This is a large part of why I don't enjoy competitive multiplayer video games.
Once people figure out how to min/max for statistically optimal results, it becomes less about fun and novelty and more about how much time you have to study these strategies.
I completely understand how this "solving" of the game can be incredibly fun and rewarding to some people, but I personally don't have the time or motivation to dedicate. I like to explore and play by ear. As such, I have zero chance in anything competitive/multiplayer.
Not really complaining, just something I realized isn't up my alley a long time ago.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Original article is talking about Fantasy Football, but I feel like something similar has been occurring in Poker over the last few years.
A lot of the current players are studying Game-Theoretic-Optimal (GTO) models of gameplay, and memorising range tables and bet sizes based not just on your cards, but also on where you are sat at the table in relation to the dealer, and the size of your chip stack.[0]
I know that Poker is a game of skill, and the more you put into understanding the game, the more you're going to get out - but this just seems like... a lot of work.
Is it really making the game more fun?
It's kind of weird, because watching Rounders from back in the day, you'd see a lot of people express respect for Knish (John Turturro) and his attitude towards grinding it out, playing careful odds, treating Poker as a job. And if the poker scene is filled with people "playing the man, not the cards" and learning how to make good reads, and, well, dreamers, then having someone like Knish around makes for an interesting contrast.
But if everyone plays like Knish? Where's the fun in that?
I feel similar about the direction Go (the game, not the language) has gone ever since AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol. Suddenly the top players are looking to AI to teach them the most optimal way to play even though the plays are far more alien than if you watch games from the ancient masters, where intuition still informs most of the moves.
Sedol commented at the time that although he appreciated AlphaGo's strength, he never wanted to play it again and I agree. It's not even really that it sucks the fun out of it, it's that the decisions the AI makes are often inscrutable and counterintuitive. It removes the traditional feel of Go being a negotiation.
At that point it's not about work or fun. It's about winning. Same thing is happening at companies - it's not about great product, it's about maximizing profit. Winning and money are obvious reasonable things to strive for, so I'm not sure how we can refocus either of these areas on QoL.
I dunno. Even if you're the only one doing it, and winning a lot because of the edge, it still feels like that much work would still make it "not fun".
Or, it's possible that a lot of current poker players are the kind of nerds for whom figuring out GTO strategies and memorising probability tables for games is intrinsically fun, and they'd do it even if they had no intention of ever actually playing the game. In the same way that some people memorise everything about different types of train, even if they never intend on working in the railway industry, but because it tickles the right part of their brain. But I doubt it.
Diff. people get satisfaction from diff. things. Some like to find exploits in a system, and take advantage of them. And seeing their score go up because of that gives them satisfaction.
Fantasy Football, where millions of players compete in one league, and every top team has a Mohamed Salah, is just too boring. It was boring then, it is boring now.
I much prefer the US fantasy sports format with a draft and only a dozen of players in one league, such that there is only one team which has a Mohamed Salah.
I always thought fantasy sports leagues were careful about allocating budgets so that if you bought any one of the top 3-5 available players, you'd have trouble making the rest of your team well-balanced.
Depends! Generally to win a typical redraft 12 team league you need to hit on your first two draft picks, and then a couple more late round picks that outperform, and then have the rest of your team be at least okay. The top two picks are mostly luck, so the skill is finding those two high-value-low-cost late rounders. For daily fantasy you’re really hunting out guys that have the potential to have a one game fluke but are cheap (ex. a backup player that has 2 touchdowns in a game for the first time ever). When that happens pretty much all the top teams will have one or more of those players.
Someone had already talked about the draft-based variants, so I was considering the non-draft case, mostly because sports teams where I live don't have a draft system.
I have read up on draft systems, and while I basically get the mechanics of how they work, I don't have a good feel for how getting (or missing) your pick at a particular stage of the draft plays out.
This was an element I was curious about and didn’t get, I assumed most fantasy football groups had a draft and a player couldn’t be in one team. TIL I guess.
Both types exist and have for a while. The “one league” model focuses on who can pick the “perfect team” whereas the many league model focuses on drafting the best remaining player each round.
Online communities do this to many games. As soon as you have thousands upon thousands looking to optimize the thing, it isn't the same game you might play with your friends. Creativity goes right out the window in favor of tested strategies. Applies especially to M:TG, or other CCG's IMO, as well as many strategy computer games.
I personally hate it. Though I can see many do not mind.
This is one of the primary reasons I tend to prefer retro games, or games which are similar to retro games. They tend not to be optimized in these sorts of ways, and are often called "janky." But, they're more fun in a lot of cases. The player is often more free to develop their own strategies, and this often feels like you're "breaking the game," or at least not playing in the intended way.
The first time I experienced this was playing the original Demon's Souls, and then later playing Dark Souls. I wasn't actually any good at playing Demon's Souls, and during my first playthrough I stumbled onto all sorts now-well-known ways of abusing the game's mechanics:
- Baiting individual enemies with arrows so you can fight them one at a time.
- Killing enemies from afar with arrows by standing outside of their agro range.
- Physically turning off the console to avoid a death being recorded. (at the time I didn't know exiting the game would work better)
There are more examples than just this, but I distinctly remember when first playing these games that I often didn't feel like I was playing the game "correctly." By 2009, most games had pretty lengthy tutorials, and would often have a "live" tutorial every time you encountered some new type of enemy. They'd tell you "proper" way to find the enemy's weak point, often of a voice-over. Demon's Souls obviously did none of this, and you were left to figure out how to make it past each enemy. Often the best solution (from a difficulty perspective) was the jankiest. Take the Ornstein and Smough fight in Dark Souls. Is there anyone who doesn't use the pillars to get cover from Smough's hammer attack?
In any case, the point I'm making is that the less optimized games can be much more rewarding, and often demand much more player creativity.
I'm not sure I agree with your takeaway. It sounds to me like you were searching for optimal paths. Baiting individuals into 1 vs. 1 is more optimal than fighting a crowd. Killing enemies out of aggro range is more optimal is you're looking to preserve health.
I don't think there's anything about the game that is giving you that joy. It's the fact that you are discovering strategies yourself. When games have large online communities, it's like setting off an AI. You have so many people trying different strategies and sharing them with others that you don't get the joy of solving it yourself.
I agree in regards to Magic. Arena especially is hyper optimized. I decided to just netdeck a mono red aggro that did well in ranked, and have been racking up Ws. Sooner or later that strategy will fall apart and I'll probably just give up on Arena, I don't personally enjoy the idea of the MTG hivemind making a deck for me if I want to win.
That said, I have a weekly group that plays pretty low level paper commander, and it's a blast. We live in different states now but play on Spelltable and get together every few months to do a draft. It's the only way to play, IMO. Plenty of room for creativity within the confines of our personal meta.
I played mmos back in the day and they were a ton of fun. Then Thottbot came along, and it make the questing too easy... no one needed to talk and work together, everyone focused on getting to the next quest.
I hope future games will use more randomization to keep players guessing and building community.
This reminds me of multiplayer video games and to a lesser extent board games. What I really enjoy doing is exploring different elements of the game, map, characters, mechanics. But lots of games have been “solved” and playing with certain people is just minor variations on an optimal path.
Chess can get like this to an extreme extent. Sometimes when playing chess with friends I'll make an obviously un-optimal move because it has a chance at putting the game in a weird situation. Just something _different_ for a change is much more fun/interesting than playing the same boring lines out.
I play a lot of online poker. Sometimes I'll start betting increased amounts (3 to 5x big blind) on the initial deal regardless of the quality of my hand to force more money to get into play. I just want to increase the stakes a bit because it makes the game more enjoyable than everyone always betting the optimal and predictable amount.
It's amazing how often this significantly upsets other players. It's not real money (or even significant if they went bankrupt and couldn't wait 24 hours to get the next handout) at the tables I plan (small amounts). I've seen serious meltdowns over pennies.
Because people want to play a game of skill and not luck. Your random bets gave an advantage to whoever had a good hand then. Which is not what people want when they play poker.
Long ago I played in cheap & FTP tourneys. Multiple people would go all in on the first hand or relatively soon. Whoever 3-4xed their chips in the first few hands had an enormous advantage for the rest of the game. It was the single largest reason I stopped playing.
I know the all-in strategy, and that is a very different thing. Yeah it can be frustrating but those people also tend to go broke really quick. You don't have to play their game and you always have the option to go to a different table.
I want to clarify, my bets were not random and they are not even close to the order of magnitude as the all-in bets. Poker isn't just "mathematical purity" it's also psychology and that's part of the skill. A player losing their cool because I kept throwing 30 into the pot instead of 10 when we all have 1000 on hand is losing the psychology game big time.
There is a feedback loop that game studios put in to these always online games to make players believe that grinding content over and over to get some gear with better stats will make them better. Gamers test the better gear and create spreadsheets of DPS (damage per second) numbers per weapon, optimal loadouts, etc. to prove via math that they are right.
A while back in Destiny there was some sniper that required getting PvP kills with it in order to get an upgrade (or something like that). I suck at PvP but was able to do it and you know what - I got decent at sniping in PvP simply because I kept doing it over and over and over. I believe its the grinding of the content that makes the player better. Those pro gamers that play 8-12 hours per day are really good. A lot of people would be really good at some of these games if they put that time in. The changed stats on gear is an illusion to keep players engaged (not a fake illusion but I think a facade with marginal difference).
"It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on."
this is what kills me about games these days, not just multiplayer games where you have to play the 'meta' if you want to stand a chance, but even single player games where every choice is viable but people will make fun of you for not choosing the 'optimal' build, which a lot of the time is backed more by personal preference than anything else. I used to play Overwatch and left for largely that reason - people would get on the microphone and try to play the leader of a group of randoms and tell other players to 'do their jobs' and pick the 'right' hero.
An example from today is in Elden Ring - largely a single player game, but with multiplayer elements. When I started playing, there was a huge variety in player stats, weapon/armor selection, and people were even encouraged to try out different things by the in-game "rebirthing" mechanic. Then someone found out that a single sword used a specific way vastly overpowers everything else, especially in multiplayer, and now everybody who plays player-versus-player is locked in to using that same sword or else it's not even a fair fight. Players have been begging the developers to change this, and they only recently (as of this week) did something about it.
Magic: The Gathering is an interesting case. On the one hand, there's a crazy amount of data in terms of win rates on Arena and MTGO, as well as popular cards in a given format (especially EDH with EDHREC). What a computer cannot do is win games, or analyze a deck based on its oracle text and tell you what can win. One of the more interesting facets of this (to me) is watching the prices change from spoiler season to a few weeks/months after release. Fable of the Mirror-Breaker was less than a dollar when Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty came out, and it's over $20 now. Tiamat, from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, was over $25 after the set was released, now you can get it for around $10-$15. (Price has a lot more information in it than just game utility, but its desirability for gameplay is still pretty high in the list.)
For as uniform as, say, the standard meta is, it's still based on player consensus and behavior, not computer analysis of game mechanics or simulations of games. Turns out player consensus is still pretty good. I don't know if you could moneyball Magic.
As other raised here, this is a similar issue to games like Hearthstone for exemple, where you can easily find online the deck with the highest win% and run that.
I happen to play both FPL and HS. The difference is that for Hearthstone since you play against others deck the meta can change, hence a win% is only relevant in the current context. That doesn't really work like that with FPL.
I agree this is taking the fun out of the game, but really only if you focus on winning rather than building yourself your own deck or team. So I'd let other copy paste the optimal team every weeek, I'm good thank you.
Ironicaly if you want to win a league, most likely you'll have to make a couple of bold choice during the season, gambling against a model and being right.
Anyway, I've started coding my own bot to help me pick FPL players, it's never going to be as good as any online model and probably even myself but in the journey the fun will be :)
This seems like a problem with the game itself more than anything, the fact that there is a single optimal team or strategy.
I see data-driven approaches are being used more and more everywhere, not just in games, and I can see how that can be seriously problematic in some cases.
But, for example, my 14yo son plays on a popular minecraft server, with his friends, and he's been writing python scripts to download in-game item sales/pricing data, and make graphs/do analytics on it, so they can get an edge in online trades. I think he's having more fun doing that than actually playing, tbh. But the point is there is no 'optimal' strategy or configuration in that game, it's still 'open'. It just now requires more sophisticated play rather than a naive casual approach.
You could create new categories of play with varying restrictions to make things fun again.
I don't know about fantasy football, but in the video-game speed-running community people often come up with new categories to maintain the fun. Sometimes a game can be broken to the point that it can be finished in mere minutes, but people still play the 100% category as well.
How about restricting what kinds of data and models are allowed? Another option is to straight up ban the model team and force people to get creative.
It sounds like you're basically already doing this, but maybe you should lobby your preferred platform to add explicit support for this kind of restricted play.
"You could create new categories of play with varying restrictions to make things fun again."
I think the obvious one (to me, anyhow) would work: Penalize a person relative to the number of people who take him. I'd have to sit down with some pencil & paper to work out the best way to do so, my gut says it'll be something a bit non-obvious to make the math work out the best (possibly involving something like the logarithm of the number of people who selected a given player), but off hand it's not immediately obvious to me what that is. (I suspect just dividing the value of a player by the number of people selecting them is a bit too direct and has some pathologies in it. It certainly does around low numbers of selections, e.g., if you selected a person first you take a heck of a hit when the second person selects them.)
I'd motivate the change with a large player base by saying this is an attempt to simulate at a large scale the fact that in the real world, teams can't pick the same person more than once.
Even if this didn't solve the problem, I am fairly certain it would destabilize the meta and at least turn it from something static to something dynamic, which is still an improvement over there being one single true solution.
Dating myself here, but the feeling the author describes is reminiscent of when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov. There are certainly a lot of games humans are no longer best at.
I suspect that with computers getting better at so much of what we took pride in, we'll have to start looking very deeply at what makes a human a human. A human still has to aim the computer at something the human finds meaningful - hopefully, we'll have a lot more time to think about that question.
We want to compete in elaborate made-up games both physical and intellectual, hold fancy parties and dress up and play pretend together and basically have a blast all the time. I don't think we're that hard to decipher.
The stuff we got to do to keep the lights on prevents us from doing that fulltime. For now.
Edit: Although in the West, if you have some cash, even work-life seems more and more like a pretend play. We all dress up and act professional so we can weave a nice narrative about being productive when that clearly is very questionable. There's a truckload of gaming going on on just about every level. OK, I might be having a bad day..
I sort of agree, but then why play sports or fantasy at all? Why not just turn to a hobby that inherently rewards creativity and boldness (most contemporary arts)?
Alternatively, in competetive environments, things that have stock trading or market mechanics mean that as soon as something becomes “common sense” it’s probably not the correct move anymore.
I'm not sure how well it would work (if at all!), but an alternative could be for a specific prediction to become less valuable as it becomes more popular. In other words, reward players not for absolute accuracy, but for making bets on underpriced outcomes.
Sounds like it's high time fundamental aspects of a given game morph slightly during gameplay... fabric of reality remains unknowable so this should be reflected in games
This is a large part of why I don't enjoy competitive multiplayer video games.
Once people figure out how to min/max for statistically optimal results, it becomes less about fun and novelty and more about how much time you have to study these strategies.
I completely understand how this "solving" of the game can be incredibly fun and rewarding to some people, but I personally don't have the time or motivation to dedicate. I like to explore and play by ear. As such, I have zero chance in anything competitive/multiplayer.
Not really complaining, just something I realized isn't up my alley a long time ago.
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.
Original article is talking about Fantasy Football, but I feel like something similar has been occurring in Poker over the last few years.
A lot of the current players are studying Game-Theoretic-Optimal (GTO) models of gameplay, and memorising range tables and bet sizes based not just on your cards, but also on where you are sat at the table in relation to the dealer, and the size of your chip stack.[0]
I know that Poker is a game of skill, and the more you put into understanding the game, the more you're going to get out - but this just seems like... a lot of work.
Is it really making the game more fun?
It's kind of weird, because watching Rounders from back in the day, you'd see a lot of people express respect for Knish (John Turturro) and his attitude towards grinding it out, playing careful odds, treating Poker as a job. And if the poker scene is filled with people "playing the man, not the cards" and learning how to make good reads, and, well, dreamers, then having someone like Knish around makes for an interesting contrast.
But if everyone plays like Knish? Where's the fun in that?
[0] https://www.splitsuit.com/poker-ranges-reading
I feel similar about the direction Go (the game, not the language) has gone ever since AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol. Suddenly the top players are looking to AI to teach them the most optimal way to play even though the plays are far more alien than if you watch games from the ancient masters, where intuition still informs most of the moves.
Sedol commented at the time that although he appreciated AlphaGo's strength, he never wanted to play it again and I agree. It's not even really that it sucks the fun out of it, it's that the decisions the AI makes are often inscrutable and counterintuitive. It removes the traditional feel of Go being a negotiation.
This reminds me of the recent post about Magnus Carlsen giving up his chess World Champion title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163993
>> but this just seems like... a lot of work.
At that point it's not about work or fun. It's about winning. Same thing is happening at companies - it's not about great product, it's about maximizing profit. Winning and money are obvious reasonable things to strive for, so I'm not sure how we can refocus either of these areas on QoL.
Isnt it like this for all things?
Its fun when you are the only one with an edge and winning. Its no longer fun when everyone has the same edge.
Goes for startups, college admissions, SEO/marketing, etc.
I dunno. Even if you're the only one doing it, and winning a lot because of the edge, it still feels like that much work would still make it "not fun".
Or, it's possible that a lot of current poker players are the kind of nerds for whom figuring out GTO strategies and memorising probability tables for games is intrinsically fun, and they'd do it even if they had no intention of ever actually playing the game. In the same way that some people memorise everything about different types of train, even if they never intend on working in the railway industry, but because it tickles the right part of their brain. But I doubt it.
Diff. people get satisfaction from diff. things. Some like to find exploits in a system, and take advantage of them. And seeing their score go up because of that gives them satisfaction.
Arms races are a negative sum game.
Fantasy Football, where millions of players compete in one league, and every top team has a Mohamed Salah, is just too boring. It was boring then, it is boring now.
I much prefer the US fantasy sports format with a draft and only a dozen of players in one league, such that there is only one team which has a Mohamed Salah.
I always thought fantasy sports leagues were careful about allocating budgets so that if you bought any one of the top 3-5 available players, you'd have trouble making the rest of your team well-balanced.
Depends! Generally to win a typical redraft 12 team league you need to hit on your first two draft picks, and then a couple more late round picks that outperform, and then have the rest of your team be at least okay. The top two picks are mostly luck, so the skill is finding those two high-value-low-cost late rounders. For daily fantasy you’re really hunting out guys that have the potential to have a one game fluke but are cheap (ex. a backup player that has 2 touchdowns in a game for the first time ever). When that happens pretty much all the top teams will have one or more of those players.
Someone had already talked about the draft-based variants, so I was considering the non-draft case, mostly because sports teams where I live don't have a draft system.
I have read up on draft systems, and while I basically get the mechanics of how they work, I don't have a good feel for how getting (or missing) your pick at a particular stage of the draft plays out.
This was an element I was curious about and didn’t get, I assumed most fantasy football groups had a draft and a player couldn’t be in one team. TIL I guess.
Both types exist and have for a while. The “one league” model focuses on who can pick the “perfect team” whereas the many league model focuses on drafting the best remaining player each round.
Ah, I didn't know that the draft model has existed for Fantasy EPL. That's great!
Wow, being from the US, I assumed that is how all fantasy sports work… TIL
Online communities do this to many games. As soon as you have thousands upon thousands looking to optimize the thing, it isn't the same game you might play with your friends. Creativity goes right out the window in favor of tested strategies. Applies especially to M:TG, or other CCG's IMO, as well as many strategy computer games.
I personally hate it. Though I can see many do not mind.
This is one of the primary reasons I tend to prefer retro games, or games which are similar to retro games. They tend not to be optimized in these sorts of ways, and are often called "janky." But, they're more fun in a lot of cases. The player is often more free to develop their own strategies, and this often feels like you're "breaking the game," or at least not playing in the intended way.
The first time I experienced this was playing the original Demon's Souls, and then later playing Dark Souls. I wasn't actually any good at playing Demon's Souls, and during my first playthrough I stumbled onto all sorts now-well-known ways of abusing the game's mechanics:
- Baiting individual enemies with arrows so you can fight them one at a time.
- Killing enemies from afar with arrows by standing outside of their agro range.
- Physically turning off the console to avoid a death being recorded. (at the time I didn't know exiting the game would work better)
There are more examples than just this, but I distinctly remember when first playing these games that I often didn't feel like I was playing the game "correctly." By 2009, most games had pretty lengthy tutorials, and would often have a "live" tutorial every time you encountered some new type of enemy. They'd tell you "proper" way to find the enemy's weak point, often of a voice-over. Demon's Souls obviously did none of this, and you were left to figure out how to make it past each enemy. Often the best solution (from a difficulty perspective) was the jankiest. Take the Ornstein and Smough fight in Dark Souls. Is there anyone who doesn't use the pillars to get cover from Smough's hammer attack?
In any case, the point I'm making is that the less optimized games can be much more rewarding, and often demand much more player creativity.
I'm not sure I agree with your takeaway. It sounds to me like you were searching for optimal paths. Baiting individuals into 1 vs. 1 is more optimal than fighting a crowd. Killing enemies out of aggro range is more optimal is you're looking to preserve health.
I don't think there's anything about the game that is giving you that joy. It's the fact that you are discovering strategies yourself. When games have large online communities, it's like setting off an AI. You have so many people trying different strategies and sharing them with others that you don't get the joy of solving it yourself.
I agree in regards to Magic. Arena especially is hyper optimized. I decided to just netdeck a mono red aggro that did well in ranked, and have been racking up Ws. Sooner or later that strategy will fall apart and I'll probably just give up on Arena, I don't personally enjoy the idea of the MTG hivemind making a deck for me if I want to win.
That said, I have a weekly group that plays pretty low level paper commander, and it's a blast. We live in different states now but play on Spelltable and get together every few months to do a draft. It's the only way to play, IMO. Plenty of room for creativity within the confines of our personal meta.
I played mmos back in the day and they were a ton of fun. Then Thottbot came along, and it make the questing too easy... no one needed to talk and work together, everyone focused on getting to the next quest.
I hope future games will use more randomization to keep players guessing and building community.
This reminds me of multiplayer video games and to a lesser extent board games. What I really enjoy doing is exploring different elements of the game, map, characters, mechanics. But lots of games have been “solved” and playing with certain people is just minor variations on an optimal path.
Chess can get like this to an extreme extent. Sometimes when playing chess with friends I'll make an obviously un-optimal move because it has a chance at putting the game in a weird situation. Just something _different_ for a change is much more fun/interesting than playing the same boring lines out.
This is an interesting post to read through: https://www.ichess.net/blog/why-has-professional-chess-scene...
I play a lot of online poker. Sometimes I'll start betting increased amounts (3 to 5x big blind) on the initial deal regardless of the quality of my hand to force more money to get into play. I just want to increase the stakes a bit because it makes the game more enjoyable than everyone always betting the optimal and predictable amount.
It's amazing how often this significantly upsets other players. It's not real money (or even significant if they went bankrupt and couldn't wait 24 hours to get the next handout) at the tables I plan (small amounts). I've seen serious meltdowns over pennies.
Because people want to play a game of skill and not luck. Your random bets gave an advantage to whoever had a good hand then. Which is not what people want when they play poker.
Long ago I played in cheap & FTP tourneys. Multiple people would go all in on the first hand or relatively soon. Whoever 3-4xed their chips in the first few hands had an enormous advantage for the rest of the game. It was the single largest reason I stopped playing.
I know the all-in strategy, and that is a very different thing. Yeah it can be frustrating but those people also tend to go broke really quick. You don't have to play their game and you always have the option to go to a different table.
I want to clarify, my bets were not random and they are not even close to the order of magnitude as the all-in bets. Poker isn't just "mathematical purity" it's also psychology and that's part of the skill. A player losing their cool because I kept throwing 30 into the pot instead of 10 when we all have 1000 on hand is losing the psychology game big time.
> Because people want to play a game of skill and not luck
Any game that involves dice or random cards has at least some luck involved.
There is a feedback loop that game studios put in to these always online games to make players believe that grinding content over and over to get some gear with better stats will make them better. Gamers test the better gear and create spreadsheets of DPS (damage per second) numbers per weapon, optimal loadouts, etc. to prove via math that they are right.
A while back in Destiny there was some sniper that required getting PvP kills with it in order to get an upgrade (or something like that). I suck at PvP but was able to do it and you know what - I got decent at sniping in PvP simply because I kept doing it over and over and over. I believe its the grinding of the content that makes the player better. Those pro gamers that play 8-12 hours per day are really good. A lot of people would be really good at some of these games if they put that time in. The changed stats on gear is an illusion to keep players engaged (not a fake illusion but I think a facade with marginal difference).
Any RPG like game where if you aren't following one of a few optimal character builds, you're "doing it wrong".
"It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on."
-GK Chesterton
this is what kills me about games these days, not just multiplayer games where you have to play the 'meta' if you want to stand a chance, but even single player games where every choice is viable but people will make fun of you for not choosing the 'optimal' build, which a lot of the time is backed more by personal preference than anything else. I used to play Overwatch and left for largely that reason - people would get on the microphone and try to play the leader of a group of randoms and tell other players to 'do their jobs' and pick the 'right' hero.
An example from today is in Elden Ring - largely a single player game, but with multiplayer elements. When I started playing, there was a huge variety in player stats, weapon/armor selection, and people were even encouraged to try out different things by the in-game "rebirthing" mechanic. Then someone found out that a single sword used a specific way vastly overpowers everything else, especially in multiplayer, and now everybody who plays player-versus-player is locked in to using that same sword or else it's not even a fair fight. Players have been begging the developers to change this, and they only recently (as of this week) did something about it.
Magic: The Gathering is an interesting case. On the one hand, there's a crazy amount of data in terms of win rates on Arena and MTGO, as well as popular cards in a given format (especially EDH with EDHREC). What a computer cannot do is win games, or analyze a deck based on its oracle text and tell you what can win. One of the more interesting facets of this (to me) is watching the prices change from spoiler season to a few weeks/months after release. Fable of the Mirror-Breaker was less than a dollar when Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty came out, and it's over $20 now. Tiamat, from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, was over $25 after the set was released, now you can get it for around $10-$15. (Price has a lot more information in it than just game utility, but its desirability for gameplay is still pretty high in the list.)
For as uniform as, say, the standard meta is, it's still based on player consensus and behavior, not computer analysis of game mechanics or simulations of games. Turns out player consensus is still pretty good. I don't know if you could moneyball Magic.
As other raised here, this is a similar issue to games like Hearthstone for exemple, where you can easily find online the deck with the highest win% and run that.
I happen to play both FPL and HS. The difference is that for Hearthstone since you play against others deck the meta can change, hence a win% is only relevant in the current context. That doesn't really work like that with FPL.
I agree this is taking the fun out of the game, but really only if you focus on winning rather than building yourself your own deck or team. So I'd let other copy paste the optimal team every weeek, I'm good thank you. Ironicaly if you want to win a league, most likely you'll have to make a couple of bold choice during the season, gambling against a model and being right.
Anyway, I've started coding my own bot to help me pick FPL players, it's never going to be as good as any online model and probably even myself but in the journey the fun will be :)
This seems like a problem with the game itself more than anything, the fact that there is a single optimal team or strategy.
I see data-driven approaches are being used more and more everywhere, not just in games, and I can see how that can be seriously problematic in some cases.
But, for example, my 14yo son plays on a popular minecraft server, with his friends, and he's been writing python scripts to download in-game item sales/pricing data, and make graphs/do analytics on it, so they can get an edge in online trades. I think he's having more fun doing that than actually playing, tbh. But the point is there is no 'optimal' strategy or configuration in that game, it's still 'open'. It just now requires more sophisticated play rather than a naive casual approach.
Many models are great and optimal and they work... right until they don't.
Many people in quant trading industry learn it every year the hard way.
You could create new categories of play with varying restrictions to make things fun again.
I don't know about fantasy football, but in the video-game speed-running community people often come up with new categories to maintain the fun. Sometimes a game can be broken to the point that it can be finished in mere minutes, but people still play the 100% category as well.
How about restricting what kinds of data and models are allowed? Another option is to straight up ban the model team and force people to get creative.
It sounds like you're basically already doing this, but maybe you should lobby your preferred platform to add explicit support for this kind of restricted play.
"You could create new categories of play with varying restrictions to make things fun again."
I think the obvious one (to me, anyhow) would work: Penalize a person relative to the number of people who take him. I'd have to sit down with some pencil & paper to work out the best way to do so, my gut says it'll be something a bit non-obvious to make the math work out the best (possibly involving something like the logarithm of the number of people who selected a given player), but off hand it's not immediately obvious to me what that is. (I suspect just dividing the value of a player by the number of people selecting them is a bit too direct and has some pathologies in it. It certainly does around low numbers of selections, e.g., if you selected a person first you take a heck of a hit when the second person selects them.)
I'd motivate the change with a large player base by saying this is an attempt to simulate at a large scale the fact that in the real world, teams can't pick the same person more than once.
Even if this didn't solve the problem, I am fairly certain it would destabilize the meta and at least turn it from something static to something dynamic, which is still an improvement over there being one single true solution.
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." Paul Morphy
I got a similar feeling about wordle when everyone wants to ay ADIEU as their first guess.
Dating myself here, but the feeling the author describes is reminiscent of when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov. There are certainly a lot of games humans are no longer best at.
I suspect that with computers getting better at so much of what we took pride in, we'll have to start looking very deeply at what makes a human a human. A human still has to aim the computer at something the human finds meaningful - hopefully, we'll have a lot more time to think about that question.
We want to compete in elaborate made-up games both physical and intellectual, hold fancy parties and dress up and play pretend together and basically have a blast all the time. I don't think we're that hard to decipher.
The stuff we got to do to keep the lights on prevents us from doing that fulltime. For now.
Edit: Although in the West, if you have some cash, even work-life seems more and more like a pretend play. We all dress up and act professional so we can weave a nice narrative about being productive when that clearly is very questionable. There's a truckload of gaming going on on just about every level. OK, I might be having a bad day..
Or you're getting serious about how hard the problem actually is to solve ;)
I sort of agree, but then why play sports or fantasy at all? Why not just turn to a hobby that inherently rewards creativity and boldness (most contemporary arts)?
Alternatively, in competetive environments, things that have stock trading or market mechanics mean that as soon as something becomes “common sense” it’s probably not the correct move anymore.
i like this line:
> You can find people who could barely add and subtract yet have the ability to recite various player and team statistics.
because it calls to mind a scene from 'the wire', i think a lot about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1mmePD549o
I'm not sure how well it would work (if at all!), but an alternative could be for a specific prediction to become less valuable as it becomes more popular. In other words, reward players not for absolute accuracy, but for making bets on underpriced outcomes.
If you haven't made a spreadsheet for it yet, are you even having fun?
Sounds like it's high time fundamental aspects of a given game morph slightly during gameplay... fabric of reality remains unknowable so this should be reflected in games