Hey, I had an idea. Most games don’t really need a thread for this, but Marvel has a few things going for it here:
-Really open game engine. You can never say never in this game, because there is an exception to every rule, intentional or not.
-Dominating Tactics: In a game as open as this, there are so many tactics that can come out of no where and destroy even the best players. We’ve already seen ChrisG win nearly every major he attends, and sometimes people like Kusoru (remember him?) and Frusty come out of the woodwork and amaze us with crazy things that we never really see. Sometimes this kind of thing gets a bandwagon following, and it is interesting to see how people jump to any character that shows promise, only to drop them because they aren’t the crazy sleeper god tier they were expecting.
-Drama: Ah yes, the Marvel scene and our drama. If we aren’t starting wars between each other (NorCal vs SoCal, East vs West, America vs The World), we are popping off on each other on stage (PR Rog) and behind the scenes. Shit gets hype, yo. This is mostly a place to discuss the former, but there is room to weigh in on the influence of the latter upon the former as well.
So, because of all this, I felt that Marvel needed a thread to actively discuss the meta, locally and overall, so I made one. Here are a few questions to get things started:
-What characters are most common per each scene? (I’ve seen a fair amount of Haggar out of the East and South, but West Coast seems to ignore the guy.)
-Is MorriDoom and/or TACs killing this game?
-What players are best equipped to take out ChrisG? Even the best players can only scrape a few rounds from him.
best player in socal is a haggar player.
TX common characters:
zero, haggar, dormammu, spencer, dante, wesker, vergil. a little magneto, hulk, wolverine.
rubeks plays skrull and buckethead plays morrigan, but not a lot of other notable reps of those chars.
morri doom is killing the game slightly, not enough morri doom players though.
TACs aren’t really killing the game, but they do allow magneto, phoenix, and morrigan to be stronger than they would be normally. not that morrigan needs it.
best players to take out chris G
ranmasama with mag dorm haggar. mag loses to morrigan but ranma’s movement lets him do things other magnetos cannot , which basically involves dealing with chrisG’s movement and soul fists.
dorm haggar can fight morri doom.
any good zvd player. one touch = could win. just have to realize that chrisG is great at blocking, but keep him in unrelenting mixups.
pr rog/justin. pr rog is crazy enough to be able to hit chrisG. justin is good enough at marvel to be able to hit chrisG, but needs better characters.
Apparently I should’ve read the wikipedia article itself, because past the bare definition it actually gets into examples that are non-metagaming.
Metagaming describes strategy that exists outside of the game’s rules. “Mixing up your opponent until they die” or “zoning them out” is not metagame, they’re strategies that are easily defined by the rules of the game.
This comparison on the talk page sums it up for me:
"Example (proper): A runner in a race gets a full night’s sleep and eats a healthy meal before a race. This helps him place better in the race. The runner is using a STRATEGY that falls ENTIRELY OUTSIDE of the race itself.
Example (improper): While participating in a race, a runner tricks the other runners into taking a longer route. This helps him place better in the race. The runner is using a STRATEGY that falls ENTIRELY WITHIN the race itself."
Now deciding to play a certain strategy based on its proven effectiveness or wide use is maybe kind of sort of metagaming, but that sounds like it falls within the environment of the game itself. In my opinion the closest thing to describing metagame thus far in this thread has been the “Drama” section of the OP. Maybe the accepted meaning of the word has evolved into something past the original definition, but the pedant in me doesn’t see what this thread offers that the theory thread doesn’t already. They’re both basically talking “strategy.”
Anyway, if you’re gonna cite an example of dominant strategies from a year ago, here are some more recent examples that refute it:
And every match that Dieminion wins.
Even when Flocker did beat Chris G at ECT, the sets were honestly more about forcing the opponent into unfavorable neutral positions than incessant blockstun/mixups (though that may have been more due to Flocker dropping shit and wanting to play it safe).
The word metagame is jargon. The uses for it vary depending on which game it is being used. In poker there is strategic metagaming where people will switch how they bet. I.E. the zoning them out or switching to RTSD depending on how your opponent is playing. In M:TG and other card games, metagame is more about what you bring. Fighting games can have both: what character you bring as well as you how you play it are part of the metagame. So really, the strategies being employed as dictated by the characters or how the characters are being played are both important to the metagame. Because a Ryu in SoCal is not the same as a Ryu in NY.
Currently the word “metagame” has come to cover the totality of current strategic trends that are in use within a competitive scene. It is incorrect according to the traditional definition but it is still a useful term.
discovigilante, welcome to the group of people who got bodied going by the original definition of “metagame”, not knowing that it did actually acquire a broader meaning quite a while ago.
I know prescriptive linguistics died a while ago but dammit, why did the term “metagame” have to take over a pre-existing term? Especially one as basic as “strategic trends?”
Not that big a deal if you consider that it is used in different ways. The way people use the word shade to describe a color and the technically way it is used in art are completely different; I ain’t getting extra cracks in my ass about it. Discussing the topic while moving away from the word is the most productive way to deal with the topic. Too many people in the site get extra butthurts at contextual definitions of words (even though these exist for a million other words).
Hey man, I made an attempt to move the discussion forward at the end of my long post. Don’t dwell on people dwelling on the definition of the term. Let’s get back into what the “metagame” is like right now.
Yeah I don’t really care when people use it since it’s only recently emerged as a fighting game term. I just don’t like to use the term much myself cuz…yeah.
Discussion is technically going backwards. See, I even renamed it so people wouldn’t get butthurt.
I the best. It doesn’t really matter whether you discuss this or not because, regardless of how ass their teams is at certain matchups, dudes refuse to practice other characters. All the smart things we could do with team selection get defeated by the all mighty: “niggas is lazy.”
A meta game is a game within a game. MvC2 has a meta game, because while most of the cast are useless, virtually unplayable and the game is unbalanced, there is a small set of characters who combine to create what is a perfectly balanced fighter. And yes, MvC2 meta game is balanced, incredibly balanced, the top tier characters all intermingle with each other, varying team composition offers viable counter picks, the system benefits them all to make the gameplay fair and they’re all as equally capable as each other of getting the win. In what is a broken and unbalanced game is a well structured and incredibly balanced sub game and that’s what, at least in my opinion, it means to be a meta game.