2567 Most Effective Tactics Available.

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Meta is one of those words that has taken on new meanings in recent years, although it could be argued that they are more like evolutions than new meanings. Meta gaming in a tabletop setting is using knowledge your character wouldn’t have to your advantage. Cheating, to some degree. That degree is often debated. Meta narrative is one that’s self aware, or aware of tropes in the genre, or what have you. Meta gaming in terms of a video game is using the “Most Effective Tactics Available”. There’s also the Meta company that pretentiously renamed itself, but let’s forget about them. In fact, let’s forget about them as an entire culture.

I play Fire Emblem Heroes and the meta for that game is money. The secondary meta changes over time based on how much money you want to spend chasing it. Actually the current meta is damage reduction, although it’s evolving into revoking damage reduction. I’m sure this holds true for many live service games but the meta tends to evolve based on whatever thing the developers came up with 6 months ago that they can’t figure out how to fix. I’ve played since almost the beginning of the game so I’ve played through all the various metas. Vantage sweeping, armor, Reinhardt, armor effectiveness, save tanking, I’ve played through them all. Since I’m a largely free to play player I’ve only had meta relevant teams on accident over time by trying to simply survive the current meta with whatever free characters I manage to build up. It’s kind of a golden age for me because they just released weapons you can trade off to older characters to make them much more powerful. So my old teams suddenly get much more dangerous if I manage to pull an arcane weapon. Characters who most people thought of as worthless have become relevant and I tend to be drawn to worthless characters.

Anyway, that’s what Edward is talking about when he says “meta” and “power creep” Over time the strength of characters escalates because the developers add stats instead of thinking up better game mechanics. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but generally that’s what it is. When a character supersedes the meta they are sometimes called overpowered (OP), meta breaking, meta defining, or whatever else nerds come up with. Jess is implying that Ed defines the meta, at least for her.

The meta for the internet is money and attention. I have your attention so now I’ll try and get your money by reminding you that the links above can enable you to support my work. I will use the money to make myself happy, make comics, and have insurance, among other things. The replacement keyboard I bought recently allows you to change the color of the backlights. That makes me happy in addition to helping me make comics. Very meta defining.

19 Comments

As a Granblue Fantasy player, I can’t tell if I’m happy or exasperated to see the terms I’m so used to seeing argued back and forth in the commentary for one of my favorite webcomics. XD

ed is too succesfull to not atleast be a little meta
just point him at his smoking hot girlfriend and ask if he really deserves a buff XD

“money and attention”? Whoa, attention is not a currency, and 100% of modern evil stems from that tidbit. As in – Cory Doctorow’s essays on ‘enshittification’…

I don’t think being the Meta is a good thing, he was kind of an @$$hole. (For those of you who don’t get this joke go to the Red Vs Blue Wiki and look it up. I’ll wait.)

The capitalists that own twitter and facebook taught me a thing. If they want me to call their companies something else they should pay me to call them something else.
Cheers ~ulrich

The only reason I can think of them actually caring whether you say “Alphabet Inc” or “Google Inc” (which is apparently still a company as well as a search engine), “X Corp” or “Twitter, Inc”, or “Meta Platforms, Inc” (Ohh, I get it now, we’re talking about “Meta”) instead of “Facebook Inc”, is if you were writing them an actual check.

The circle is now complete.

You want to see Meta in action, come play magic the gathering or for really expensive meta come play Warhammer 40,000.

“There’s also the Meta company – , but let’s forget about them. In fact, let’s forget about them as an entire culture.” …Amen!!

The meaning of ‘meta’ from which most current usage derives comes from formal logic: the ‘metalogic’. The logicials need to reason about logic. To avoid getting all tangled up, they need to distinguish the logic they use in their reasoning from the one they are studying. The metalogic is the logic about the logic. The metalanguage is the language used when talking about a language. A metalogic is often more powerful than the original logic, but this isn’t always the case. However, if you want to prove a partucular logic is consistent, Gödel showed that your metalogic needs to be more powerful than the logic you’re talking about.

Good on you for sticking through with FEH. Even before they started going hard on the pay to win aspects I was getting tired of the game (and jumped ship once Dragalia Lost released in Canada). I don’t know if I would’ve stuck around after the monthly subscription dropped, but I can say that I’ve never really felt myself wanting to go back

It’s not the kind of thing people would like except the most hardcore FE players. I’ve kept playing because a lot of my old FTP characters are relevant with the new inheritable weapons.

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