My Life As A Gamer: The Meta Matters In MultiPlayer

Be it tabletop or online, any game that involves multiple people cooperating towards an objective inevitably has a metagame element that comes to dominate actual play. This is most noticeable if the game promotes pick-up play. Known as "pugging", from "Pick-Up Group" (PUG), as opposed to playing in a (more or less) static team roster, this metagame arises due to the known gamer psychology of minimizing risk and effort for maximum return and performance.

The tell is this: "What is the best (X)?"

When you participate in pick-up groups, you are playing with people you don't know; you haven't conducted the necessary team-building required to allow for customizing group performance to account for whatever it is that you have to work with. Minimizing the risk of incompetence and stupidity in your pick-up group means focusing on what you can control, which is what player-controlled thing (a character, an army build, etc.) that man in the group brings.

In RPGs, this means looking at what elements are required for a group to operate and choosing the option that (a) has the highest performance and (b) is least able to screw up executing that role. In D&D, that means there's a Best Spell List for spellcasters and a Best Group Comp, both of which are informed by what the PUG environment allows; players who bring what is best get group invites, and the rest get benched.

In MMORPGs, this gets even more blatant and even encouraged. As I write this post, I'm listening to a podcast live show discussing what tanks will be best in the upcoming patch for World of Warcraft and if there is any difference between the various endgame content choices. (i.e. Best Mythic Plus vs. Best Raid vs. Best BG vs. Best Arena) Once the score-or-so of guild-writers publishing their guides and put out their videos, the meta is set and you will conform or you will get benched.

Why? Because they don't know you. You might as well be a bot to them. You're there to fill a spot to do a job, and being Best--being on-meta--means the risk of you not meeting expectations is as low as can be had. This is as impersonal an environment as working a Corporate job, be it office or fast food or whatever else is depersonalized enough to make a man into a cog.

And so there's a lot of crying about what is and is not Best. Because the rest get benched.

The counter-argument is always "But (Y) is viable!" and sometimes accompanied by spreadsheets, videos, etc. showing this to be so. For Classic WOW, this is routinely done with the Paladin class. To which the answer is always "Twice or thrice the effort and skill to get the SAME RESULTS", and it is an effective counter because it shows that being viable is not enough; it's both "get best results" and "with least effort" that informs the metagame.

Game designers ignore this at their peril, especially those running online games. They have data gathered in real-time as to what is best and what is not. They can figure out how to bring underperformers up to the baseline established by the Best. They routinely fail to do so. Sometimes it's ego. Sometimes it's incompetence. More and more, I find that this is in fact deliberate as a means to improve player engagement- which they then monetize one way or another. Revised player-required materials prompting re-purchases (edition treadmills, cardset changes, etc.), microtransactions to allow whales to shift their player-objects (decks, armies, PCs, etc.) to whatever the meta now favors- especially if you can gift them to others, and so on are just easily-thought of examples of such monetization.

For now, the only way to avoid the meta is to make and maintain that static group. That way you can exploit team-building of trust to compensate for off-meta player choices, but even then it comes at a cost. If you're going to be doing something like the World First Race that MMOs like World of Warcraft do, being off-meta inhibits the odds that you'll finish in the Top 10- nevermind winning. Know your limits, and choose your goals, accordingly.