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.