The Business: Why Metas Are Enforced By The Players

This one's for the Normies.

You're playing a multi-player game. This is your relaxation time. You put in a long day at work. Kids' homework is sorted. Now you just want to log in and run a dungeon before you go to bed, and being months behind you're just getting to this one a year or so after it got patched into the game. It's new to you, and you have no idea what to expect. Maybe you remember to say so to the others.

Then you end up eating floor and wondering why the healer stops talking to you. If you're not that important in the group, this is merely inconvenient; if your role is make-or-break (e.g. the tank in most MMORPG parties), then they're eating floor with you and maybe they're screaming at you in chat about messing up their milk run.

Normie, I'm going to tell you why they're mad: you walked into a solved problem without knowing what to do.

I would not presume that the folks yelling at you are not Normies. They likely are, believe it or not, because they--like you--just want their gaming entertainment to be stress-free ROFLstomp roller-coaster rides. Gamers, more often than you think, are more tolerant of first-timers screwing up. The difference? The Normies listened to a Gamer telling them to go watch a guide--like this one below--before stepping into it.

Why did those Normies bother to watch a guide?

Think about it. Spend five minutes to be handed, on a silver platter, all of the solutions on how to handle the situations this dungeon puts you in? That's a massive time-saver, and time saved (in MMO terms) is money saved; this gets to be a massive return on investment once you're farming these instances for metacurrencies you need to improve your character beyond what the first playthrough allows.

Go watch that video again. She shows you exactly what is going to happen at every step, what to do about it, how to do it, and that translates into very fast and clean runs that go smooth like a hot knife through butter. That is exactly what you, Normies, want out of your gaming entertainment. Gamers want this too, as they're doing this to farm for those metacurrencies they need for the real game they play. Everyone wins.

However, there is a price.

There is no sense of discovery anymore. New games, and new patches, have all their content and mechanics fully documented and solved within days of release at the most; in severe cases, this is done before the official release, as is the case with Game of Gankcraft- and as been for over a decade.

Normie, if this isn't something you want when you play, consider switching to single-player only games or games that have no online multiplayer (aside from fighting games, of course). You'll enjoy Breath of the Wild far more than you will with any MMORPG or similar game if you want to play blind and figure things out as you go. Like it or not, most players-- also being Normies--go with applying known solutions over figuring it out themselves because they want the thrill ride and figuring things out is work.

Blaming the Gamers for solving the problems doesn't help; they just want the best odds to beat an unknown and difficult problem. Blame your fellow Normies for gladly accepting anything that makes the game conform to their expectations for entertainment. Gamers, by and large, aren't going to care; they'll raise you, tell you what you ought to know and go again- they know that eating floor is expected when you're new.