Meta

Is there anyway to deal with meta based balancing, where instead of seeking actual game balance devs just stupidly buff certain things to unstoppable tier and nerf others to unplayable?

Or better yet, is there anyway to deal with a meta based community? I ask this because I truly don't get why multiplayer based gaming has become like this.

In fighting game tournaments I get why people pick top tiers. They couldn't care less about the actual game and neither do the viewers. They just care about the drama and winning money so it makes sense why they do that. Same with any esports scene.

Why then does your average person do it? Why is it that in Hearthstone it is literally impossible to play people not using a meta deck they saw in a tournament or on reddit or some other website? Fine I get it in ranked go for what wins, but why is it like this even in a casual match?

Why are moba like that too? Why are people so obsessed with the meta and restricting the game to its most barebones possible? It just makes the entire game's scene revolve around the same exact thing over and over again

>people cry about the OP top tiers
>everyone flocks to them anyway
>the low and mid tier are completely abandoned
>devs don't do anything because they make money on people being "forced" to learn the top tiers
>once the meta gets stale and people start to move on, the devs do a huge rebalancing
>it doesn't actually make the game more balanced it just switches characters around randomly
>the cycle repeats all over again

MKX is and SFIV are great examples of how this looked in action and I'm getting sick of it. It's an artificial way for the devs to inflate interest in the game and it also shows the natural weaknesses in the community.

KoFXIV has barely been out now yet every team is already moving to having Athena and/or Nakoruru on their team

Why do people do this? Why go out of your way to kill the fun not just for you, but everyone else you play too?

>Why don't people just pick trash characters and have fun??????????????
>Don't people enjoy losing????????????????????

Are you fucking serious.

Losing in casual matches online? Also the reason they might lose is probably because the other people are picking top tiers. Why is the fear of such a thing so dominant that it controls THE ENTIRE community?

Winning is fun you autistic cuntbag

Because losing is inherently unfun.

A meta will always exist, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.

If anything, metas are infinitely better now than they were ever, due to patches being a thing. Patches call for constant innovation until it settles for a small amount of time, then it gets shaken up again.

Fuck you and your thread

You gotta have a 5 to do that, Yugi boy.

If people can expect patches to shake things up, they won't learn a counter. If a game was long lasting and had a "top tier" people would eventually come up with a tactic that deals with the top tier that was previously undiscovered. Why discover those tactics if you know it'll just be swapped soon?

Like this?

No, but you can always make fun of them for playing ezmode.

This thread is unfuckable! UNFUCKABLE!
I can't even do so!

>Is there anyway to deal with meta based balancing, where instead of seeking actual game balance

Let me stop you right there. Hearthstone literally cannot be "actually" or "objectively" balanced. It is asymmetrical. You cannot have different classes and a perfectly balanced game. The only way to achieve meaningful balance is diversity of card pool, so that every strong strategy has counters.

This also applies to any asymmetrical game. You evaluate what performs the best, then either nerf it or buff its counters.

>Why then does your average person do it [netdecking etc]?

News flash: people like winning, even if it isn't "ranked" or "competitive" mode. If you pit two people against each other, with nothing on the line at all, people are still usually going to want to win, and try to win. I'm not going to assert that humans are naturally competitive because I'm not a scientist, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were true. Our brains literally react differently to winning and losing even if it's technically irrelevant.

Man I hate that picture.

What if people want to... you know... be good at the game?

>In fighting game tournaments I get why people pick top tiers. They couldn't care less about the actual game and neither do the viewers. They just care about the drama and winning money so it makes sense why they do that. Same with any esports scene.

No they pick top tiers because they happen to like the character and want to win. A lot of top players do not pick top tiers and end up winning anyway not just because they're "more skilled" but because so much of the game has been undiscovered that it's impossible to really narrow down what the top tier is other than just theory.

The whole point of meta is to push the game to its absolute limit. Other people will find whatever counters to the dominant strategy later becoming the dominant strategy itself then bitches like you complain about that as well. A good game will evolve like this.

Losing a casual match of League takes 20-40 minutes so yeah I don't feel like making that worse by getting shit on by a "op" character in lane because I picked a fun character

...

>pick whichever character I like the most
>they're rock-bottom tier
>win anyway

Most people are so used to fighting a small subset of a fighting game's roster, they don't know what to do when they go up against someone competent using a rarely picked character.

Remember that tier lists assume equal skill. If you're not planning on winning any tournaments any time soon just pick the character you like.

>playing rank 20 shieldbearer with fun deck
>vs a golden anyfinOTK N`Zoth Rag Paladin
>next is 4 turn kill facehunter
>after that 4 mana 7/7 shaman with perfect curv

>casual is just facehunter and trogg totem shaman

They not only assume equal skill, they also assume the game is played at the level of a national tournament.
On any game that doesn't have awful balance, you'll see characters from all over the tier list win locals.

Because losing fucking sucks. No one wants to be the loser.

on that note, over the years i can safely say that Blizz dont balance shit, they just make something else more OP or just kills it with nerf

because people want to win you fucking retard

It's bad balancing in my opinion.

I think balance in a game like this should be about keeping the spirit of the character (their win conditions) intact while making sure they're not amazing at everything, to the point where an idiot and a pro are evenly matched at best. A character who 9-1's half the cast and 1-9's the rest isn't balanced either.

Imbalance isn't necessarily bad. In MvC2 or Melee, god tier is big enough to effectively make it a game with less characters, but still fun to play. This doesn't work for Dota 2 for instance, because it ruins the game when you only have 6-7 characters in god tier, unlike a fighting game.

I think balance should be done very judiciously and sparingly, save for glaring issues. Especially game-wide changes. Shit like that can flip a game's entire play style on its head. Riot does it every patch, Valve did it in Dota 6.82. Look how that's turning out for them.

Depends on the tier list, a lot of them are compiled based on tournament results and assume that every character is being played at the highest level. Of course you can beat your friend with kirby, no one cares about that.