I noticed this very clearly with World of Warcraft Classic…I’d played the original WoW for a bit when it first came out in 2004, and had a lot fun with it but didn’t really have time for it with school and stuff.

During the original March 2020 lockdowns I picked up Classic and had a great time enjoying a style of game that doesn’t seem to really exist anymore. Until I got to higher levels and started to realize everyone was just micro-optimizing the hell out of everything, and kind of aggressive about it (people actually private messaged me mocking the fact that I played a Human instead of Gnome because Gnomes were mathematically a tiny bit better).

There was none of the mystery or excitement from the first time around, just widespread obsession with getting “best in slot” gear and the perfect combination of other tricks to make everything easy.

I still had a lot of fun mostly staying away from this attitude where possible, but when a significant number of players in a multiplayer game are operating like that it bleeds into many areas of the game, even if you try to avoid it.

That’s because most of those players had been playing in private servers for years prior. To them there’s no fun in doing the content itself.

This is a realization I'm coming to with Escape From Tarkov. I love firearms and customizing them in real life. I like games that make that a priority. I like the open market. But it's all about metas now. No variability. No realistic encounters (just finding cheesy ways to abuse the mechanics of the game to your advantage). As such, I stopped playing about a year ago, and after revisiting a couple weeks ago, I don't think I'll really be playing ever again.

>all about metas now.

How long have you played? Ever since the Flea was introduced, there has been a consistent meta that largley ruins the game. That meta might change through various wipes, but there has always been a preferred way to play.

Asking for people who aren't familiar with the Escape from Tarkov game mechanics: What is a 'meta' and what are 'wipes' in this context? And in which way did 'the Flea' ruin the game?

Wipe: Tarkov is still in beta, as such balancing, leveling and the economy aren't worked out yet, so periodically they reset the game to square one: you lose your progress, along with everyone else, and have to start from the beginning. This is called a wipe. (at first I thought this would be annoying, but many players find it exciting, it renews the game, and early stage and late stage wipe play very differently.)

Flea and meta: the flea is a market between players instead of only having npc stores. It changed the way the game works, as people with a lot of money can always have meta loadouts. meta in this context refers to the best performing configuration of items, so the meta is x weapon with y ammo etc. (meta is a common term: for example in overwatch the various heroed are dubbed in the meta or out of the meta depending on the latest game mechanics updates)

meta is an acronym of Most Effective Tactic(-s) Available

haha, thats nice. I believe that's a backronym though.

Min-maxing is a reliable way to suck the fun out of most things for me, too. Way back in High School my friends and I would get together and play bridge. We were certainly competitive, and became decent players, but it was as much about the trash-talking and socializing as about who won or lost.

Later I took a course with an ACBL life master, and learned the complex and completely artificial bidding systems and other ways to communicate every possible bit of information through quirky and limited channels. I guess some people find that fun, but to me it was mechanical and WORK. The game was less of a game.

This is due to trait Agreeableness in the big five. Competitiveness is a hallmark of Disagreeable people. Being agreeable makes you more likable and much better at building relationships. Being disagreeable makes you more likely to view things as a competition, more likely to negotiate on your own behalf (agreeable people often put others point of view before their own) many games that are competitive generate extraordinarily toxic environments for this very reason, they mostly attract people who take specific joy in feeling like they have beaten others at something.

It's the same for board games. Luckily the board game people I know keep buying so many new games that any particular game doesn't get replayed often enough for minmaxers to dominate.

You've min-maxed the meta-game.

That’s why I really like SSBU. Once you learn the controls, the game becomes more about your understanding of your opponent and your own weaknesses than anything else. Sure, there are combos and “tech” you can learn, but it doesn’t matter until you reach the top 0.01% of play.

you may further realize then that you don't enjoy competition in general. or maybe that you only enjoy it at a really low level where you don't have to put in any effort to achieve any form of mastery.

because mastery and min maxing like this is at the basis of every form of competition.

even all the traditional physical sports are min maxed to the same extents. in fact the strategy and novelty aspect there is typically so small compared to video games (due to the inherent lower complexity of the sports) that in most sports you just start having a big focus on min maxing your physical capabilities much earlier than you would for example start to grind out and improve your macro speed and capabilities in a game like Starcraft 2.

Good point, but you kind of miss the point. Some sports, like road cycling, have been all but reduced to one variable (how many W/kg can you produce?). Turning yourself into the world’s best road cyclist is a grim slog at the border of overtraining and starvation. Even more complex ones require serious dedication and sacrifice.

But at that point they’re jobs or obsessions. They’re something you do because you must, not because you enjoy it.

>even all the traditional physical sports are min maxed to the same extents.

Not in most rec leagues.

Once I found a YT video called "The History of World 4-2" (Super Mario Bros. level). I thought oh, maybe it's a perspective on game design using the evolution of a single level as an illustration of level design principles.

Nope -- it was speedrunshit. Basically, Guy A found a glitch that let him shave fractions of a second off, and then guy B found another glitch that let him shave a few more fractions of a second off, et weary cetera. The big deal about World 4-2 is that in Super Mario Bros., where you go when you go down a pipe or climb a vine is selected by the x-coordinate of the screen scroll position, so if there were a way to run past the vine that leads to the 6-7-8 warp zone and go down the pipe immediately following without scrolling the screen to the right far enough to change the pipe destination to the coin room, Mario will go to the warp zone area instead without the time-consuming vine animation, saving a few seconds. But this is only achievable by jumping backwards in a few frame-perfect jumps throughout the level leading up to that pipe, which in turn must be speed-optimized to shave a few milliseconds off so you can beat the other guy's Any% world record and... arrrrrgh. That's what World 4-2 was to these people. Not a little segment of a fantasy world. Not even a beautiful artifact of human art and design and how it communicates with the player, the messages the design itself shares with the person operating the game. Just a set of glitches and hacks to exploit to get through the game faster, and the history of the level was the history of finding these glitches to decrease the world-record time. How basic is it that I can remember discovering the 4-2 vine and my mind was blown at the revelation of this little secret!

Just today I saw another germane YouTube video called "Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros", ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFFpJW0j5z0 )which posits that professional players don't know how to make a fun game because they are concerned with minute details of mechanics and balance, and the vast majority of a game's potential audience want a fun experience in single- or multiplayer. So if you really laser in on the pro-gamer experience, you're creating a niche experience that won't be popular in the wider market -- and hardcore players will turn literally anything (Minecraft, Roblox, Excel) into an esport anyway.

The trick is just to not be good at them. At least in Overwatch, at middle or low tiers you can just ignore the meta and play whatever, no one cares really.

That's not my experience at all. Before role queue it was common to get yelled at for not choosing a class that would fit into 2-2-2 meta. I quit around the time role queue came out so maybe it has improved?

People will yell about minmaxing in all competitive team-based games at skill levels far below where any of it matters (eg proper map awareness alone will probably shoot you into the top-90% of most competitive games, even with poor skill/choice in other aspects).

That has less to do with anything the game/community has specifically done and more to do with people always looking for “easy” answers to the problems they see — blame the loss on balance, on team members, on lack of minmaxing, on luck, on people not doing their jobs, etc.

And they yell those answers at you because you’re playing a team game where they depend on your success for their success.

In the end, you need a thick skin to play effectively and actually get better, to pierce through the noise and rabble

Meta games like those you're referring to are not avoidable though, it's practically a social construct built on top of the game itself. Happens in just about any highly competitive field because of free "market" ideas.

Sure but the fact that it exists and is inevitable has nothing to do with the yelling at each other about it — especially at lower levels of play where it’s generally safe to say that anyone who thinks they’ve identified the meta has done so poorly, and likely understands none of the real trade offs (if they understood it well, they’d likely be at higher levels).

And more importantly, at lower levels of play the meta is generally far less important than fundamental mechanics in terms of actually winning consistently.

It's not true, butit was happening far before role queue. Even before OWL became a thing, people from all the way down in low silver were trying to emulate the top streamers and piggy back on thier methods. GOATS and pro league is when this really took off though. I remember ever other lobby in ranked was people trying to pull off GOATS, but no one had near the skill to coordinate properly, or even the game sense to understand what role they were supposed to fill.

It’s a lot more rare now in my experience. Role queue locks you into at least 2-2-2, and open queue everyone kinda knows you’re getting 4 or 5 DPS anyways. Even in role queue off meta picks you might get a try hard annoyed every once in a while, but generally isn’t so bad.

I was saying the exact thing to my wife last night. I want to feel immersed, to a certain extent. Like a kid pretending with his toys. I don’t want to work and develop my gaming skills like some sort of real life skill set.

If people want to do that, that’s fine, but I haven’t found many games that haven’t been stripped down to the purely technical, almost “speedrun-esque” competition. Really no fun, because treating the game like some sort of equation to uncover and master totally removes any sense of reality and the ability to immerse yourself.