No competitive multiplayer game has perfect balance, but some had notoriously broken eras that players still shudder to think of.
In a June 20 Reddit thread, players reminisced and debated some of the worst and most unfair metas of various popular games through the years. There are some smaller shoutouts in there to things like Smite‘s Gauntlet of Thebes metagame that made every character frustratingly tanky or the Pokemon VGC‘s Smeargle meta when it was impossible to avoid every ‘mon on your team being put to sleep with Darkrai’s signature Dark Void move. Some stood above the rest as the most loathsome and notorious metas.
It would be a lie to say any Call of Duty game was ever balanced, but at least there aren’t cheap perks like Martyrdom and Last Stand anymore. Martyrdom was a perk in the original Modern Warfare and World at War, as well as a Deathstreak bonus in the original Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3 that caused you to drop a grenade upon death. This was particularly punishing for players getting knife kills or using close-range guns like SMGs because there was little time to react before the grenade went off. As a player, it always made sense to have this perk since it was a promise of free kills with no downside.
Similarly, Last Stand was a perk in the entire original Modern Warfare trilogy, along with Advanced Warfare, that strangely rewarded players for losing a gunfight. If you take critical damage while Last Stand is equipped, rather than immediately die, your character falls into a prone state with only a pistol that you can potentially use to kill your attacker. Once again, this felt cheap, and from a competitive perspective, it always made sense to have this perk since it guaranteed extra health and an opportunity for a kill with no drawback.
In contrast to Call of Duty, Counter-Strike never had a reputation for players relying on cheap tricks to succeed, a large factor in it becoming one of the biggest esport success stories. That doesn’t mean Valve and the almighty Gabe Newell are without fault, though.
In 2015, Valve added the R8 Revolver to CS:GO, a pistol that only cost $800 with unbelievable firepower. The R8 could take you down with just a body shot, and its range and accuracy were relatively high considering its damage output. As the commenter notes, the R8 overtook the Counter-Strike meta so quickly that Valve released a nerf within two days of the pistol’s launch.
One commenter notes that a bad meta in Overwatch may have killed more than just the competitive strategies at the time; it may have started what became an avalanche of unpopular moves from Blizzard. The GOATS meta, named after the team who invented it, was a team composition of three tanks and three healers. No characters from the damage class, although the strategy would typically utilize at least one more damage-driven healer like Moira or Brigitte. This was a potent meta that made every match slow and tedious, while the only effective counter was switching to the same kind of team comp.
So, no, role queue is not going anywhere anytime soon.
