Response to Gee: Metalevel Thinking

One part of chapter two that I found very interesting was the discussion of the Semiotic Domain, but specifically dealing with the "metalevel thinking." Not only is this process important to a game, but it is necessary for a game to be able to survive over a long period of time and games that successfully meet the "meta" flourish and continue to get played.  I will talk about a couple different games that have done this successfully. One big game that a lot people may be familiar with is League of Legends. This game is constantly changing its meta game due to a couple of different elements. The game is constantly getting updated with new champions, champion balances, item balances, and environmental balances. I use balance in terms of they change something that has been either overpowered or underpowered in the eyes of the community and developers. With this in mind, players have to adapt to these changes at such a constant rate it could potentially make or break the game. I have had a couple champions(characters) in the game that have been "nerfed" so hard that they lose playability, well at least at first. One example of this was when they changed one of my favorite character's scaling that he wasn't as strong as he use to be. I was unable to perform or play him well at all, so I stopped playing him. After about 2 months, I picked him back up again and found that I had an easier time then before. The difference was that when I was playing him, I knew my limitations, and then they changed them drastically. After forgetting those limits, to a point, relearning what I could and couldn't get away with allowed me to play this character once again and have fun with it. Another big thing that has changed League of Legends "Meta" is the team compositions. Now this can be argued as being my opinion and wrong, but I feel as though there are a lot of people who can agree with this. Since the game has been out, the strategy of the "lanes" in the game has changed overtime. For anyone who doesn't know what this game entails, I'll do my best to explain the basics. There are 2 teams of 5 who battle on a map with 3 main "lanes." The change in the meta comes in when we discuss what kind of characters, along with how many go to each lane. For the most part, the middle lane has always been a solo lane and occupied by a ranged caster type champion (oh and just for the record, if anyone would like me to explain this more in depth in person, feel free to ask or comment). Top and bottom lane are the two that have changed a lot. At the beginning, and still sometimes today, top would consist of two champions. More recently, top has become a solo lane, while the other player goes into what is called the "jungle" and levels up by killing the creatures in the jungle rather then leveling up in the lane. The jungler also has the task of performing sneak attacks called "ganks" on opponents in the 3 lanes of his/her choosing to help out the team and the players in the specific lane. Bottom, for the most part, has been also a duo lane. The change in the meta comes into play when dealing with the kinds of characters that go there. At least in my experience, players would just go any champion they would want and have a 2v2 battle lane down bottom. More recently, the lanes now consist of a ranged champion and a support champion. This is followed by the strategy of the ranged champion becoming "fed" off of all the monster kills that yield more gold as the support champion focuses on healing and protecting it's ranged partner. With all this changes, the game has proved to be successful in continuing to adapt to new champions they add along with user feedback to make the game more balanced for all players. Another game I would like to point out that has kept the meta game balanced is Team Fortress 2. With all the content updates that come into a game that still is played by it's core gameplay, it continually keeps up with balancing new items and new game modes. The game still consists of its 9 classes from launch and have given each class a variety of tools to make each player somewhat unique over another playing the same class. They have introduced many new game types, weapons, cosmetic items, and has gone free to play along with being available to play on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It just goes to show that if you can update your game to meet the needs of the ever changing market, you'll continue to have a prosperous journey for both the players and the developers.