[estearum]

Not really, because there are players at every level who watch Youtube. So at every level of skill, those players who are up to date on the latest "meta" will win. Not enough to beat the meta players at the next level up, but enough to beat the non-meta players at their own level.

[ffsm8]

The bigger issue is that these springengine games don't really have large communities. And they're usually team battles... So yeah, you're not getting 8-16 people with similar elo rating within reasonable timeframes

[im3w1l]

In the equilibrium those playing the meta poorly will be matched with players who use suboptimal strategies with good execution.

[estearum]

Yes, correct.

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.

[fc417fc802]

If matchmaking is working correctly you should win some fraction of your matches, probably ~half.

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.

[estearum]

Correct, and if 100% of the people who beat you are using all the same "meta" then that suggests it's not a skill variation that explains it. That makes the game extremely boring.

> 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.

[fc417fc802]

I'm familiar with the term, thanks. I'm suggesting that if you're consistently losing to it that's a skill issue. Sure, you might find the gameplay boring but then that's a complaint about a perceived failure in the game design (notably only from your perspective, not necessarily other's). I appreciate that you're more interested in casually playing off the wall builds for fun rather than competitively playing to win but casting that as others being less skilled or the community being in the wrong is just petulant.

[estearum]

Yes, it is a game design failure (obviously) insofar as it seems not possible to make a perfectly balanced game. But games weren't previously perfectly balanced either, presumably. But they didn't have this same "herding" dynamic because there wasn't an entire industry (literally!) of people trying to discover and disseminate knowledge about the imbalances.

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.

[im3w1l]

Many games operate on a rock-paper-scissor system though, and even if rock is perhaps a bit stronger than it should be, what that actually means is that it wins more against scissor than it loses to paper, but it still loses against paper.

[estearum]

This is how games are meant to operate. But the balance space is now so incredibly high-dimensionality that it turns out there is almost always a meta-optimal strategy. There is a Rock that beats both Scissors and Paper at greater frequency than expected.

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.