Well the weird stuff about meta is, it actually helps you basically nothing to know what is currently “meta” if you can’t actually play the game.
Meta basically “evolves” from playing the game right, but it doesn’t provides anything to only “know” the meta alone.
It’s literally the opposite of how “meta” is usually used. Normally meta gives you a deeper understanding of the stuff but in gaming it’s actually the opposity. It’s a shallow reference that doesn’t gives you any hint about the real gameplay actually.
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Pretty much perception
But it’s not a creative explanation.
Yes, meta is a greek word, but when it comes to gaming it is just an acronym
I absolutely meant it. When you talk about gaming, META stands for Most Effective Tactic Available.
Anyway, what the other people here are telling you is absolutely true about greek and prefixes is absolutely true
Well, tbh the meta is born from countless hours of testing options by a community to determine what’s the best way to do things.
It’s not just perception, it’s more of an empyrical test in this case.
We know that on arabia the best civs in the current patch are the chinese and the mayans, but that’s not just perception. At the highest level, Chinese and Mayans havee been determined to be the best civs on that specific map for the current balance.
Of course the lower the level is, the more meta is about one person’s perception, but that’s just because at a lower level people cannot properly execute at mechanical level most pf the things that are considered a given from a certain point onwards.
For example, the two militia drush, that is currently a top meta strategy on arabia, won’t be executed well enough by a 1k2 player to be effective.
There are strats and openings that are objectively better only if you can’t pull them off, otherwise they are harmful for yourself
Last time I explained meta like this, people were laughing at me.
Then they laughed at you for no reason
I don’t mean to be a grammar pedant, but “meta-game” doesn’t apply here, because what the users have described isn’t anything “beyond” the game. No, I don’t think it’s a Greek prefix. Regardless of the word usage, thanks everyone for explaining the meaning.
With what we’ve said and through your own experience/opinion - how would you best describe it now?
Note that meta is also currently related to facebook’s ‘meta’ world which is different.
Yep, agree with this. Coming from other games, that is my understanding of the term, and it means the optimal strategy, generally determined by many of the best players over countless hours of testing, and still subject to change at any moment from a new discovery or balance patch.
I’d say it’s part perception and part empiric. For example: objectively, it’s vey important to not have an idle Town Center at the beginning, and to sustain villager production, you need at least five of them on food. That’s the part of the meta that is empiric. You don’t do that, you’re dead. But then, we could try to define what is the “beginning” of the game. Do we do it by playtime or by how many villagers do you have? Such a definition is important because when you’re not in the beginning anymore, the game branches, and your own personal gamestyle or events out of your control must be taken into account.
Does this mean that there’s no meta after the Feudal Age? Not at all. To illustrate what I was trying to say, I searched on Youtube for a recording of a match between Viper and Nicov (who, I’m proud to say, comes from the same country as me). I couldn’t find it. But I remember that one of them put quite a few villagers on stone in the Dark Age to build towers on the other’s base. I’ve seen guides about what to do with your first 21 villagers, and that wasn’t mentioned. As some users have pointed out, meta changes with new civilizations, or patches, but also with new ideas. What I said earlier about the idle Town Center is immutable, and wasting time so early will only result in your victory if your opponent is much worse than you. But if you watch Viper or Nicov execute that tower rush, even if they’re the best players, you shouldn’t be so quick to establish that as the meta, because you never know what will come along.
For the past two years I’ve been playing online with a group of people near my town (you can imagine which situation made them turn to such home entretainment). I had a taste of what meta is with them - they insisted with building stone walls. Even when a more experienced player told them that the best players globally never surround their city with walls, “their” meta consisted of it. Of course, it’s inefficient, immature and neurotic. They warned me that if I didn’t wall up, all other enemy players would come for me. The obvious retort would be “why are YOU not doing anything when I’m attacked by two others?”. I have to mention that we always played with a half hour peace treaty. In this case, meta depends on skill level and game conditions - complete reluctance to acknowledge that stone walls shouldn’t be 30 squares long, and a peace time that facilitated such a dumb strategy. Empirically, it’s a bad thing to do; in their minds, they were doing something important.
Stone walls can be very strategic if placed in the right areas, I don’t believe they are necessarily wrong and they perhaps took their own styles into account when saying that you would want to be heavily defended to deter enemy advances because they would be defended enough that the enemy would surely seek out the least defensive among them, yourself. - sure they may not be 100% effective, but they can be very much worth while. Though, in my personal experience, small camp walls with both Palisades/houses and a tower per camp minimum works great for the early game and possibly follow it up on the mid’game or early castle with stone walls in key places if needed. If facing a swift opponent, such as a cav archer civ/play or archers in general or even knights, you may wish to funnel the opponent towards a certain part of your base so you have better control over where your defenses lay, such as where your mangonels need to be instead of having them roam a 360° base in hopes of protecting the correct side.
Often times I personally hope the enemy focuses on me instead of my allies because I’m terrible with defending my allies at certain points, particularly in feudal and somewhat in castle. Which is why I also tend to leave my base mostly open, even tho it’s well defended it leaves the perception that the enemy may invade at will at their own peril.
With all that in mind from my own stand point, I understand the thought of wishing that all your allies were as defensive or chose a similar style to your own so that each ally might mostly focus on booming and defense instead of wasting time in feudal age.
However the opposite is true for those who are more offense oriented. The problem lies in that the two styles have trouble mixing when they’re both at their extremes; the offensive player has lots of trouble defending against two offensive players, you could say it’s almost impossible, especially when the defensive ally shows no sign of coming to your aid right then and there, however in the defensive players’ mind they probably wish you to hold out until their forces are truly ready to save you without wasting the whole effort on fighting too early
My main tip is for the defensive player to be at the forward location, and then you might focus fully on offense with minimal thought on defense, though, still, be careful. As for if the defensive player is to the rear, be prepared to be attacked by two players at once and plan accordingly, perhaps switch to a more defensive style for the occasion. And if both of you are offensive minded, feel free to go ham on the front lines.
As for team games with trade carts involved, I suggest the ‘select all trade carts/cogs’ hotkey, (which selects all carts with the first press and cogs with the second regardless of if they’re idle or not) and micro those carts instead of blindly letting them die when an enemy ‘somehow’ enters the trade lanes.
I think the acronym might have come after the term had been established.
The metagame is the game of playing the game, the strategies that develop in a multiplayer game because of how people play the game. You’re going beyond how to handle the game into how to handle the players playing the game.
(It’s clearer when you think about a game like Pokémon or a MOBA, where you have to make a selection of which monsters/hero/units you bring to the game. There are a lot of strong dragon types to choose from, so you could bring one of those. Or you could bring something that counters dragon types because your opponent also knows those are strong options.)
It’s related to concepts like metahumor, humor that works because of how people work with humor. Like say a joke about a bad standup comedian ending on the punchline “and what’s the deal with airplane food, am I right?” In itself the line might be a little funny the first time you hear it, but as a reference to punchlines that have been beaten to death it can under the right circumstances be very funny.
It’s all very meta.
That’s also the meta Facebook has named themselves after. Because their webpages are totally a “metaverse”, a world beyond the world, a new layer of efficiency and social interaction, based not merely on the world itself, but on how people interact with the world. The fact that the term is so hard to define and pin down precisely is a great bonus. If nobody knows what your promises were you can never break them. Also gamers use the term, and that means it’s hip now and companies should do it too.
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This. And lets be honest: its not even a good acronym.
“most effective”: No, not really. First of all, for “effective” to have a meaning, we need to think about the desired effect first. Thats probably winning - but is it, really? Many players do not lame and even send sheep to their opponent. So clearly, for many players its not about winning (they chose to do things that benefits their oppoent!), but winning in a game that is perceived as fair.
But even if we accepted “effective=win”: For most players below 1400, the most effective would be to just go frank 2 stable kts every game because its just that easy to pull off. However, we would hardly call them following the meta if they did. On the other hand, hoang realized that he could win a lot (“beeing effective”) by not producing vills, which was “off-meta”. So his most effective strategy did not follow the meta.
Lets go on in the acronym: T for “tactic”?? but a tactic is something small, like using box formation when drushing, using stand ground to block units, using split formation to surround archers, using your kts to block enemy kts from reaching your archers etc. Most things described as “meta” are about the overall approach to the game, ie strategy not tactics - eg going archers in feudal for the nice powerspike when upgrading to xbow, fighting for relics on arena before going into a boom and so on.
So the meta isn’t about beeing effective, its surely not “the most” effective, its hadly ever about tactics at all, so it really isnt the “most effective tactic available”.
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Well it applies to other games as well, and for AoE2, it’s kind of just the Most Effective Term Availiable for most people.
my response applies to other games as well, too.
Cheeses are non-meta and very effective, and meta usually is about strategy not about tactics. Switch out my examples and my text could be about lol, sc2 or any other game as well.
I know that “most effective tactic availble” is easier to memorize than understanding a greek prefix and i accept that many players start to think the acronym makes sense, but if you observe how “meta” is used in conversations its really about knowledge beyond pure game mechanics, about the situations emerging from people interacting with how players play the game and usually not about tactics.
Exactly. There are some campaign scenarios in which you are meant to build a wall. They have long cliffs with a gap in the middle, or your city is surrounded by water on one side and a forest in the other and just a tiny patch of land is free. Random maps aren’t like this.
Going back to the discussion about the word. I still feel like the things people have talked about here aren’t a “metagame”; knowing how to play, having strategies and anticipating what the other players will do is the game itself. “Metahumor” is like someone here described: the comedian who says “what’s the deal with airplane food”. It’s funny because it’s an outdated joke; it’s a commentary on humor. The tried-and-tested knowledge that Mayas and Chinese excell at Arabia isn’t “beyond” anything.
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Oh it sure goes beyond the game, at least for 99.99% of the playerbase.
Because we cant just look at the gamefiles, the stats of the units, and come up with a 21pop maa into archer rush. Yet we do use this strat, because when we go beyond the game, we find out there is more. The word might have a few different meanings, but most of them are about playing the game in a way you never could with only the information you get from the game itself.
But if you Google- or Bing-search, “what does meta in gaming mean?”, the top result is this, respectively:
Case closed. Meta means Facebook, but also at least these two things if you factor in gaming, and if you believe everything you read on the internet 
Which came first, the chicken or the egg, doesn’t really matter with Meta. It’s clear big search engines feel meta, at least nowadays, can mean “Most Effective Tactics Available” as one of the go-to definitions
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Weak argument. Search engines just repeat what they find most often, not what is true. For example, until i and some fellow historians reported it, Google cited a founding date for switzerland that was over 500 years off.
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If you look it up on Wikipedia the acronym doesn’t even appear anywhere on the page.
(Although to be fair. “metagaming” as a general term goes further in looking beyond the game itself than “the meta” usually does.)
So yeah, the acronym came after the term itself. I’m fine with the acronym existing and being widespread. But this topic was about what the word means, knowing the origin of the word can help in that.
(Plus if you use the word metagame to remember what the prefix meta- means you as a bonus the meaning of terms like metaphysics, metahumor, metadata, meta elements, metamorphosis and more.)
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