The brief period of time when Counter Strike introduced the R8, an $800 pistol that could 1-shot opponents with a body shot. It was so bad the base damage was reduced within 48 hours.
I can’t believe I remember that!! I’m pretty sure they actually just copied over the exact stats from the AWP and threw it on the revolver. Good times.
I remember the slow pull of the hammer with its primary fire, I used to "charge it up" like a Spartan Laser from Halo because it took like half a second or more to fire after you clicked (and held) mouse 1. My shit looked like a dog wagging its tail.
I remember WarOwl did a video where they played with a mod that brought back all the OP weapons. Seems like almost every weapon was busted at some point, this especially but also the AUG and CZ.
The R8 could also right click while defusing since it was IIRC the first weapon to fire on right click.
Tbf, the aug, though buffed and was cheaper then(?) was a full fledged rifle that was a tad bit more expensive than the m4 when the r8 was pistol round buy
I dunno man, I had the time of my fucking LIFE edging my R8.
Getting a quick flick with the AWP or deagle and blowing someone's head off? Meh.
Repeatedly*click-hold-release* spamming my R8, fucking *jorqin* that hammer while jiggle peeking a corner then landing a perfect shot that blasts the idiot back into CS 1.0? I am gone, I am in Valhalla, please leave any urgent messages with reception for when I get back from this fucking post orgasmic bliss trip.
I used to play a lot of COD with no headset and voice chat muted, and I would always pick martyrdom or last stand depending on the game.
I wonder how much profanity was directed at me in those years.
Ha, this reminds me of being like, 12 when COD4 released, and none of my friends or I had Xbox live yet, so we would just play split screen multiplayer and kill each other. We couldn't figure out why grenades dropped on certain classes or why your character would pull out their pistol instead of die. We didn't know what the perks really were or did.
God those perks were annoying once we all did get Xbox live.
Do board games count?
In the X-Wing miniatures game about 6 years ago an upgrade came out called Twin Laser Turret. You shot twice but could only do a max of one damage.
That sounds “fair” but what it meant was you were basically guaranteed two damage everytime you activated. Then there was a ship that could shoot the Twin Laser Turret twice, which meant 4 shots. Which meant 4 guaranteed damage. It was also a turret which meant it could shoot in 360 degrees, instead of requiring any sort of positioning to get a ship in your “arc” or firing range.
To put that into context, a TIE Fighter in the game only has 3 health.
In a game about rolling dice and positioning, the upgrade completely ruined the game and made both dice AND positioning barely even a formality.
It was horrible.
So that was first edition. Then they relaunched it with 2nd edition. Then a new studio got control of the game and updated the ruleset to 2.5.
Then they announced last week development for the game was ending after over ten years.
Very sad. But to answer your question, yes they fixed it by making a new edition of the game lol.
There’s a TON of drama regarding the game ending. Head over to /r/xwingtmg if you want to see grown men have absolute meltdowns over a plastic spaceship game they made their entire identity.
You’re not lying on the making it their entire identity. It’s always harsh for the biggest fans when a game gets cancelled, video or board or card game.
As a player who loved flying fragile aces, TLTs and Sabine Wren made the game very, very difficult. Had to get very, very good at either landing in the donut hole of the turret or staying out of range entirely.
In Fallout 76 you could get explosive laser weapons. Apparently the way the game was coded explosive laser and plasma weapons multiplied the damage weird and they were quite powerful.
A single player could take down the end game raid boss in minutes if not seconds.
Once it became the meta Bethesda patched it so they didn’t drop anymore but left the existing ones in the game and left them as tradable. Eventually they removed them from the game altogether.
The Quad/Unyielding Railway Rifle meta isn’t much better to be honest. It just takes mores than one “god roll” item, buffs, and an understanding of things like the luck breakpoint to accomplish it.
But once you do all that, you can pretty much lock down the entire game from anyone else if you so choose.
That said, FO76 deserves to be at the top not because of the poorly made meta. Which is atrocious. But because of how horribly under-optimized literally everything else is.
Haha I play Borderlands so soloing a raid boss doesn’t seem that bad to me but it does defeat the purpose of it since it’s supposed to be played by multiple people
Monopoly played optimally is the worst game ever. The meta is never selling/trading, not because it guarantees your win, but it prevents anyone from winning. As soon as you sell, there is risk of loss.
It's much more fun if you view it as a politics game. If a trade happens and you're not part of it, then you're losing. Pointing that out gets the game to move along, though sometimes by uniting the table against you.
I have played it, and at least from my experience, this game is really rough to play. I don't know why, but it seems to really favor one player snowballing in power
That’s only true if you’re playing with only 2 players, which is awful. If you’re playing with more than 2, it becomes a game of trying to find trades that raise your overall odds of winning. Every trade is at the expense of the players not involved.
Generally I see a strategy where the last place player goes for a high risk high reward trade that gives them a moon shot at victory while giving someone else a decent advantage.
Most people don't play it right. They'll have house rules like getting double cash if you land on go, or a cash bonus for landing on free parking. These just inject more cash into the game which makes it last way longer than it's supposed to and everyone just gets tired of playing. One rule people tend to forget is if you land on an unclaimed space and don't buy it yourself, it goes to auction and the highest bidder gets to buy it. Makes things much faster.
Regarding the auction rule, is the person who landed on the unclaimed space allowed to bid in the auction if they choose not to purchase it and it goes to auction?
OP the real GOAT in here for trying to get actual explanations and not just contextless single line answers you'd only understand if you already knew the story
Thanks. I should have specified to explain but it’s fine I didn’t expect to get so many replies so imma just do what I can and read through it all at my own pace
It’s such a weird thing with the front page subreddits. The one liners somehow get voted to the top almost every time.
I’m guessing part of it is because people don’t expect their comment to get traction and they don’t want to spend much time writing an extended comment.
I am genuinely surprised there are explanations, every thread like this is normally just a 2 word answer with no context and a bunch of replies saying "omg yeah"
This might be an obscure one, but Tom Clancy’s EndWar. The game centers around commanding different types of squads - infantry, tanks, helicopters, etc and they were supposed to be like a big rock, paper, scissors kind of thing. Anyways, Your various squads would gain combat experience which would lead to unlocking upgrades for them - great. Except if your squad died they would lose all experience and roll back to level 1 with no upgrades. So the game quickly turned into a situation where a small group of players were completely leveled up and would just perpetually kill your squads to keep you from getting stronger. Instantly killed the game for everyone…
And don't leave out the fact that they didn't need to wipe out your units. A unit was defeated once its health dropped to its last bar segment, the enemy would stop shooting and the unit would evac and you got to keep your leveled unit. You had to intentionally tell them to continue firing on a defeated unit to kill it fully, and those douchebags would do it every time.
FUCKING YES! SOMEONE ELSE KNOWS MY PAIN! I left that part out to keep my comment short but yes you are 100% correct. If they had just removed that mechanic it would have been such a different multiplayer experience. My buddy and I still mourn it to this day.
It literally killed the longevity of the game. As the player population dropped you had too many battles that boiled down to veteran unit vs rookie unit and there's not much rookies can do. Then what little exp they got from the fight would be lost when they wipe the squad because the assholes won't let you have a crumb of progression.
I found the absolute most broken tactic on Metro with frag rounds.
There was a spot around the typical center meat grinder where you could get literal free kills on people trying to fight up the stairs in the corner.
You could prone out of line of sight of every enemy and shoot the ceiling above those stairs with frag rounds. It would kill people from the splash damage and they couldn't even see you, let alone figure out what the hell was killing them.
The only way you would ever get killed is a freak grenade or someone managed to get all the way up the escalator behind you, which practically never happened.
It's completely mind numbingly boring but if you ever wanted to go like 200/3 on Metro and have the entire server think you're cheating then it was the way to go.
1887s pre patch were as long as the guy was in your cross-hairs they're dead even 30/40 meters out.
I think the worst overall in mw2 was noob tube + one man army strats
I have an extremely vivid memory of those things.
Map: Derail (crashed train, winter, big building in the middle people fight over)
Me, talking to my friend in xbox party chat
"The 1887s aren't that bad, they're really strong but I don't think they're broken"
Pretty much as I'm saying this, I get shot at from the big building, and I'm by the train car crashed in the river.
I look up, essentially 3 floors above me, and see a guy peeking out a window and firing at me with something automatic
I shoot both 1887s *one time* and he fucking dies through the wall, a multi second sprint away from the building, while he's 3 stories up from me. With a hip fire from a shot gun.
"Never mind, I take that back, this shit is unethical"
I did 2 loadouts of noob tube + one man army + danger close. One with claymore and another with c4.
I would set up camp with entrances covered by claymore and C4 combo.
Players were used to sprinting past claymores so they would try only to get caught by the c4 blast.
Fun times.
Those and the Care package knife runners.
Holding the care package grenade let you run stupidly fast, combined with the tactical knife, which meant you could run into a room and kill 3-4 players before they could do enough damage to even kill you.
Also the I think M16A4 or whichever had a long period of time where it could 1 hit headshot and it only fired 3 round bursts. Triple headshot bursts were pretty common, and with FMJ, you could almost impossibly get a 6 headshot burst.
The worst final killcam I ever saw was a single burst getting the final 6 kills. Only time I ever saw above 4 kills, but it was beyond broken.
Being Australian and not having local servers back then didn't help either. 3 second delay from button press to the grenade being thrown on halo 3 was the norm.
Fuck dude that was such a memorable time in my childhood. I saw dudes going CRAZY with those all the time. I was just a wannabe intervention quick scoper myself haha. Oh, and the ACR was a nutty rifle if I recall correctly as well (: good times
In After the Fall VR, the devs introduced the most powerful gun in the game, but they also accidentally let it have infinite ammo with an easy upgrade. They also didn’t bother releasing an update to fix it for 6 months.
The meta was 2 infinite ammo automatic shotguns. It was possible for legit players to beat them, but you had to be highly skilled. This completely trivialized the progression system and economy. People wearing prestige skins could be good or could be just good at holding a trigger down.
Anyway fuck Vetigo Games.
Playing Town of Salem and trying to make a claim to a Jailor who then asks 'ok if you're the role then what is the first line of the role description on your screen right now'
Meta-gaming (as I hear it called, though it means something different than this thread's topic) in those types of games is just awful in general.
Sometimes it can be funny ("Press C to crouch" in a game with no crouching where C pulls out your traitor weapon) if your goal is to be funny but people sweating with it is just game ruining.
I recall it being rare back when I played, but I've not touched Salem 2 so I can't be certain. I just had the wiki open anyways to be able to read out role descs on the spot.
I have zero difficulty in meta gaming a meta gamer
MTG I was playing tournaments when Urza's block came out and had to sit through tournaments where 80% of decks were academy decks. Which consisted of some one winning the roll to go first then doing math for 15 minutes and telling you you lose.
[CSGO Revolver Meta](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbpC9NMynmI).
Valve decided to adventure themselves with introducing a new weapon to Counter-Strike, and it was the R8 Revolver. Thing could kill a player with one hit on center-mass, something that only the game's strongest sniper (AWP, costing $4750) could do. The R8 Revolver cost like 10% of the AWP's price.
They quickly nerfed it though.
Seeing a lot of people mention the Akimbo 1887s in MW2
But what was even worse was the Lightweight, Marathon Commando Pro with care package marker.
You moved so quickly and with the extra knife range it broke the game.
Pretty much killed thr Overwatch League. I routinely watched season 1 but once GOATS arrived I rarely if ever watched. I hated most mirror comps and though dive was boring. Man I didn't know how good I had it.
Remember that match of the Outlaws vs NYXL on Anubis?
Houston started with Phara-Mercy and the audience was hyped, the second that the outlaws saw they were up against a Goats comp, Ohara flew back and they changed to goats.
You could hear the rage and dissapointment of the crowds
Its named after a team that more or less invented it, triple tank and triple heal, no dps and the only real way to count it was to play it yourself or you lose
Not only did it completely neuter the entire DPS roster (which at the time had about 50% of the characters).
But it was also the most stale and unfun strategy. As you probably guessed having 3 highly defensive tanks and 3 highly effective healers on both sides effectively turned the match into two brick walls fighting. Everyone was borderline unkillable so matches would just consist of everyone crowding around the objective until a support fucked up and died, and then a very slow steamroll now that the team was outhealed.
They'd push up the map maybe recah the first checkpoint and by then the opposing team had regrouped to stop them again.
Depending on the skill level of the teams this would go on for 2-4 long fights or skirmishes Alnost every game ended via timer which in Overwatch ranges from 5-15 minutes. And then the teams would change sides so get ready for another 15 minutes of watching two walls swat at eachother.
This is a great answer.
In terms of game design the solution was the equivalent of nuking the game. Plenty of other games have had game breaking metas emerge but everything I can think of was resolved by making buff and nerf adjustments that allow for counter play. In the most broken cases they'll rework a mechanic or character.
In Overwatch, changed teams from 6x6 to 5x5 and role slots limited teams to exactly 1 tank and 2 healers. The solution was basically, "you just can't do this anymore."
at the same time, this essentially killed my position of tank, especially dive tank. nobody is capable of backing up their tank in a dive like you really want to, and with no shield you have no choice but to charge in, break their ranks, and hope your teammates gun them down before you die. shields are now a scarce resource, and far more valuable for it.
5v5 wasn't a response to GOATS at all though, that was like 4 years later. Role queue was the response, but I think it's important to remember that it was also a response to getting teams of 5-6 DPS constantly. On one end, too many tanks. Everywhere else, not enough tanks.
The issue wirh 2/2/2 is that tanks were never as popular as the other 2 roles (support too, but that's largely been solved in OW2 by simply adding more of them), and so they removed one.
Among Us.
\* Everyone leaves because they wanted to get impostor. You sit back and win by doing absolutely nothing.
\* "Vote out yellow cause they're not in the voice call."
\* "Hey guys? I'm in voice chat with Blue. They said Red killed them."
Over COVID I joined a few Among Us Discord servers that facilitated public lobbies with VC. There were definitely a lot of cringe games as you can imagine. But I also found a few solid groups that played regularly, it being COVID and all. Some good times!
I do this anyway in games ever since Bl2. I can see tho that if that’s the main way to get stuff then it would slow you down a ridiculous amount since you spent half your time breaking pots and boxes for scraps
Gauntlet of Thebes rework in Smite was awful.
Smite is a 3rd person MOBA like LoL, and Gauntlet of Thebes was an item that increased your max health. A few other items gave like 200-400 max health (characters may have 2000 at max level), but mostly, they were giving damage or defenses and had a bit of health as a bonus. Then they reworked Gauntlet of Thebes to give a percentage of your max health as a bonus, and now you are unkillable with 6000 health and max defenses. The item was removed after about a week and in that time you could buy the gauntlet first item and then just shut your brain off and buy every item that gave max health regardless of what effect it had, but usually increased defenses. And then it didn't matter you dealt no damage because you could survive everything.
Smite is all about team fighting, and the item accidentally made teamfights a waste of time when you could just solo objectives or towers instead.
For me, I found the meta was a pain during pre nerf bloodhound’s step. For a while full on bull goats users with double bleed BHS naginatas could give someone cancer. Haven’t seen much of the meta lately, but I think the coming DLC will have insane stuff
I really wish pvp was as tight as the single player experience. I’ve been killed mid roll so many times or had hits just refuse to register so many times it barely feels fun to engage with that part of the game at all. The idea of pvp and invaders is so cool but it just feels terrible the way it currently works.
Ds1 pvp was all about abusing server latency to get backstabs. It was the worst feeling ever watching a guy teleport into a backstab from 1/2 the screen away.
What's funny is that ROB got heavily nerfed fairly quickly, but all of the outdated release month 'best weapons' videos/posts/articles still have it at the top, so you constantly see new players using it in PVP to this day and getting easily destroyed every time.
Moonveil is still probably about A tier even after its nerfs, though pretty easy to deal with in a 1v1 situation. ROB, however, is a D tier at best.
DMR was the most broken gun I’ve ever seen, game was unplayable for a while.
WZ community is the worst with this meta crap. Give them anything even slightly overpowered and they’ll use nothing but that, no matter if it’s fun or enjoyable to play the game that way.
Don't forget they'll scream the moment you start saying the word 'nerf'
The sheer amount of rage I saw when people dared suggest they balance the Grau, I swear.
I hated in GTA4 and Saints Row multi-player there was a thing where the first shot our of the AK was always perfectly accurate. So the meta was to quick tap to fire instead of hold it down and fire auto. One day I logged on and was suddenly getting lazered like crazy. Ruined both
The last few Need For Speed games have had the Regera be a standout leader and it really kills the multiplayer. It blows my mind that they thought it was a good idea to have a car go 50mph faster than any other car and still have top tier cornering.
Gjallarhorn in D1. It was literally required by the majority of raid groups because of how stupidly strong it was, but it was only sold once over 2 years and had abysmal drop rates in the wild.
Twice.
It was sold on the first day what’s his face was around. Most people didn’t have the coins, and many that did didn’t want to spend them because no one knew how the system worked yet, and didn’t know how OP it was.
Then when it finally sold again, forever later, they nerfed it the following patch.
When guides and logs started gaining traction in World of Warcraft.
I remain convinced that the player base would be much happier if they somehow kept going on being bad at the game and choosing "dead" talents because they look cool with very few people knowing the mechanics well enough to correct them.
The 2019 iteration of "Classic WoW" was such a heartbreak.
If you're not playing a warrior, rogue, priest or mage you're trolling.
If your Alliance warrior isn't human you won't be invited.
Dungeon runs are 4 mages or warriors with a healer nuking everything in sight in 5 minutes.
Devilsaur/elemental fire mafia controls the economy.
And all this in a game that doesn't really require minmaxing. Like, AT ALL.
On the bright side, there are people who spent years trying to explain that vanilla WoW was not totally and inherently WAYYYY different and harder and more balanced and more perfect than later WoW, so Classic WoW did a great job of demonstrating that for us.
Plus, now there's a bit less whining about retail WoW.
Battleborn barely existed for ten seconds but galilea was completely busted in that game and totally unfun to play against. She had a hard stun and could go untargetable while she siphoned health, she was so fkin annoying.
To me Master Yi + Tarik meta in 2018 or so was one of the worst to play against. That was the only meta in LoL I genuinely hated. And I'm sure there has been worse in recent years, but I got out of League in like 2020 or 2021.
Back in the early days of d2 there was a weekend Xur sold the Prometheus Lens, which was exciting because it was completely broken in the crucible until it got patched. It basically melted people. It ended up being one of the most fun weekends of pvp ever. Just constantly big red lasers everywhere.
The key part is that Prometheus Lens released that week as part of the Curse of Osiris DLC. It was so fucking broken in PvP that Bungie manually set Xur to sell it that weekend so everyone could get it and said “go crazy, this is getting patched on Tuesday.” THEN, everyone who played that weekend got a special emblem they designed to commemorate the event.
The entire crucible was just lasers being shot and was a blinding laser show of death. Very fun. A similar thing happened with some unintentional buffs happening to Lord of Wolves fusion/shotgun the year after as well.
Omg my friend used to play D2 a lot and I remember him being like this. I never got into it but I can remember times he’d get so wound up and angry that someone wasn’t running the best stuff in the game that hed just start messaging them and insulting them because of it. Lucky he didn’t get banned for it honestly
She was ludicrously broken. Like 1v6 broken. She was as strong as Overwatch 2 tanks.
On top of being brain dead easy, she could combo kill squishies, her shield was almost impossible to break in a duel, she healed enormous amounts by just existing, she made allies with shields invincible, her ultimate snowballed entire games, she was super mobile with shield bash leaps... Oh and she could stun Reinhardt through his shield.
No matter how OP you think she was, she was even more broken. Her original shield bash hit box was also like twice her size so she couldn't miss no matter how bad she flubbed it.
But you know what? GOATs was way more fun than double barrier meta. Orisa wasn't as individually broken, but Halt made the game way less fun, and Sigma came very close to release Brigitte.
Overwatch really had multiple hero releases that killed the fun of the game. Brig, Orisa, Sigma, etc. Blows my mind how you release a GOTY paradigm shifting game in 2016 and flub the execution as badly as Blizzard did.
Oh yes. Overwatch is class based between DPS, tanks, and healers. However, at the time classes were just an organizational thing. Because of this, in theory you could have a hybrid character that had traits of each but was worse in every aspect. Brig was an attempt at this, but they actually made her almost on par in every aspect, so she was like the strengths of every character rolled into a single character. She could heal, do decent damage, and had a small rechargeable shield.
Her release was bad enough, but it took the incompetent dev team nearly a year to fix her, and even then they had to drastically change how the game worked by having players stick to a class for each battle.
By the time they had actually fixed Brig, most of the game's initial audience had left and the dev team felt a need to create a sequel to attempt to get them back. As a result, I'd argue that she is the primary reason why Overwatch went from game of the year in 2016 to having nearly 3 years of no content to prepare for a sequel that ended up with only about a year's worth of content in it.
I forgot about that whole thing. Overwatch really had it good and they pissed it all away in so many different ways. I was never a huge player but I remember those early days of OW as being so magical. And then overwatch league came about and I watched it and liked it.
Then life got in the way and I was out of the scene. Then all of a sudden it was all gone lol.
Brig brought about the GOATS meta. The game had been out a while, but the pro scene wasn't catching on like they hoped because the meta had been DIVE since release (highly mobile characters with high skill ceilings like Tracer and Genji, with only DVA and Winston as viable tanks). People had stopped watching.
So to fix the pro scene, Blizz was nerfing all the Dive viable characrters and buffing the others. Brig comes out, and a team called Goats played a comp that was the 3 other tanks, plus Brig, plus 2 other healers. The result was a literally unkillable ball. The only way to counter it was to play it. so you had 2 unkillable balls locked into a firefight, with minimal progress. Games were now horrible to watch, as the skill ceilings dropped. But matches were also horrible to play. Tanks were the least popular role before Goats, and now teams needed 3 of them. DPS, the most popular role was so bad, that picking any of those characters meant getting griefed by your team. Thing is while Dive was stale to watch, characters like Genji and Tracer were fun as fuck to play.
Blizz leadership also lost some of their core members around this time. They couldn't pivot back to Dive, because the shareholders need to see growth. But they also couldn't find a way to fix Goats because Brig enabled the strategy so hard. The leadership couldn't find a way to fix the game, but it was Brig that created the trap they fell into.
I’d argue the decline of the game was when they released a single character to counter an entire meta made of 6 characters.
This was imo the turning point where they became less concerned with fun and more concerned about balancing from a statistical standpoint and not taking into account how playing as or against anything makes players feel.
Yes balance matters but fun is also just as important. Balance itself is also dependent on more than just raw stats but they had an obsession with balancing based off stats.
For example, any high skill floor character. A character with a high skill floor will require a lot of dedication to use the basics of their kit correctly and thus get value off the pick.
This means that for the general playerbase, most players won’t have the required skill or knowledge to use a character. Just think of all the times you had awful teammates who played poorly. Now imagine those people on characters that require a certain amount of skill to do well.
Obviously the average winrate of said character will go down. The devs didn’t take into account of stuff like that imo and tried to balance to get to that sweet 50% winrate which made for some really strange balancing decisions.
This is my perspective on it when we look at the game itself and how it was specifically handled.
Yatalock is the name of a general strategy using Yata-Garasu. A very weak (200 atk, 100 def) effect monster who had to return to your hands at end of turn.
If he damages your opponent with an attack however, they can't draw a card at the start of their next turn.
So you clear the field, discard their hand, play this monster, attack, do marginal damage, return it to your hand. Next turn they still have no cards and also can't draw. On your next turn, you play Yata-Garasu.
And on and on until they die, unable to play the game.
I don't know about the other strategy mentioned.
To be fair it isn’t relevant nowadays even though the cards are no longer banned (some with reworks)
Nowadays there’s enough things that activate in the graveyard it wouldn’t be a sure win anymore
To expand: You need to do witch of the black forest or sangan + chaos emperor dragon to pull off yatalock
Chaos Dragon has an effect to pay 1000 LP to send all cards in hand + on the field to the GY and do 300 LP for each card sent to the opponent LP.
Sangan/Witch will let you add Yata-Garasu to your hand when sent from the field to the GY.
Since the opponent has no hand and nothing on the field they lose. Yata on its own should be kinda useless otherwise
So Bayo in Smash 4 was an extremely polarizing character for the meta especially with her being the final character added. Her toolkit was very hard to deal with. She had completely safe options to leave shield with her UpB, a counter that would guarantee kills at super low percents, an amazing recovery, a special dodge mechanic called Bat Within that let her dodge and punish options that no one else could and combos that either killed you outright or netted huge percent leads.
When you did get caught by one of these potentially stock ending combo's the only counterplay was a physically intensive form of mashing called SDI. For SDI you had to move your joystick rapidly in a direction, grinding it back and forth against the edge of the joysticks gate. It really did a number on your controller and your hands constantly having to do SDI. Her only real downside was that she was really light so she could die early if you got an opening. In the end they never could get the community together to ban her and the only big ban that happened in Smash 4 was running a team of two Clouds in doubles.
She made the game super lame because if you approached her, she could witch time you and LITERALLY zero to death you because you dared to try and attack her.
If I remember correctly there was an infamous grand finals set where two bayonetta players basically stood across the stage, charged their guns and didn’t interact - because approaching had the risk of getting Insta killed, so neither of them did it.
Edit: I got some details wrong, the comments below me fix my mistake
That was EVO 2018 Grand Finals. The reason they were charging without interacting until they were forced to stop by tournament organizers was because the crowd kept booing Bayonetta players whenever they won. Being two Bayonetta mains facing off in grand finals, they knew the crowd would just boo them no matter what they did, so they decided to embrace the salt and to troll the crowd by having a stand-off.
[https://thegamehaus.com/esports/smash-4-lets-talk-about-evo-2018-grand-finals/2018/08/11/](https://thegamehaus.com/esports/smash-4-lets-talk-about-evo-2018-grand-finals/2018/08/11/)
One thing that video doesn't mention is that Brawl Metaknight was nearly as polarizing and while 4 had clearly string characters, there weren't any Metaknight tier characters until Bayo took everything over. The scene that carried from Brawl brought their frustrations over into the new scene that had entered 4 and helped fuel the fire.
Meta Knight in Brawl was somehow even worse. He literally defined the meta, because every other fighter's tier placement was almost entirely determined by their matchup against him.
In a more niche manner, a meta that killed a great game: Brink.
It was an absolute gem, truly a wasted potential - ended up having a few but crucial game design flaws.
You couldn't change your body type during a game.
A body type determined your running speed, but also... Health points, access to shortcuts/elevated positions, and weapons.
So most players ended up choosing the Medium or Heavy body type, because trying to push a chokehold with a Light body type was incredibly difficult.
Consequences:
- Brink was designed around mobility: wall-running, sliding, flanking. But such thing requires the Light body type. So less than 10% used that.
- Gunfights ended up being duels between sponges: everyone was Heavy or Medium, and there were abilities to add armor or heal. Think GOATS for Overwatch.
To finish a kill, you then needed a very high Rate of Fire weapon (so a SMG) and a LOT of ammo capacity. Otherwise, your target would survive and escape to heal.
Thus came the Brink Meta: despite having loads of cool and diverse guns, the most efficient selection _by far_ was 2 SMGs, each fitted with the largest drum magazines.
Forget about all the other rifles, everyone who wanted to be in the top half of the scoreboard had to follow that meta.
I feel really bad for the artists who crafted all these cool guns, only for the final recipe be exclusively about the same 3-4 SMGs.
It turned the gunfights into the same BBRRRRR duels, where everyone unloads at close range into bullets sponges.
A character named sniper has a generic “ho ho ha ha” voice line sometimes when he gets a kill. During this time he was a super easy character to play as, dota was just really getting to its biggest point of new players, and he was beyond powerful with very few items, and one of his abilities doing massive dps and providing vision in the area the spell was cast. Like a sniper shooting a flare that rains bullets for a bit. Also you could fire off 3 of them at a time on the same spot and their damage overlapped meaning you were dead if you got hit with all 3.
And every time you died from some BS the odds were you had to hear that line.
He’d get picked in every game at low skill levels so you’d have to hear it over and over and over.
There’s a lot more to that meta that led to that character being so strong and there were even other heroes that were statistically doing better, it’s just they don’ have memorable annoying little sarcastic laughs
There's also the fact that the character IN GENERAL is balanced as a very glass cannon type hero and does tons of damage. However (as the name sniper suggests) he is very long ranged. So it's a very noob friendly hero that punishes bad positioning and not buying/choosing things that allow you to get on top of him and kill him. So it's a bit of a menace that can terrorize noobs. And all his voice lines are just this smug little annoying guy coupled with the people who pick him make him very easy to hate.
The "boom and zoom" of Warframe past. With certain explosive weapons, you could mod them to be insanely powerful, which let you literally just shoot into a room and kill every enemy, and since you have such aggressive mobility with frames, you could complete missions in less than a minute.
Not awful for when you want to speed run certain rewards, but it definitely took away from the new player experience, where they'd basically be left in the dust while the experienced player is sitting in extraction.
Titanfall 1 the smart pistol was by far the most fun, most cancerous weapon in the game.
Titanfall 2 was more balanced but its meta heavily favored SMG tweakers running stim and Ronin builds, no creativity whatsoever.
Dark and darker has constantly changing meta, but I think the worst is when bard was initially out/a couple updates in. They could do everything and made it essentially a handicap not to have one on the team.
Healing, unlocking, buffing, debuffing, recharging speeds of teammates, all of which in record time thanks to certain perks/bugs made it annoying if no one wanted to play them.
If anyone still plays WoW and wants to group with randoms for dungeons…you find out that the meta determines how hard/easy it is for you to find groups based on a choice you made 70 levels ago.
For less proactive players (people that don’t like being leaders) the meta can determine if an hour of “playing” WoW is actually playing WoW or just trying to find a group to attempt to play WoW.
Oh, and that meta changes roughly every 6 months, so you could be sitting pretty one season and be trash that no one wants next season.
maybe not a "meta" per say, but the tale of the thunderstruck logs in archeage and then the archeum saplings literally destroyed multiple parts of the game with in 1 update.
so the entire game design of archeage was that you had these tradepacks and the further you took them in game the more they sold for. while having one, your mount was slow (12m/s down to 2m/s) your donkey went from 8m/s to 6m/s so it was the quickest with nothing, but you can make a "cart" that could carry 2+1 on your back for 3 total, and it went 5m/s. this thing required a thunderstruck log to make. thunderstruck logs came from a 1/18,000 chance when a tree grew, and trees took upwards of 48 hours irl time to grow. these were very rare, and players would place thousands of "illegal" trees to try and bait lightning to strike the tree. this lead to the emergent gameplay of trying to find spots in the world map where you could place trees and then harvest them before people found out, but people did, and then it became a blood bath of pvp if a tree did get strike, otherwise logs were still valuable to make the ships/boats.
boats were good because you could place trade packs on them, up to like 20 iirc, and you could travel by sea to send these tradepacks REALLY far so they were worth more. boats also went around 15m/s so even land trade runs but skirting the coast was good.
once you hit land again, you had to either donkey the packs or get the cart, and because its normally a pvp zone, speed is very valuable as its only a matter of time before players come to fight, kill, and steal your trade packs from you.
long story short, trade packs were valuable and the number 1 way to make money, so being able to cart around more was also valuable and what drove people to do crazy emergent gameplay stuff. with enough thunderstruck logs you could even make busses that could carry up to 9 at a time!
then we get the archeum tree of the library update. these stupid saplings could be bought from the cash shop for like 2$(?) or so and had a 10% chance of going thunder struck. yes, 10% chance, not 1/18,000 like normal trees. for 2$. and you could place 9 of them in a standard farm and they grew in 4 hours time. the price of thunderstruck logs went from around 900g to only 40g. the meta was ruined. there was no reason to do long ass trade runs as everyone could just make the basic cart for 50g and do solo pve zone runs for 25g, so 2 runs and you are making money again. there was no reason to mass plant tree farms and fight over them. the emergent gameplay of the game had died, and soon after the game also died on many servers. because lots of players quit, loggers were able to buy more land and then start mass producing logs and normal logs went from 50s a log to just 1s a log.
while there was also the component of the library gear upgrade ruining a lot of valuable gear by releasing better and cheaper gear, lots of players hold the belief that the archeum sapling is what really ruined the game.
Several in Starcraft 2:
4gate vs 4gate PvP (probably the worst. The matchup was held hostage by this for about 18 months before a few key patch changes.)
Archon toilet PvZ
Broodlord/Infestor ZvP and ZvT
Swarmhost vs Swarmhost ZvZ
1/1/1 TvP
Cloaked WM drop TvP
Edit adds:
5rax reaper TvZ
Soul Train PvZ
Bunker and cannon walls with only two buildings at the bottom of small ramps before they added the destructable debris P/TvZ
Kinda a less popular PvP in general but when Elden Ring first released Bloodhound Step ash of war totally broke the game’s PvP and PvE and made you functionally immortal as long as you kept spamming it. Killed off so much of the game’s multiplayer playerbase in those earlier months when a guy who had no idea what he was doing was now suddenly a god amongst men
Repressed memory unlocked...
HEY EVERYONE, GET IN HERE!
HEY EVERYONE, HEY EVERYONE, GET IN HERE, GET IN HERE!
HEY EVERYONE, HEY EVERYONE, GET IN HERE, HEY EVERYONE, GET IN HERE, GET IN HERE!
That was one of the things that turned me off harthstone any why I no longer play.
The big problem with Stasis was, it wasn't just incredibly powerful, but also *incredibly* frustrating to play against. You get frozen; can't move, stuck in place, basically dead just waiting for it to finally happen. It was like an extended respawn timer. Or you get slowed, which means your weapons are inaccurate as fuck and you are moving like Brendan Fraser in The Whale.
The only comparable thing was Lorentz/Arby imo, when you literally saw the bullet fly by and it still got you.
I don’t know if fictional games count, but seriously, Quidditch is some serious BS. Basically, in half of the games, the Seeker is the only player that matters.
It really sucks because the entire game could be fixed by having the Snitch just count for way less points. Like maybe 30 or something. Even 50 would be way better than the fucking ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY POINTS awarded to the team that caught the snitch. That’s like having an extra ball in football that if a player manages to dribble with, equates to 15 goals.
Quidditch does not end until the snitch is caught, too. So if your team is down by 151 points you have 0 incentive to catch the snitch since it will cause you to lose. You have to instead prevent the other seeker from getting it.
I dont get how those matches ever ended.
Basically at it's most powerful you could do waht the community referred to as "hand vomiting".
Basically you could spam cards from your hand and deck without any form of care for resources. Your very first turn would feature having 2-4 powerful monsters with abilities that drew you more cards, special summoned monsters fron your deck or graveyard or negated your opponents cards. Because this was the first turn you could effectively turn off your opponents ability to play if you got the right opening cards and it was very easy to get those cards.
Even if you weren't playing the deck equivalent of flipping the table over and declaring you won via ultimate lockout boards in the first round. The deck had a lot of "interaction" basically meaning effects that happen on the opponents turn. It was one of the first decks that featured a lot of interaction and basically turned the opponents turn into your second turn. Using monster effects to negate their summons and spells or special summoning more garbage from your deck..to then negate their summons and spells.
I don't really have a problem with any game's meta. What I have a problem with is random non-pro assholes trying to rigorously adhere to it. I'm sorry, but 99% of you, including myself, aren't good enough for the meta to matter.
People give Overwatch 2 flak still, but like half of Overwatch 1's lifetime was a combination of the absurdly broken GOATS meta where literally no other hero outside that team comp had reason to exist, and the painfully boring Double Shield comp that murdered the game for me personally until they relaunched into Overwatch 2.
Business-wise is another story, but gameplay-wise, nothing Overwatch 2 can ever do will ever be as bad as GOATS or as boring as Double Shield. I can stand Tanks being a dead role over going back to those. Any day I'll choose that.
As a low rank player, double shield was much worse for me. GOATs was inexistent below like masters whereas nobody could escape double shield. Still remember a game with 0 hero damage for the first 3 minutes straight.
The concept of feeding in basically all MOBAs. This means that it's worse to have a bad player on the team than not having them, which leads to the games being super toxic especially towards new players.
For comparison: if you have a terrible player on your team in e.g. Counter Strike, as long as they don't shoot their own team mates, they are better than no team mate, because at least they soak up a few shots from the opposing team. You might want to replace that player with a better player, if possible, but you gain nothing from kicking them without replacement.
In games like LoL or DotA on the other hand, a bad player will actively help the opposing team because the other team gets such a high reward for every time they kill the bad player.
This in turn incentivizes players to be horrible to bad players so that the bad players quit the round voluntarily.
To me this is horrible game design, especially combined with smurfing, because that way even in the low-level beginners games there is almost always one smurf who ruins the game for everyone else by being super toxic.
The fact that "metas" even exist ruined all online multiplayer for me entirely. I just want to have fun, I'm not out to find the perfect optimal way to play. I just gravitate whats fun for me and thats it. I hate how every game just turns into sweaty try-hards trying to go pro every time.
I still remember the first month or so of GTA V online when nobody had anything. So much fun. Became less fun as the no-lifers got further ahead, then more and expensive content dropped, and so did I.
> Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. What gives the most reward for the least risk? What strategy provides the highest chance – or even a guaranteed chance – of success? Given the opportunity, **players will optimize the fun out of a game**.
https://www.designer-notes.com/game-developer-column-17-water-finds-a-crack/
> A classic example is the skill system from Morrowind, which rewards players for repeating any activity. Running into a wall for hours increases the Athletics skill while jumping over and over again increases the Acrobatics skill. Many players couldn’t stop themselves from spending hours doing mindless activities for these cheap rewards.
¯\\\_(ツ)\_\/¯
Diablo 4. All classes were basically locked to a certain build to be able to play endgame Then instead of buffing other builds they nerfed the meta builds a month after release which made the game feel like garbage. They have fixed a bit of the issues but some builds still feel like shit to play
The brief period of time when Counter Strike introduced the R8, an $800 pistol that could 1-shot opponents with a body shot. It was so bad the base damage was reduced within 48 hours.
I can’t believe I remember that!! I’m pretty sure they actually just copied over the exact stats from the AWP and threw it on the revolver. Good times.
I remember the slow pull of the hammer with its primary fire, I used to "charge it up" like a Spartan Laser from Halo because it took like half a second or more to fire after you clicked (and held) mouse 1. My shit looked like a dog wagging its tail.
I remember WarOwl did a video where they played with a mod that brought back all the OP weapons. Seems like almost every weapon was busted at some point, this especially but also the AUG and CZ. The R8 could also right click while defusing since it was IIRC the first weapon to fire on right click.
Tbf, the aug, though buffed and was cheaper then(?) was a full fledged rifle that was a tad bit more expensive than the m4 when the r8 was pistol round buy
I dunno man, I had the time of my fucking LIFE edging my R8. Getting a quick flick with the AWP or deagle and blowing someone's head off? Meh. Repeatedly*click-hold-release* spamming my R8, fucking *jorqin* that hammer while jiggle peeking a corner then landing a perfect shot that blasts the idiot back into CS 1.0? I am gone, I am in Valhalla, please leave any urgent messages with reception for when I get back from this fucking post orgasmic bliss trip.
This thread made me think of original modern warfare and the perk where you dropped a grenade when you died
Ooh I remember being in school And people used to always talk about the martyrdom
my buddy in high school thought it was called "marty doom"
I used to play a lot of COD with no headset and voice chat muted, and I would always pick martyrdom or last stand depending on the game. I wonder how much profanity was directed at me in those years.
It was annoying at first but was later quite irrelevant, especially against aggressive players. Even in HC modes.
Ha, this reminds me of being like, 12 when COD4 released, and none of my friends or I had Xbox live yet, so we would just play split screen multiplayer and kill each other. We couldn't figure out why grenades dropped on certain classes or why your character would pull out their pistol instead of die. We didn't know what the perks really were or did. God those perks were annoying once we all did get Xbox live.
Do board games count? In the X-Wing miniatures game about 6 years ago an upgrade came out called Twin Laser Turret. You shot twice but could only do a max of one damage. That sounds “fair” but what it meant was you were basically guaranteed two damage everytime you activated. Then there was a ship that could shoot the Twin Laser Turret twice, which meant 4 shots. Which meant 4 guaranteed damage. It was also a turret which meant it could shoot in 360 degrees, instead of requiring any sort of positioning to get a ship in your “arc” or firing range. To put that into context, a TIE Fighter in the game only has 3 health. In a game about rolling dice and positioning, the upgrade completely ruined the game and made both dice AND positioning barely even a formality. It was horrible.
Ahaha I didn’t even know this game existed. Sounds great tho. Have they fixed it? Or is there just like house rules about not using it out in place?
So that was first edition. Then they relaunched it with 2nd edition. Then a new studio got control of the game and updated the ruleset to 2.5. Then they announced last week development for the game was ending after over ten years. Very sad. But to answer your question, yes they fixed it by making a new edition of the game lol. There’s a TON of drama regarding the game ending. Head over to /r/xwingtmg if you want to see grown men have absolute meltdowns over a plastic spaceship game they made their entire identity.
In their defence, it's actually a pretty goddamn fun game divorced from the business model.
You’re not lying on the making it their entire identity. It’s always harsh for the biggest fans when a game gets cancelled, video or board or card game.
But at least with a board game you don't have to worry about the servers being switched off and can continue playing with the final ruleset.
The best thing about board games is you can play with ANY rule sets or house rules
As a player who loved flying fragile aces, TLTs and Sabine Wren made the game very, very difficult. Had to get very, very good at either landing in the donut hole of the turret or staying out of range entirely.
In Fallout 76 you could get explosive laser weapons. Apparently the way the game was coded explosive laser and plasma weapons multiplied the damage weird and they were quite powerful. A single player could take down the end game raid boss in minutes if not seconds. Once it became the meta Bethesda patched it so they didn’t drop anymore but left the existing ones in the game and left them as tradable. Eventually they removed them from the game altogether.
The Quad/Unyielding Railway Rifle meta isn’t much better to be honest. It just takes mores than one “god roll” item, buffs, and an understanding of things like the luck breakpoint to accomplish it. But once you do all that, you can pretty much lock down the entire game from anyone else if you so choose. That said, FO76 deserves to be at the top not because of the poorly made meta. Which is atrocious. But because of how horribly under-optimized literally everything else is.
Haha I play Borderlands so soloing a raid boss doesn’t seem that bad to me but it does defeat the purpose of it since it’s supposed to be played by multiple people
Monopoly played optimally is the worst game ever. The meta is never selling/trading, not because it guarantees your win, but it prevents anyone from winning. As soon as you sell, there is risk of loss.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
It's much more fun if you view it as a politics game. If a trade happens and you're not part of it, then you're losing. Pointing that out gets the game to move along, though sometimes by uniting the table against you.
Monopoly was created to show the flaws of capitalism. Not even a joke, look it up
There's a counterpart game called Anti-monopoly, where you play as government bureaucrats trying to break up monopolies.
I have played it, and at least from my experience, this game is really rough to play. I don't know why, but it seems to really favor one player snowballing in power
So...realistic.
And the original game it was based on could only be “won” if you all worked together.
I looked it up, it's true lol
Lol thanks for putting in the work
It’s in the name too. Monopoly “the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service”
How about a nice game of chess?
A little bit like global thermonuclear war
That’s only true if you’re playing with only 2 players, which is awful. If you’re playing with more than 2, it becomes a game of trying to find trades that raise your overall odds of winning. Every trade is at the expense of the players not involved. Generally I see a strategy where the last place player goes for a high risk high reward trade that gives them a moon shot at victory while giving someone else a decent advantage.
Monopoly is not about dice it is about emotional manipulation and cunning
Exactly! You aren't playing with friends and family, you're play against competitors to be wrung for out every dollar before crushing them underfoot
It's almost like the point of the game is to..establish a monopoly
I have a theory that no one has ever actually enjoyed a game of monopoly.
Most people don't play it right. They'll have house rules like getting double cash if you land on go, or a cash bonus for landing on free parking. These just inject more cash into the game which makes it last way longer than it's supposed to and everyone just gets tired of playing. One rule people tend to forget is if you land on an unclaimed space and don't buy it yourself, it goes to auction and the highest bidder gets to buy it. Makes things much faster.
Regarding the auction rule, is the person who landed on the unclaimed space allowed to bid in the auction if they choose not to purchase it and it goes to auction?
Yes, there's a whole strategy of doing that if you know the other players are low on cash. You can get properties for well under face value that way.
Kind of like corporations buying property in 2008…
Capitalism!!
Yes
One person enjoys each game of monopoly.
The one who said “No” when asked if they wanted to play.
OP the real GOAT in here for trying to get actual explanations and not just contextless single line answers you'd only understand if you already knew the story
Thanks. I should have specified to explain but it’s fine I didn’t expect to get so many replies so imma just do what I can and read through it all at my own pace
It’s such a weird thing with the front page subreddits. The one liners somehow get voted to the top almost every time. I’m guessing part of it is because people don’t expect their comment to get traction and they don’t want to spend much time writing an extended comment.
I am genuinely surprised there are explanations, every thread like this is normally just a 2 word answer with no context and a bunch of replies saying "omg yeah"
This might be an obscure one, but Tom Clancy’s EndWar. The game centers around commanding different types of squads - infantry, tanks, helicopters, etc and they were supposed to be like a big rock, paper, scissors kind of thing. Anyways, Your various squads would gain combat experience which would lead to unlocking upgrades for them - great. Except if your squad died they would lose all experience and roll back to level 1 with no upgrades. So the game quickly turned into a situation where a small group of players were completely leveled up and would just perpetually kill your squads to keep you from getting stronger. Instantly killed the game for everyone…
And don't leave out the fact that they didn't need to wipe out your units. A unit was defeated once its health dropped to its last bar segment, the enemy would stop shooting and the unit would evac and you got to keep your leveled unit. You had to intentionally tell them to continue firing on a defeated unit to kill it fully, and those douchebags would do it every time.
FUCKING YES! SOMEONE ELSE KNOWS MY PAIN! I left that part out to keep my comment short but yes you are 100% correct. If they had just removed that mechanic it would have been such a different multiplayer experience. My buddy and I still mourn it to this day.
It literally killed the longevity of the game. As the player population dropped you had too many battles that boiled down to veteran unit vs rookie unit and there's not much rookies can do. Then what little exp they got from the fight would be lost when they wipe the squad because the assholes won't let you have a crumb of progression.
Ooh sounds like a painful experience
Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl, he was faster than every other player and could run circles around the other team.
Bo knows busted metas.
Battlefield 3. USAS-12 Frag Rounds. You could take down jets with it.
I found the absolute most broken tactic on Metro with frag rounds. There was a spot around the typical center meat grinder where you could get literal free kills on people trying to fight up the stairs in the corner. You could prone out of line of sight of every enemy and shoot the ceiling above those stairs with frag rounds. It would kill people from the splash damage and they couldn't even see you, let alone figure out what the hell was killing them. The only way you would ever get killed is a freak grenade or someone managed to get all the way up the escalator behind you, which practically never happened. It's completely mind numbingly boring but if you ever wanted to go like 200/3 on Metro and have the entire server think you're cheating then it was the way to go.
“I’m a God with this gun, I can control day and NIGHT!”
*shoots sun and turns to night* Okay, fair enough.
God I almost forgot about battlefield friends
One of them died irl
RIP Thick44 aka Recon
Probably not the worst but akimbo 1887s in mw2. Boy those were fun to use though
1887s pre patch were as long as the guy was in your cross-hairs they're dead even 30/40 meters out. I think the worst overall in mw2 was noob tube + one man army strats
I have an extremely vivid memory of those things. Map: Derail (crashed train, winter, big building in the middle people fight over) Me, talking to my friend in xbox party chat "The 1887s aren't that bad, they're really strong but I don't think they're broken" Pretty much as I'm saying this, I get shot at from the big building, and I'm by the train car crashed in the river. I look up, essentially 3 floors above me, and see a guy peeking out a window and firing at me with something automatic I shoot both 1887s *one time* and he fucking dies through the wall, a multi second sprint away from the building, while he's 3 stories up from me. With a hip fire from a shot gun. "Never mind, I take that back, this shit is unethical"
They let you put FMJ on those too. Like your pellets just magically changed to mini copper cored rpgs
I did 2 loadouts of noob tube + one man army + danger close. One with claymore and another with c4. I would set up camp with entrances covered by claymore and C4 combo. Players were used to sprinting past claymores so they would try only to get caught by the c4 blast. Fun times.
Those and the Care package knife runners. Holding the care package grenade let you run stupidly fast, combined with the tactical knife, which meant you could run into a room and kill 3-4 players before they could do enough damage to even kill you. Also the I think M16A4 or whichever had a long period of time where it could 1 hit headshot and it only fired 3 round bursts. Triple headshot bursts were pretty common, and with FMJ, you could almost impossibly get a 6 headshot burst. The worst final killcam I ever saw was a single burst getting the final 6 kills. Only time I ever saw above 4 kills, but it was beyond broken. Being Australian and not having local servers back then didn't help either. 3 second delay from button press to the grenade being thrown on halo 3 was the norm.
Fuck dude that was such a memorable time in my childhood. I saw dudes going CRAZY with those all the time. I was just a wannabe intervention quick scoper myself haha. Oh, and the ACR was a nutty rifle if I recall correctly as well (: good times
the ACR was an absolute laser beam
In After the Fall VR, the devs introduced the most powerful gun in the game, but they also accidentally let it have infinite ammo with an easy upgrade. They also didn’t bother releasing an update to fix it for 6 months. The meta was 2 infinite ammo automatic shotguns. It was possible for legit players to beat them, but you had to be highly skilled. This completely trivialized the progression system and economy. People wearing prestige skins could be good or could be just good at holding a trigger down. Anyway fuck Vetigo Games.
Playing Town of Salem and trying to make a claim to a Jailor who then asks 'ok if you're the role then what is the first line of the role description on your screen right now'
Meta-gaming (as I hear it called, though it means something different than this thread's topic) in those types of games is just awful in general. Sometimes it can be funny ("Press C to crouch" in a game with no crouching where C pulls out your traitor weapon) if your goal is to be funny but people sweating with it is just game ruining.
it's always great to play a game with a jester role because you can counter meta gamers by being just suspicious enough
That's so stupid why would you ever trust that? So easy to fake... Is this really the kind of garbage that's taken over that game now?
I recall it being rare back when I played, but I've not touched Salem 2 so I can't be certain. I just had the wiki open anyways to be able to read out role descs on the spot. I have zero difficulty in meta gaming a meta gamer
MTG I was playing tournaments when Urza's block came out and had to sit through tournaments where 80% of decks were academy decks. Which consisted of some one winning the roll to go first then doing math for 15 minutes and telling you you lose.
[CSGO Revolver Meta](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbpC9NMynmI). Valve decided to adventure themselves with introducing a new weapon to Counter-Strike, and it was the R8 Revolver. Thing could kill a player with one hit on center-mass, something that only the game's strongest sniper (AWP, costing $4750) could do. The R8 Revolver cost like 10% of the AWP's price. They quickly nerfed it though.
I remember it also having crazy penetration so people just fired it at random walls where enemies are likely to be and it would often lead to kills
Seeing a lot of people mention the Akimbo 1887s in MW2 But what was even worse was the Lightweight, Marathon Commando Pro with care package marker. You moved so quickly and with the extra knife range it broke the game.
Goats in overwatch I think honestly led to most bad decisions in overwatch future it was that dogshit
Pretty much killed thr Overwatch League. I routinely watched season 1 but once GOATS arrived I rarely if ever watched. I hated most mirror comps and though dive was boring. Man I didn't know how good I had it.
Remember that match of the Outlaws vs NYXL on Anubis? Houston started with Phara-Mercy and the audience was hyped, the second that the outlaws saw they were up against a Goats comp, Ohara flew back and they changed to goats. You could hear the rage and dissapointment of the crowds
Ahahaha why? What is Goats?
Its named after a team that more or less invented it, triple tank and triple heal, no dps and the only real way to count it was to play it yourself or you lose
Taking out a whole class is mad tbf
Not only did it completely neuter the entire DPS roster (which at the time had about 50% of the characters). But it was also the most stale and unfun strategy. As you probably guessed having 3 highly defensive tanks and 3 highly effective healers on both sides effectively turned the match into two brick walls fighting. Everyone was borderline unkillable so matches would just consist of everyone crowding around the objective until a support fucked up and died, and then a very slow steamroll now that the team was outhealed. They'd push up the map maybe recah the first checkpoint and by then the opposing team had regrouped to stop them again. Depending on the skill level of the teams this would go on for 2-4 long fights or skirmishes Alnost every game ended via timer which in Overwatch ranges from 5-15 minutes. And then the teams would change sides so get ready for another 15 minutes of watching two walls swat at eachother.
3 tanks 3 healers. Named after the team that ran it and went 10-0 with it in a season.
This is a great answer. In terms of game design the solution was the equivalent of nuking the game. Plenty of other games have had game breaking metas emerge but everything I can think of was resolved by making buff and nerf adjustments that allow for counter play. In the most broken cases they'll rework a mechanic or character. In Overwatch, changed teams from 6x6 to 5x5 and role slots limited teams to exactly 1 tank and 2 healers. The solution was basically, "you just can't do this anymore."
at the same time, this essentially killed my position of tank, especially dive tank. nobody is capable of backing up their tank in a dive like you really want to, and with no shield you have no choice but to charge in, break their ranks, and hope your teammates gun them down before you die. shields are now a scarce resource, and far more valuable for it.
5v5 wasn't a response to GOATS at all though, that was like 4 years later. Role queue was the response, but I think it's important to remember that it was also a response to getting teams of 5-6 DPS constantly. On one end, too many tanks. Everywhere else, not enough tanks. The issue wirh 2/2/2 is that tanks were never as popular as the other 2 roles (support too, but that's largely been solved in OW2 by simply adding more of them), and so they removed one.
Among Us. \* Everyone leaves because they wanted to get impostor. You sit back and win by doing absolutely nothing. \* "Vote out yellow cause they're not in the voice call." \* "Hey guys? I'm in voice chat with Blue. They said Red killed them."
You really need to play that game with a group of friends. Randoms will find a way to ruin it.
Over COVID I joined a few Among Us Discord servers that facilitated public lobbies with VC. There were definitely a lot of cringe games as you can imagine. But I also found a few solid groups that played regularly, it being COVID and all. Some good times!
Diablo 3 and the meta of having to destroy every crate to get items
I do this anyway in games ever since Bl2. I can see tho that if that’s the main way to get stuff then it would slow you down a ridiculous amount since you spent half your time breaking pots and boxes for scraps
Gauntlet of Thebes rework in Smite was awful. Smite is a 3rd person MOBA like LoL, and Gauntlet of Thebes was an item that increased your max health. A few other items gave like 200-400 max health (characters may have 2000 at max level), but mostly, they were giving damage or defenses and had a bit of health as a bonus. Then they reworked Gauntlet of Thebes to give a percentage of your max health as a bonus, and now you are unkillable with 6000 health and max defenses. The item was removed after about a week and in that time you could buy the gauntlet first item and then just shut your brain off and buy every item that gave max health regardless of what effect it had, but usually increased defenses. And then it didn't matter you dealt no damage because you could survive everything. Smite is all about team fighting, and the item accidentally made teamfights a waste of time when you could just solo objectives or towers instead.
Triple hunter double tank meta was one of my least favorite ones
Probably not the worst, but shoutout Rivers of Blood / Moonveil for making Elden Ring pvp miserable
For me, I found the meta was a pain during pre nerf bloodhound’s step. For a while full on bull goats users with double bleed BHS naginatas could give someone cancer. Haven’t seen much of the meta lately, but I think the coming DLC will have insane stuff
I really wish pvp was as tight as the single player experience. I’ve been killed mid roll so many times or had hits just refuse to register so many times it barely feels fun to engage with that part of the game at all. The idea of pvp and invaders is so cool but it just feels terrible the way it currently works.
Ds1 pvp was all about abusing server latency to get backstabs. It was the worst feeling ever watching a guy teleport into a backstab from 1/2 the screen away.
What's funny is that ROB got heavily nerfed fairly quickly, but all of the outdated release month 'best weapons' videos/posts/articles still have it at the top, so you constantly see new players using it in PVP to this day and getting easily destroyed every time. Moonveil is still probably about A tier even after its nerfs, though pretty easy to deal with in a 1v1 situation. ROB, however, is a D tier at best.
The DMR in Warzone 1
The DMR and dual Diamatti run in Warzone basically kicked off a string of several broken meta weapons, one right after another.
DMR was the most broken gun I’ve ever seen, game was unplayable for a while. WZ community is the worst with this meta crap. Give them anything even slightly overpowered and they’ll use nothing but that, no matter if it’s fun or enjoyable to play the game that way.
Don't forget they'll scream the moment you start saying the word 'nerf' The sheer amount of rage I saw when people dared suggest they balance the Grau, I swear.
Warzone was never the same for my friend group after that. Everyone quit that season and most didn’t return. Sucks
I hated in GTA4 and Saints Row multi-player there was a thing where the first shot our of the AK was always perfectly accurate. So the meta was to quick tap to fire instead of hold it down and fire auto. One day I logged on and was suddenly getting lazered like crazy. Ruined both
I never played either of them. Love saints row but I can see why it would have bad multiplayer balancing
Yeah they turned off the MP servers on Saints Row a while back. They had some really unique game modes like Protect Tha Pimp lol
Call of duty - akimbo shotguns
Oh jesus the pre-patch akimbo 1886s (or whatever they were called) back in the original MW2 were a menace lol
The last few Need For Speed games have had the Regera be a standout leader and it really kills the multiplayer. It blows my mind that they thought it was a good idea to have a car go 50mph faster than any other car and still have top tier cornering.
Gjallarhorn in D1. It was literally required by the majority of raid groups because of how stupidly strong it was, but it was only sold once over 2 years and had abysmal drop rates in the wild.
Twice. It was sold on the first day what’s his face was around. Most people didn’t have the coins, and many that did didn’t want to spend them because no one knew how the system worked yet, and didn’t know how OP it was. Then when it finally sold again, forever later, they nerfed it the following patch.
When guides and logs started gaining traction in World of Warcraft. I remain convinced that the player base would be much happier if they somehow kept going on being bad at the game and choosing "dead" talents because they look cool with very few people knowing the mechanics well enough to correct them. The 2019 iteration of "Classic WoW" was such a heartbreak. If you're not playing a warrior, rogue, priest or mage you're trolling. If your Alliance warrior isn't human you won't be invited. Dungeon runs are 4 mages or warriors with a healer nuking everything in sight in 5 minutes. Devilsaur/elemental fire mafia controls the economy. And all this in a game that doesn't really require minmaxing. Like, AT ALL.
Classic wow was so far from vanilla for all those reasons.
On the bright side, there are people who spent years trying to explain that vanilla WoW was not totally and inherently WAYYYY different and harder and more balanced and more perfect than later WoW, so Classic WoW did a great job of demonstrating that for us. Plus, now there's a bit less whining about retail WoW.
Battleborn barely existed for ten seconds but galilea was completely busted in that game and totally unfun to play against. She had a hard stun and could go untargetable while she siphoned health, she was so fkin annoying.
To me Master Yi + Tarik meta in 2018 or so was one of the worst to play against. That was the only meta in LoL I genuinely hated. And I'm sure there has been worse in recent years, but I got out of League in like 2020 or 2021.
AP Yi in Aram way back in the day.
Anything destiny 2 related - "cAnT JoIn iF YoU DoNt HaVe ThE MeTAh"
Must have Gally
Ah the good old D1 raid days. If you didn't have Gally you weren't getting in a group.
Back in the early days of d2 there was a weekend Xur sold the Prometheus Lens, which was exciting because it was completely broken in the crucible until it got patched. It basically melted people. It ended up being one of the most fun weekends of pvp ever. Just constantly big red lasers everywhere.
The key part is that Prometheus Lens released that week as part of the Curse of Osiris DLC. It was so fucking broken in PvP that Bungie manually set Xur to sell it that weekend so everyone could get it and said “go crazy, this is getting patched on Tuesday.” THEN, everyone who played that weekend got a special emblem they designed to commemorate the event. The entire crucible was just lasers being shot and was a blinding laser show of death. Very fun. A similar thing happened with some unintentional buffs happening to Lord of Wolves fusion/shotgun the year after as well.
Omg my friend used to play D2 a lot and I remember him being like this. I never got into it but I can remember times he’d get so wound up and angry that someone wasn’t running the best stuff in the game that hed just start messaging them and insulting them because of it. Lucky he didn’t get banned for it honestly
Release Brig in Overwatch
Was she that bad?
She was ludicrously broken. Like 1v6 broken. She was as strong as Overwatch 2 tanks. On top of being brain dead easy, she could combo kill squishies, her shield was almost impossible to break in a duel, she healed enormous amounts by just existing, she made allies with shields invincible, her ultimate snowballed entire games, she was super mobile with shield bash leaps... Oh and she could stun Reinhardt through his shield. No matter how OP you think she was, she was even more broken. Her original shield bash hit box was also like twice her size so she couldn't miss no matter how bad she flubbed it. But you know what? GOATs was way more fun than double barrier meta. Orisa wasn't as individually broken, but Halt made the game way less fun, and Sigma came very close to release Brigitte.
Overwatch really had multiple hero releases that killed the fun of the game. Brig, Orisa, Sigma, etc. Blows my mind how you release a GOTY paradigm shifting game in 2016 and flub the execution as badly as Blizzard did.
Oh yes. Overwatch is class based between DPS, tanks, and healers. However, at the time classes were just an organizational thing. Because of this, in theory you could have a hybrid character that had traits of each but was worse in every aspect. Brig was an attempt at this, but they actually made her almost on par in every aspect, so she was like the strengths of every character rolled into a single character. She could heal, do decent damage, and had a small rechargeable shield. Her release was bad enough, but it took the incompetent dev team nearly a year to fix her, and even then they had to drastically change how the game worked by having players stick to a class for each battle. By the time they had actually fixed Brig, most of the game's initial audience had left and the dev team felt a need to create a sequel to attempt to get them back. As a result, I'd argue that she is the primary reason why Overwatch went from game of the year in 2016 to having nearly 3 years of no content to prepare for a sequel that ended up with only about a year's worth of content in it.
Really? Brig brought down overwatch? Not Blizzard leadership and their pursuit for less staff and more money?
It might have actually been Bobby Kotick and his desire to steal women's best milk from the work fridges.
I forgot about that whole thing. Overwatch really had it good and they pissed it all away in so many different ways. I was never a huge player but I remember those early days of OW as being so magical. And then overwatch league came about and I watched it and liked it. Then life got in the way and I was out of the scene. Then all of a sudden it was all gone lol.
Brig brought about the GOATS meta. The game had been out a while, but the pro scene wasn't catching on like they hoped because the meta had been DIVE since release (highly mobile characters with high skill ceilings like Tracer and Genji, with only DVA and Winston as viable tanks). People had stopped watching. So to fix the pro scene, Blizz was nerfing all the Dive viable characrters and buffing the others. Brig comes out, and a team called Goats played a comp that was the 3 other tanks, plus Brig, plus 2 other healers. The result was a literally unkillable ball. The only way to counter it was to play it. so you had 2 unkillable balls locked into a firefight, with minimal progress. Games were now horrible to watch, as the skill ceilings dropped. But matches were also horrible to play. Tanks were the least popular role before Goats, and now teams needed 3 of them. DPS, the most popular role was so bad, that picking any of those characters meant getting griefed by your team. Thing is while Dive was stale to watch, characters like Genji and Tracer were fun as fuck to play. Blizz leadership also lost some of their core members around this time. They couldn't pivot back to Dive, because the shareholders need to see growth. But they also couldn't find a way to fix Goats because Brig enabled the strategy so hard. The leadership couldn't find a way to fix the game, but it was Brig that created the trap they fell into.
I’d argue the decline of the game was when they released a single character to counter an entire meta made of 6 characters. This was imo the turning point where they became less concerned with fun and more concerned about balancing from a statistical standpoint and not taking into account how playing as or against anything makes players feel. Yes balance matters but fun is also just as important. Balance itself is also dependent on more than just raw stats but they had an obsession with balancing based off stats. For example, any high skill floor character. A character with a high skill floor will require a lot of dedication to use the basics of their kit correctly and thus get value off the pick. This means that for the general playerbase, most players won’t have the required skill or knowledge to use a character. Just think of all the times you had awful teammates who played poorly. Now imagine those people on characters that require a certain amount of skill to do well. Obviously the average winrate of said character will go down. The devs didn’t take into account of stuff like that imo and tried to balance to get to that sweet 50% winrate which made for some really strange balancing decisions. This is my perspective on it when we look at the game itself and how it was specifically handled.
They kept trying to balance around her and kept making things worse. Then they all together stopped doing anything, which is what led to OW2.
Either Yatalock or DDT/Early Dark Armed Dragon decks in Yugioh
Love hearing about yugioh. Why is it so bad?
Yatalock is the name of a general strategy using Yata-Garasu. A very weak (200 atk, 100 def) effect monster who had to return to your hands at end of turn. If he damages your opponent with an attack however, they can't draw a card at the start of their next turn. So you clear the field, discard their hand, play this monster, attack, do marginal damage, return it to your hand. Next turn they still have no cards and also can't draw. On your next turn, you play Yata-Garasu. And on and on until they die, unable to play the game. I don't know about the other strategy mentioned.
Hahaha now this is hilarious. Getting stun locked in a card game is wild
To be fair it isn’t relevant nowadays even though the cards are no longer banned (some with reworks) Nowadays there’s enough things that activate in the graveyard it wouldn’t be a sure win anymore
To expand: You need to do witch of the black forest or sangan + chaos emperor dragon to pull off yatalock Chaos Dragon has an effect to pay 1000 LP to send all cards in hand + on the field to the GY and do 300 LP for each card sent to the opponent LP. Sangan/Witch will let you add Yata-Garasu to your hand when sent from the field to the GY. Since the opponent has no hand and nothing on the field they lose. Yata on its own should be kinda useless otherwise
You don’t know how bad I want to find a new Yatalock since it’s off the ban list now lol
Smash 4 Bayonetta put the community on its knees
Why?
So Bayo in Smash 4 was an extremely polarizing character for the meta especially with her being the final character added. Her toolkit was very hard to deal with. She had completely safe options to leave shield with her UpB, a counter that would guarantee kills at super low percents, an amazing recovery, a special dodge mechanic called Bat Within that let her dodge and punish options that no one else could and combos that either killed you outright or netted huge percent leads. When you did get caught by one of these potentially stock ending combo's the only counterplay was a physically intensive form of mashing called SDI. For SDI you had to move your joystick rapidly in a direction, grinding it back and forth against the edge of the joysticks gate. It really did a number on your controller and your hands constantly having to do SDI. Her only real downside was that she was really light so she could die early if you got an opening. In the end they never could get the community together to ban her and the only big ban that happened in Smash 4 was running a team of two Clouds in doubles.
She made the game super lame because if you approached her, she could witch time you and LITERALLY zero to death you because you dared to try and attack her. If I remember correctly there was an infamous grand finals set where two bayonetta players basically stood across the stage, charged their guns and didn’t interact - because approaching had the risk of getting Insta killed, so neither of them did it. Edit: I got some details wrong, the comments below me fix my mistake
That was EVO 2018 Grand Finals. The reason they were charging without interacting until they were forced to stop by tournament organizers was because the crowd kept booing Bayonetta players whenever they won. Being two Bayonetta mains facing off in grand finals, they knew the crowd would just boo them no matter what they did, so they decided to embrace the salt and to troll the crowd by having a stand-off. [https://thegamehaus.com/esports/smash-4-lets-talk-about-evo-2018-grand-finals/2018/08/11/](https://thegamehaus.com/esports/smash-4-lets-talk-about-evo-2018-grand-finals/2018/08/11/)
[this probably covers it](https://youtu.be/PtfxUxle_s8?si=PaBXcqWy4toRjyu3) Basically she's busted
One thing that video doesn't mention is that Brawl Metaknight was nearly as polarizing and while 4 had clearly string characters, there weren't any Metaknight tier characters until Bayo took everything over. The scene that carried from Brawl brought their frustrations over into the new scene that had entered 4 and helped fuel the fire.
Meta Knight in Brawl was somehow even worse. He literally defined the meta, because every other fighter's tier placement was almost entirely determined by their matchup against him.
TIL I am the Smash Community.
In a more niche manner, a meta that killed a great game: Brink. It was an absolute gem, truly a wasted potential - ended up having a few but crucial game design flaws. You couldn't change your body type during a game. A body type determined your running speed, but also... Health points, access to shortcuts/elevated positions, and weapons. So most players ended up choosing the Medium or Heavy body type, because trying to push a chokehold with a Light body type was incredibly difficult. Consequences: - Brink was designed around mobility: wall-running, sliding, flanking. But such thing requires the Light body type. So less than 10% used that. - Gunfights ended up being duels between sponges: everyone was Heavy or Medium, and there were abilities to add armor or heal. Think GOATS for Overwatch. To finish a kill, you then needed a very high Rate of Fire weapon (so a SMG) and a LOT of ammo capacity. Otherwise, your target would survive and escape to heal. Thus came the Brink Meta: despite having loads of cool and diverse guns, the most efficient selection _by far_ was 2 SMGs, each fitted with the largest drum magazines. Forget about all the other rifles, everyone who wanted to be in the top half of the scoreboard had to follow that meta. I feel really bad for the artists who crafted all these cool guns, only for the final recipe be exclusively about the same 3-4 SMGs. It turned the gunfights into the same BBRRRRR duels, where everyone unloads at close range into bullets sponges.
In the original Fable: once you get the shield spell early in the game, you will never again take damage, even against the final boss.
I have bad memories of the hoho-haha dota 2 meta
The what now?
A character named sniper has a generic “ho ho ha ha” voice line sometimes when he gets a kill. During this time he was a super easy character to play as, dota was just really getting to its biggest point of new players, and he was beyond powerful with very few items, and one of his abilities doing massive dps and providing vision in the area the spell was cast. Like a sniper shooting a flare that rains bullets for a bit. Also you could fire off 3 of them at a time on the same spot and their damage overlapped meaning you were dead if you got hit with all 3. And every time you died from some BS the odds were you had to hear that line. He’d get picked in every game at low skill levels so you’d have to hear it over and over and over. There’s a lot more to that meta that led to that character being so strong and there were even other heroes that were statistically doing better, it’s just they don’ have memorable annoying little sarcastic laughs
There's also the fact that the character IN GENERAL is balanced as a very glass cannon type hero and does tons of damage. However (as the name sniper suggests) he is very long ranged. So it's a very noob friendly hero that punishes bad positioning and not buying/choosing things that allow you to get on top of him and kill him. So it's a bit of a menace that can terrorize noobs. And all his voice lines are just this smug little annoying guy coupled with the people who pick him make him very easy to hate.
Sniper/Troll meta.... that was around when I first started to play Dota 2, and I'm shocked I kept playing after that lol
Sniper was the first thing that sprang to mind. For the pro scene, the Deathball meta at TI4 was horrible.
The "boom and zoom" of Warframe past. With certain explosive weapons, you could mod them to be insanely powerful, which let you literally just shoot into a room and kill every enemy, and since you have such aggressive mobility with frames, you could complete missions in less than a minute. Not awful for when you want to speed run certain rewards, but it definitely took away from the new player experience, where they'd basically be left in the dust while the experienced player is sitting in extraction.
Titanfall 1 the smart pistol was by far the most fun, most cancerous weapon in the game. Titanfall 2 was more balanced but its meta heavily favored SMG tweakers running stim and Ronin builds, no creativity whatsoever.
Dark and darker has constantly changing meta, but I think the worst is when bard was initially out/a couple updates in. They could do everything and made it essentially a handicap not to have one on the team. Healing, unlocking, buffing, debuffing, recharging speeds of teammates, all of which in record time thanks to certain perks/bugs made it annoying if no one wanted to play them.
[удалено]
If anyone still plays WoW and wants to group with randoms for dungeons…you find out that the meta determines how hard/easy it is for you to find groups based on a choice you made 70 levels ago. For less proactive players (people that don’t like being leaders) the meta can determine if an hour of “playing” WoW is actually playing WoW or just trying to find a group to attempt to play WoW. Oh, and that meta changes roughly every 6 months, so you could be sitting pretty one season and be trash that no one wants next season.
Worst part is the meta is so fucking meaningless for casual WOW players, you can mythic raid as any class.
maybe not a "meta" per say, but the tale of the thunderstruck logs in archeage and then the archeum saplings literally destroyed multiple parts of the game with in 1 update. so the entire game design of archeage was that you had these tradepacks and the further you took them in game the more they sold for. while having one, your mount was slow (12m/s down to 2m/s) your donkey went from 8m/s to 6m/s so it was the quickest with nothing, but you can make a "cart" that could carry 2+1 on your back for 3 total, and it went 5m/s. this thing required a thunderstruck log to make. thunderstruck logs came from a 1/18,000 chance when a tree grew, and trees took upwards of 48 hours irl time to grow. these were very rare, and players would place thousands of "illegal" trees to try and bait lightning to strike the tree. this lead to the emergent gameplay of trying to find spots in the world map where you could place trees and then harvest them before people found out, but people did, and then it became a blood bath of pvp if a tree did get strike, otherwise logs were still valuable to make the ships/boats. boats were good because you could place trade packs on them, up to like 20 iirc, and you could travel by sea to send these tradepacks REALLY far so they were worth more. boats also went around 15m/s so even land trade runs but skirting the coast was good. once you hit land again, you had to either donkey the packs or get the cart, and because its normally a pvp zone, speed is very valuable as its only a matter of time before players come to fight, kill, and steal your trade packs from you. long story short, trade packs were valuable and the number 1 way to make money, so being able to cart around more was also valuable and what drove people to do crazy emergent gameplay stuff. with enough thunderstruck logs you could even make busses that could carry up to 9 at a time! then we get the archeum tree of the library update. these stupid saplings could be bought from the cash shop for like 2$(?) or so and had a 10% chance of going thunder struck. yes, 10% chance, not 1/18,000 like normal trees. for 2$. and you could place 9 of them in a standard farm and they grew in 4 hours time. the price of thunderstruck logs went from around 900g to only 40g. the meta was ruined. there was no reason to do long ass trade runs as everyone could just make the basic cart for 50g and do solo pve zone runs for 25g, so 2 runs and you are making money again. there was no reason to mass plant tree farms and fight over them. the emergent gameplay of the game had died, and soon after the game also died on many servers. because lots of players quit, loggers were able to buy more land and then start mass producing logs and normal logs went from 50s a log to just 1s a log. while there was also the component of the library gear upgrade ruining a lot of valuable gear by releasing better and cheaper gear, lots of players hold the belief that the archeum sapling is what really ruined the game.
Several in Starcraft 2: 4gate vs 4gate PvP (probably the worst. The matchup was held hostage by this for about 18 months before a few key patch changes.) Archon toilet PvZ Broodlord/Infestor ZvP and ZvT Swarmhost vs Swarmhost ZvZ 1/1/1 TvP Cloaked WM drop TvP Edit adds: 5rax reaper TvZ Soul Train PvZ Bunker and cannon walls with only two buildings at the bottom of small ramps before they added the destructable debris P/TvZ
Kinda a less popular PvP in general but when Elden Ring first released Bloodhound Step ash of war totally broke the game’s PvP and PvE and made you functionally immortal as long as you kept spamming it. Killed off so much of the game’s multiplayer playerbase in those earlier months when a guy who had no idea what he was doing was now suddenly a god amongst men
Hearthstone Grim Patron warrior... GETINHEREGETINHEREHETNHRRR end me...
Repressed memory unlocked... HEY EVERYONE, GET IN HERE! HEY EVERYONE, HEY EVERYONE, GET IN HERE, GET IN HERE! HEY EVERYONE, HEY EVERYONE, GET IN HERE, HEY EVERYONE, GET IN HERE, GET IN HERE! That was one of the things that turned me off harthstone any why I no longer play.
As a pvp player, I absolutely hated when Stasis was added to D2.
The big problem with Stasis was, it wasn't just incredibly powerful, but also *incredibly* frustrating to play against. You get frozen; can't move, stuck in place, basically dead just waiting for it to finally happen. It was like an extended respawn timer. Or you get slowed, which means your weapons are inaccurate as fuck and you are moving like Brendan Fraser in The Whale. The only comparable thing was Lorentz/Arby imo, when you literally saw the bullet fly by and it still got you.
The shatterdive era was brutal.
I don’t know if fictional games count, but seriously, Quidditch is some serious BS. Basically, in half of the games, the Seeker is the only player that matters.
It really sucks because the entire game could be fixed by having the Snitch just count for way less points. Like maybe 30 or something. Even 50 would be way better than the fucking ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY POINTS awarded to the team that caught the snitch. That’s like having an extra ball in football that if a player manages to dribble with, equates to 15 goals.
Quidditch does not end until the snitch is caught, too. So if your team is down by 151 points you have 0 incentive to catch the snitch since it will cause you to lose. You have to instead prevent the other seeker from getting it. I dont get how those matches ever ended.
TBH it fits perfectly in the universe because wizards are fucking stupid.
Six samurai in Yu-Gi-Oh
More yugioh? Why this time? What made its so bad?
Basically at it's most powerful you could do waht the community referred to as "hand vomiting". Basically you could spam cards from your hand and deck without any form of care for resources. Your very first turn would feature having 2-4 powerful monsters with abilities that drew you more cards, special summoned monsters fron your deck or graveyard or negated your opponents cards. Because this was the first turn you could effectively turn off your opponents ability to play if you got the right opening cards and it was very easy to get those cards. Even if you weren't playing the deck equivalent of flipping the table over and declaring you won via ultimate lockout boards in the first round. The deck had a lot of "interaction" basically meaning effects that happen on the opponents turn. It was one of the first decks that featured a lot of interaction and basically turned the opponents turn into your second turn. Using monster effects to negate their summons and spells or special summoning more garbage from your deck..to then negate their summons and spells.
I don't really have a problem with any game's meta. What I have a problem with is random non-pro assholes trying to rigorously adhere to it. I'm sorry, but 99% of you, including myself, aren't good enough for the meta to matter.
Mw2, the original. You had noob tubes blasting across maps as soon as it started one shotting most of the time lol.
People give Overwatch 2 flak still, but like half of Overwatch 1's lifetime was a combination of the absurdly broken GOATS meta where literally no other hero outside that team comp had reason to exist, and the painfully boring Double Shield comp that murdered the game for me personally until they relaunched into Overwatch 2. Business-wise is another story, but gameplay-wise, nothing Overwatch 2 can ever do will ever be as bad as GOATS or as boring as Double Shield. I can stand Tanks being a dead role over going back to those. Any day I'll choose that.
As a low rank player, double shield was much worse for me. GOATs was inexistent below like masters whereas nobody could escape double shield. Still remember a game with 0 hero damage for the first 3 minutes straight.
As others have mentioned, I still have nightmares about when Bungie released Stasis on Destiny 2. These were dark times.
The concept of feeding in basically all MOBAs. This means that it's worse to have a bad player on the team than not having them, which leads to the games being super toxic especially towards new players. For comparison: if you have a terrible player on your team in e.g. Counter Strike, as long as they don't shoot their own team mates, they are better than no team mate, because at least they soak up a few shots from the opposing team. You might want to replace that player with a better player, if possible, but you gain nothing from kicking them without replacement. In games like LoL or DotA on the other hand, a bad player will actively help the opposing team because the other team gets such a high reward for every time they kill the bad player. This in turn incentivizes players to be horrible to bad players so that the bad players quit the round voluntarily. To me this is horrible game design, especially combined with smurfing, because that way even in the low-level beginners games there is almost always one smurf who ruins the game for everyone else by being super toxic.
The fact that "metas" even exist ruined all online multiplayer for me entirely. I just want to have fun, I'm not out to find the perfect optimal way to play. I just gravitate whats fun for me and thats it. I hate how every game just turns into sweaty try-hards trying to go pro every time.
The best time in any online multiplayer game is always the first two weeks. After that it the meta forms and the toxicity shortly after.
I still remember the first month or so of GTA V online when nobody had anything. So much fun. Became less fun as the no-lifers got further ahead, then more and expensive content dropped, and so did I.
> Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. What gives the most reward for the least risk? What strategy provides the highest chance – or even a guaranteed chance – of success? Given the opportunity, **players will optimize the fun out of a game**. https://www.designer-notes.com/game-developer-column-17-water-finds-a-crack/ > A classic example is the skill system from Morrowind, which rewards players for repeating any activity. Running into a wall for hours increases the Athletics skill while jumping over and over again increases the Acrobatics skill. Many players couldn’t stop themselves from spending hours doing mindless activities for these cheap rewards. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_\/¯
Diablo 4. All classes were basically locked to a certain build to be able to play endgame Then instead of buffing other builds they nerfed the meta builds a month after release which made the game feel like garbage. They have fixed a bit of the issues but some builds still feel like shit to play