this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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Video game communities suck, and it makes playing them worse.
You play an FPS and everyone uses the meta gun at the time, then it gets nerfed and they use the new meta gun. Same with RTS and any other multiplayer game. Somehow StarCraft 1 pulled out a perfect rock paper scissors balance, but nothing else really has that so meta is what people do.
And because everyone is so busy grinding and min maxing, that's what the game developers design for now, and it sucks the fun out of games because you just grind hours to get some new items to have the best items in the game.
Occasionally game communities are good. The Chivalry 2 subreddit had a bot that would use GPT to answer questions and then on every post go on about how the polehammer is the best weapon in the game, which was so over the top it made fun of the whole meta idea. The Breath of the Wild communities doing crazy rube Goldberg machines are always fun. And I'll never not enjoy the weird hellscapes people create in the Sims.
OMG, this was what killed overwatch for me. I'm disabled and can't play games that require fast paced precise and concise actions. So Symetra was my jam. I tried other characters like torbjorn but the all had the same problem. Some 13 yo genji prick would hop circles over my head while my health ticked away and I shot sporadically around at the sky before I inevitably die. But not Sym. All I had to do was backpedal and keep that grasshopper mf'er in my general view. And pop. Pulling him into a doorway with 6 kill lasers was the best feeling the in the world. But that enabled me to be useful to the rest of the team. I occasionally did good enough that I ranked in the top of the match, but I was almost never carried.
And then they nerfed sym because, "nOt EnOuGh PrO pLaYeRs PiCk HeR!!¡!!" No more walking shield. No more turret web. No more over shield for the team. No more wide lock on gun. They turned her into just another precision shooting player. She had a Halloween bag of tricks and they swapped it for a tooth brush.
This is why I miss arena shooters (Quake, Unreal Tournament, Halo, etc.) being in vogue. There are no loadouts, no inherent differences between players, you're all equal, and any weapons, ammo, grenades, powerups, vehicles, whatever, must be picked up from the map itself. This map doesn't have a lightning gun/rocket launcher/banshee? Well tough shit, you're going to have to do without.
These are games where you must fight with whatever comes to hand, no matter how much you dislike it, and that leaves almost no space for a meta. The closest thing that can exist is a general consensus of "for this situation, these are the weapons you want to have, and these are the weapons you really do not want to be in this situation with".
Isn't that largely just the case for competitive games?