[kkukshtel]

My 2c is that a focus on "meta" has had a profoundly bad effect on games. It's hard to see ways it could have gone differently with the introduction of the internet, but it's definitely a Bad thing. Another outcome of this is what I like to call "the professionalization of amateur play" — thousands of players watch top 0.1% players of their favorite game perform at an expert level and talk about things experts care about, and then amateur players parrot those things in their local communities (or reddit, etc.) as if they are truth or if they are actually applicable to their skill level. This also belies the fact that a meta can change organically without developer intervention, but once any pro player "cracks" the meta, players are too lazy to find counter strategies and will just wait for the next patch. It creates a negative feedback cycle that makes players less interested in engaging with a meta, while simultaneously forcing developers to develop a new meta.

[AlexandrB]

This was really apparent in Overwatch. Before the "role queue" players would often insist their teammates change characters to emulate the current professional "meta" composition even though at that level (bronze league or whatever the bottom in Overwatch is called) individual skill differences trump team composition by a wide margin. Very silly stuff, and made playing the game unpleasant.