"Hey, I was wondering if anyone wants to give me tips
on playing this hero."
"Pick another one. That hero is under-powered."
"No, I mean, I really enjoy play-"
"Pick another one. That hero Is not nearly as good as
these alternates."
"Come on, I just want some advice. Look, I could easily
go to one of hundreds of forums and find out exactly how to play any of these
heroes, including sites that would tell me exactly what you're saying about
hero selection. I know I could win 51.5% instead of 51% of games if I played
the metagame and picked the most OP heroes at any given time, searching for a
marginal advantage, but that's fucking retarded as advice. I don't enjoy playing with those heroes as much, so yes, changing up my hero selection might
mean winning a sliver more, but it's also completely limiting my enjoyment of
the game which decreases my enthusiasm to make it through the early game. And
besides, even if I lose slightly more often, that will eventually be accounted
for in the matchmaking system. God fucking damn it. I just want to enjoy myself
for the five fucking hours a week you guys insist that I play."
“Look, we play this for fun. If you resent that, and if you’re
not having fun, feel free to step away from the computer. I don’t get why
everything about the meta-game is such a fucking ordeal with you. I want to
play the most challenging opponents, and maybe I don’t like that someone is so
willing to “let us slip a little in the matchmaking system” until his insistence
on playing an inferior hero resolves itself naturally, through, I might add, a
few losses. Is it FUN for you to lose? It’s fun for me to teach you, but it’s
not fun for me to teach you to avoiding losing when you insist on handicapping
yourself before you’re even good.”
“The problem I think we’re having is that we’re not being
honest about our goals and expectations. Look, I get that you want to play the
hardest possible opponents, and without handicapping yourself by playing with
inferior teammates that don’t do as they’re told or get better outside of our
games together. On the other hand, this meta-game carries with it a persistence
to follow marginal advantages that is simply ridiculous. Why? I mean that’s the
essence of competition, right? To seek the highest challenges, and then to seek
every outlet and every advantage possible to achieve those challenges? Sure, it
is, and if I thought you were just being competitive it would make things a lot
easier.
But I’m a competitor too, and getting as good as I can with a hero I
enjoy satisfies my competitive desires as much as playing the meta-game
satisfies yours, if that’s really the argument. But I don’t think it is. In
fact, I’d argue that your approach is not competitive because of a
misunderstanding about what the meta-game actually constitutes. You want
to play the most over-powered heroes and tandems until the developers get their
shit together and fix it (and in turn make other heroes over-powered).
So, sure, in
a vacuum, your ranking will rise simply because you played the odds, or your
ranking will maintain because the community self-adjusted. And that’s cool. But…
the meta-game becomes stifling as soon as it crushes experimentation. The
meta-game itself is a giant collective experiment, almost by definition. But it’s
an experiment that in advising me against certain heroes you actively betray. See, you stop choosing
certain heroes altogether because your favorite guide has told you it’s
under-powered, and because there’s nothing worse than going into battle with not
enough armaments. But then you never give new strategies, or new heroes, or new
item builds, a chance in hell. You kill your personal involvement in the meta-game so you
can enjoy its spoils without having to suffer the difficult part, the
experimentation, the strategy, the elaborate going-over of item builds, and so on.
In a
way it’s a sample size issue; if one could play thousands of games in a gaming
session (bear with me), one could drastically improve experimentation and
feedback. If one could play dozens of games, one could at least try things
without feeling like he’s alienating his friends. But no, that’s not how it
goes. We play 4 games and that is usually plenty, and in those 4 games the
amount one can experiment is minimal, and straying from the path set down by
wise armies of testers is foolish and kind of a betrayal of the enjoyment of
our friends. So we never experiment, we never explore, and in the end we never
have any goddamn fun, and we never get better because you insist that the
exploration by which we learn is underpowered according to the metagame. It’s a
vicious cycle predicated on the fact that games are too long, there are too
many choices (and most importantly, too many useless choices). This is true to
such an extent that it makes the game more about following a stifling and
simplistic path than about thinking for one’s self, which happens almost
incidentally in the insanely long and well-traveled amount of experience
required for basic competence in this game. For all the time you insist we play, we'd have been better off from the start simply playing what we like and improvising strategies every day. I just feel like I've wasted all the time I've spent, and the only gain I've made is learning to manage personalities. Goddamn it. I want to vomit.”
“You done?”
“Yeah.”
“Pick Karthas.”
“Okay.”
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