Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero.
Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine going by turn 3 or 4, if you get a drought or flood (or mulligan), you’re basically completely dead in the water. Same for your opponent.
The net result is that it feels like something like only 15%–25% of games are actually competitive, because either you or your opponent gets fucked by too many, too few, or wrong color land draws, or for whatever reason you don’t draw the cards you need within the first few turns.
A game where 80% of matchups are effectively no contest is not fun.
But this must be the case for all competitive games right? At some point the meta has been figured out and there is no real way to deviate from that.
I think this is only true about games with too few variables (not really the case for MTG), or games where too many variables can be controlled (which various MTG formats suffer from).
Historically this has not been that big a deal for the RTS genre specifically. If you look at a game like SC2, the skillfloor to actually execute the meta builds is so high that player with good fundamentals can win with a suboptimal build, versus a player with a fully meta build executed imperfectly. Plus there are almost always cheese builds that only work if the opponent doesn't expect them - not a reliable source of wins, but sometimes all it takes to clutch a tournament series
When games regularly took 10–20 turns, luck evened out pretty well even if you were a bit slow out the gate. But now when your opponent is putting out threats on every single turn that need to be countered, there’s nearly zero room for unlucky draws. Given two opponents, the odds that both of them will have sufficiently equal luck to produce an interestingly competitive game has dropped below a threshold where the game is actually fun to play.
If you don’t play the meta, you get curb stomped. If you do play the meta, most of the time the outcome of the game is essentially predetermined (and obviously so) by the luck of both of your draws or by hard counter matchups. Only a handful of games ever feel like both sides have fighting chances.
Frankly, the majority of games these days could be decided in seconds by both sides revealing their opening hard and mutually agreeing on the outcome.
The player bases are a lot more "chill" overall, despite still being attracted to playing their best.
I think they might destroy the streaming/online communities, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game itself. I play BAR, but never with random strangers, the game works fine, but I also don't participate in any "video game" communities or watch/play with streamers, so what you're saying sounds very foreign to me, and is more about the communities than the games themselves.
Ideally, it should allow non-competitive players of similar performance level to play against each other.
Which think about what that feels like: getting semi-consistently beaten by worse players who just all "happen to have" the exact same loadout and exact same strategies and exact same everything.
That's exactly what I'm describing. It's incredibly boring.
Losses against someone with better logistical choices is normal and expected. You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
I recognize the adjacent commenter's point about the small population though. It might be difficult to be appropriately matched up unlike a AAA title at launch.
> You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
You must not be familiar with what "meta" means. Modern video games seem to all have an across-the-board superior configuration. And yes, the way to "counter it" is to copy it, which is why this strategy spreads like a virus through the game until 100% of the people who beat you are all doing the exact same thing.
If the desired outcome of the game design was for everyone to use the same configurations (the meta) in order to "counter" the meta, then why have configuration options at all? Give everyone the same exact thing all the time.
The reason they don't do that is because it's extremely boring. But unfortunately the "meta-finding" capability of the streaming community yields the same functional outcome anyway. Ergo: the games are made boring by the community, as stated at the very top.
And no, the issue isn't "I like to casually play with off-the-wall builds." The issue is "video games were a lot more fun when you encountered different types of opponents."
This is, of course, why game designers put so much work into supporting variations in builds, so obviously they agree too.
I didn't criticize anyone for being less skilled or anyone for being "in the wrong." I'm observing a game dynamic that makes games less variable than their designers clearly intend.
I’ve been playing BAR since it was called Balanced Annihilation and it peaked at 1 concurrent 8v8 daily and there was little/no youtube presence to speak of. Meta pressure was still huge, to the point that trying (now-meta) then-off-meta strategies would have you mocked, called a troll, and sometimes kicked from the room. Pretty much everyone was a meta slave, except for a few (mostly top) players who had their own quirky meta-rejecting style.
I think there’s a global desire for comfort/safety which drives meta, and this works without an industry. Copying is safe, playing the same map endlessly is comfortable, and fun for fun’s sake is neither. And ego seems to have something to do with it too. Players with less ego seem to experiment more, change things up more, break the meta more.
This is like saying "scientific progress exists even without scientists talking to each other." It sure does, but collaboration and competition among them dramatically accelerates the discovery process.
If you don't like it that's fine - I'm actually mostly in agreement with you. But I don't think it's necessarily a flaw in the game any more than chess openers are necessarily a flaw with chess (although chess960 does exist so clearly not everyone appreciates the typical openers).
I'm not saying people who do this are evil or bad. I'm saying they make games not fun, and it's not clear at all that this is solvable by the game designers except by vastly simplifying the games (e.g. getting rid of builds).
The fact they design for variance so much but then do not achieve variance is an empirical proof that it is a flaw in the design.
Yes, this is also a flaw with chess and is why chess is an extremely boring game. You can just ask someone their Elo and know who will win. As you get into higher Elos, variation in play style becomes less relevant, i.e. more homogenous. This makes the game boring.
It's not my job to lend airtime to other people's opinions on the matter. I'm sharing my opinion. You can share yours if you want.
Just go read the changelogs for any major game to see them trying to balance and rebalance and adjust and constantly failing to actually achieve what you describe.
I only play public matches with random strangers and this is the feeling.
Obviously this wouldn't apply if I had a small community of not-strangers to play with consistently, which you do have but oddly describe as not having a community.
If what GP is saying is "play with people you know personally and then you won't have to play with people you don't know personally," well, sure. Great insight.
Most people don't and can't do that. That's why online matchmaking exists and constitutes 99.999999% of online gameplay.
Sometimes people would even rage quit. But I could do really well as support, even if it was slightly worse than some other characters. It made for a very fun playthrough.
And I would totally get the people. Sometimes somebody in a bad mood joins your game and just messes everything up because they didn't get to play mid. And I might have looked like someone like that.
But dealing with toxic players is surprisingly easy.
I initially looked down at LoL, but later wanted to learn to play to spend time online with my younger brother that was having a hard time. So I had a friend show me something.
First time I played jungle, I died on the first monster. Before people could finish typing flaming messages, my friend typed into the chat /ignore all
Voila - silence and no flaming.
Later I stopped preemptively ignoring everyone. Just used no second chances tactic. If anybody cursed, was mean or even used the word noob, I instantly ignored them and then kept playing.
Sometimes told a teammate that had a bad steak to do that to the flaming person. Many games I've one because of being nice to my teammates, trying to keep their spirits up. Wasn't super hard - 25 year old at that time and reading some philosophy books and meditating vs regular 13 year olds.
It was still important to ignore people before they could push your buttons and anger you.
I wonder if it's the same in other games. Definitely not the case in Eve online when I played that. But over there you meet the same people again and by having no style and being a bad winner and a bad loser didn't give you any respect.
I don't play a lot of competitive Overwatch, but it's definitely a much nicer experience with chat turned off, even if I'm not the one being flamed, even if we lose because people are typing instead of shooting.
What's weird is that I love EVE for that sort of nullsec drama and sociopathic players eating each other in crazed gambits, but a couple of matches in Overwatch competitive a decade ago put me off the idea of matchmaking lobbies altogether.
Somehow Starcraft 2 emerged from the other side of esports mostly unscathed, despite being arguably the most significant progenitor of the entire genre.
and also it's a lot harder
I like to ask now, "have you heard of playing for fun?" It's surprising how little people seem to remember that games are made for fun & learning ("play" as a human construct).
edit2: taking back this edit on political conjecture to say something shifted that I'm not sure what. edit: in online games I played growing up too, this negativity/anti-fun change came probably around 2004 with bigger changes in the US political climate as well.
Tying this to politics is odd to me.
Online gaming has been toxic since day one. Anything that depersonalizes is going to be toxic and that is inherent in the online space. In the smaller communities you can actually get to know people and have some kind of reputation but as the community size grows, the consequences of bad behavior fade because nobody can remember.
Do you think or have noticed that bad behavior is less likely to occur in smaller communities, or is simply swept under the rug or ignored due to some other dynamics at play?
With counter strike, I frequented one server and got to know the players on it a bit. You'd chat a bit after you died but, mostly, I'd just see the same names most of the time. There was usually an admin online and bad behavior (mostly not game related but social behavior) would be banned eventually.
In UO, there was a lot of player interaction where I would actually make friends and aquatintes with people I interacted with a lot. You end up building a community within a community of people you like to play with.
Both of those groups had different ways of filtering bad behavior but, I think the key difference is that they both had a pretty significant social interact component. CS seem semi-accidental but the post death chatting gave it a little something I never got from other fps games.
MMOs have really gone completely away from social gaming. They've streamlined so many processes that actual relationships aren't really that important.
I agree completely but I'd also add that those changes weren't always intentional, I think. MMO changes, in particular, have greatly stifled the social aspect of their games, not intentionally, but through adding convenience.
The advent of fast travel across the world (for cost), auction houses, mailing items at no or little cost, etc. In UO, you'd walk into a town and find a blacksmith to repair your gear because they were just pasting in an advertisement over and over. Each hub would have different prices based on who was on because travel wasn't painless. I remember making a deal with someone to buy ore I mined at a specific price. It was below market value but it took away the burden of finding buyers all the time so I did it. And just like that, a casual friendship was formed.
Now, an mmo without a global (or even cross server!) auction house would be unthinkable.
Giving into the conveniences that players ask for ruins the social aspect of the game. It's cool that I can jump online and queue for an instance with a bunch of randoms in 10 minutes but it's at the expense of me actually communicating with the people and that's a shame.
Sorry.
You blame gaming as a scapegoat and escape from real life. I'd like to differ. The reward-effort-sense of a regular job is getting worse and worse over time. Take a job for example - you take guides and classes and interviews worth an examination only to do low level stuff. Then you find out the humans governing you are incredibly flaky on their promises. It's just not as satisfying compared to finding a guide and getting your worth out of it.
The friends who all played vastly more often than I did and had all their techniques and edge jumps and recoveries and stuff practiced were furious.
Lots of "you can't do that" "that's not fair" "that's not the way you're supposed to play" etc.
edit: oh, I see your edit. Yeah, it's definitely not new.
I personally can feel that analogy about you winning in a way that made others feel wronged or offended or have their models about the game broken, and see it connect to the theme of the thread. Which is that people forget and mistake games for serious ventures. I don't know when exactly that happened, if it was a bigger cultural shift, a shift in incentives and behavior by game producers, and also by players I suppose, and or if its just how adults shift in their playing of games as they grow in age.
Either way I think thats fun, and cool that you made it so far with a strategy like that! One of my favorite ways of playing games is uncovering strategies like that =)
You can even see it in tabletop roleplaying. Where you're "not supposed to meta-game" or "you can't have a lawful good lich (who's ultimate goal is to live long enough to save the town from evil collegues)" or "someone's got to play healer" or whatever. I always like subverting norms to see what happens. A group of clerics on a quest for an ancient tomb might need to convince/coerce some local muscle. The lawful good lich lets everyone play with themes of racism and prejudices. A group without a healer is kind of just playing on hard mode because there's no safety net.
But lots of groups won't go for those kinds of things, or will only allow them occasionally.
I just play for fun. I win by having fun. The score is somewhat irrelevant.
I found my groups and communities in odd, niche areas like mindfulness communities and men's groups therapy - maybe you relate? Are you also selective with groups and friends, and keep a smaller circle perhaps?
(Unless you play with cloistered private communities)
As soon as someone loses a bunch of games in a row and decides to Google "$GameName strategy", the community's unique meta disappears.
I vaguely remember some factoid about how Magnus could tell you from memory the 20 exact opening and 20 exact closing moves of every championship game since the dawn of time or some such whatever, and I was like "oh wow great for him but what a ridiculously stupid game to continue playing."
By it's very nature, games are supposed to be fun and bonding experience for a community of humans.
But the modern interpretation is one of direct conflict to show ones superiority for the sake of feeling superior. Which ultimately leads to the imbuing the games with a level of importance or value for the victor.
RTSes present continuous, large choice spaces. So it doesn't really feel like as much of a logic puzzle, and perfection does not appear to be within ones grasp at every moment. Whether you'll lose 4 or 6 of the T2 fighter-bombers is not relevant. The strategy of RTSes is strategy of big plans and high level abstraction.
That's not true in all RTSes. Take StarCraft, for example, and there are plenty of games on record that were decided not just by 1 unit, but by 1 attack from 1 unit. There are Zerg players, for example, who have developed a reputation for creating havoc after getting a single zergling (the smallest and cheapest attacking unit) into their opponent's base. A single shot from a Protoss reaver can mean the difference between taking minimal damage and losing half of your workers (and subsequently the game).
But I'm thinking about TA-style games, the topic of this discussion, which pride themselves on large armies. Though, to your point, early game of Supreme Commander is also quite chess-like, because of how restricted the set of opportunities is.
But chess theory, the human activity of analyzing chess, is hugely more complex than whatever human players have analyzed about the game of starcraft
What I mean is, perhaps the best neural networks that play starcraft are as complex as chess neural networks, and this complexity is irreducible, but starcraft players haven't developed as much theory in comparison
Chess surely has a meta, but it's been honed so the meta is a huge number of significantly different paths. It's a balancing issue. Give Starcraft another few centuries of play and maybe it'll be the same.
That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.