially, I generally agree that quite a few multiplayer games were ruined by devs chasing "e-sport" status.

And I absolutely agree that multiplayer games that allow for many different playstyles are more fun, but they are also way harder to create and balance, and the community will find optimal strategies and overpowered characters even if you as the dev do not.

[1]: https://youtu.be/SAo3QwnPruc?t=281

"the meta" mindset is the absolute worst thing to ever happen to video games. The presupposition that a subset of behaviors is objectively the only way to olay undermines the game and the plauers attempting to truly be the best.

eSports and eCelebs have driven metas in almost every single gamr by popularizing the tactics THEY like. Depending on the genre, certain subsets are gravitated towards (hitscan and/or speed).

"meta play" often represents less than 10% of all the game has to offer. Significant amount of maps, items, game mode, and characters are never played for being rules inferior. "top players" perform the exsxt same plays and counterplays over and over and over again. The moment someone with any talent comes in and uses something non meta, tbey clean house because the "top players" are conditioned to only respond to their bubble. An "objectively inferior" character by numbers can still win if the opponent lacks the know how on how to respond to that character.

The worst part is, the moment something like this happens? The in group at the top doesn't adapt like a "top player" should. They whine and moan and move to ban the character or thing that bested them.

I used to be a top level competitive player back in the day. The character had some crazy tanky stall mechanics that nobody used because it wasn't popular. In one season, I did a showcase match prep. Every match they kept bamming my weapon sets. After banning every weapon, I was still able to pull off the tactics - - the coordinators got so frustrated they ended up changing the map and game modes themselves. That I understand, that particular game has since been retired and has not beem played to this day in any league

Which game was this?

Aren't there objective advantages and disadvantages to certain characters even as a top player? For example, if two top players were playing SSBM, the most optimal choice is playing Fox or Wolf. I understand that some will use "meta play" as storytelling/marketing, but there does come a point where skill can't make up the cost of choosing a disadvantageous character when fighting against other pros.

Try TF2 Classic, its a mod of TF2 from leaked source that is very close to original tf2 without all the crap weapons and cosmetics.

I find it 10x better then current tf2 also community is more chill

And lol is now full of bots...

Forgive my ignorance, but what does "meta" mean in this context?

The consensus strategy you need to follow or get flamed for being bad.

More importantly, in an imperfect information game, the set of strategies used to counter the consensus strategy.

The best/most advantageous way to play a game

Thanks. And what does OP mean by "meta queues"? Clearly I'm completely out of the loop here!

Overwatch is a 6 vs 6 player competitive shooter. What they are describing, I believe, is forcing each team to comprise of 2 DPS, 2 tanks, and 2 healers. They do that so that each team will be reasonably balanced, and won't consist of only players who want to play DPS, for example, but it takes away some of the creativity and fun involved in finding a good synergy with your team.

I never played or properly followed Overwatch, but didn't it start with some type of on the fly changing team composition? And then from there it went to what I can understand a very rigid meta? Or am I thinking of some other Blizzard game was it HoTS?

Overwatch evolved with the most libertarian mindset that slowly got more and more rigid. Mad respect for the team for experimenting, but its been wild to see.

Overwatch 1 os a team of 6. At launch, there were no restrictions. You could be and switch to any hero or role at anytime. That includes duplicates. Want to have 6 of the same tank? Go for it.

Eventually duplicate heroes was decided too hard to balance. They stopped duplicate heroes. Now you could switch to any hero or role at any time, but it must not be a hero already on your team.

As they added more shield tanks, it became harder to balance around. "GOATS" (I have no idea what the acronym means) became "meta" which was 3 tanks, 3 supports.

Eventually Blizzard gave up on balancing GOATS and forced role queue. 2 tanks, 2 dps, 2 supports. The role you start with is the role you had to stay in. You could switch to any hero in that role at any time so long as it wasn't what the other person was on.

Games were still sluggish, and Blizzard, with Overwatch 2 is making a lot of changes to speed the game up. Particularly, they're reducing a lot of CC abilities and eliminating 1 tank role. Games are now 5v5 with 1 tank, 2 dps, and 2 support

The tldr is that the competitiveness of all pvp games suck all the fun out of it. And I very much agree with him. The games are toxic, not fun, almost like jobs. Currently you want to have fun with friends, coop pve is the way to go

Oh absolutely. So during lockdown I played Left 4 Dead 2 a bunch with some friends and I had so much fun doing so. Much more than I can remember having on TFC and CS as a kid in the 00s. I imagine it's even more competitive and frustrating now, when I tried TF2 recently the maps were dominated by a handful of snipers who near-immediately killed everyone whenever they broke cover, I've no idea why anyone enjoys playing that game.

I identified a bunch of other co-op games we could try but then covid restrictions ended and spring had started, so I haven't got round to them yet but at least I have something to look forward to when winter returns :)

> when I tried TF2 recently the maps were dominated by a handful of snipers who near-immediately killed everyone whenever they broke cover, I've no idea why anyone enjoys playing that game.

Are you sure those weren't bots? The game has a real issue with them in the official servers.

Possibly, but if they're basically part and parcel of the game now I don't see much difference.

meta is talking about the current set of strategies that other players are using.

For example, if someone figures out a very advantageous early attack, other people will start to copy them. In response people will play defensively early on expecting the early attack. Then eventually people might not attack, and instead gather more resources early, since they expect their opponent to be defensive, etc etc.

so as you play a lot, you learn the current meta strategies, and can adjust your strategy to give you a better chance of winning the game. that's "playing the meta" and why the meta shifts over time.

It's like in Blackjack how you're not supposed to hit on a 16. Even tho it's perfectly within the rules, its so statistically unlikely you'll win that the other players at the table will get mad at you for taking "their" card.

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