What the hell does meta mean?

General Discussion
1

I can’t figure it even from googling it. What does it mean when people say Torbjörn (not saying he’s meta just an example) is meta?

Edit: thanks to everyone who replied. I understand now yayay :smiley: thanks so much for the feedback

2

Meta= current good and high picked heroes

Ex: beyblade meta was mainly Reaper+Ana because of spinning death blossom. Reaper+Ana were strong and made that meta

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3

The Meta are the current heroes that have the greatest chance of winning a game together, taking into consideration their synergies.

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4

It’s also known as ‘Most Effective Tactic Available’.

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5

meta is an abbreviation for
Most
Effective
Tactics
Available

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6

Literally: Most Effective Tactic Available

Typically used to describe heroes and strategies currently considered OP by the community.

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7

I always thought it was meta, like metadata. Metadata is data within data. The meta is the game within the game. Ya know?

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8

This is correct. The concept of “meta” is to be self-referential. Metadata is not data (a payload, contents, a file, whathaveyou), but rather a set of information that describes the data itself.

The “meta-game” takes out the concept of actually playing the game, and focuses instead on the choices you have available to you, such as items in other MOBAs, skill selection, laning so on so forth. It’s a fancy term for strategy, while being more inclusive to mean just about everything you can do outside of actually executing things.

Meta has just become shorthard for metagame. In Overwatch, the “meta-game” revolves around hero selection per map, and general strategies on how to push objectives and position yourself.

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9

This. Thank you for stating it so clearly.

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10

“Meta” means beyond or after.
The term “meta game”, or the higher level game (strategy, psychology, preparation) beyond the lower level game (game rules, mechanical skill), refers, at least in the case of Overwatch, to selecting the right 6 team members to field in a particular match.

“Most effective tactics available” is a backronym.

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11

Where did the M.E.T.A. acronym version come from? Just an assumption from people who didn’t know what they were reading? It does seem amusingly appropriate in most contexts.

Anyway, “meta” is short for “metagame,” which refers to the aspects of a game that occur outside of the primary gameplay. In Overwatch, someone talking about the “meta” is almost always talking about character selection, but it could also refer to teams picking certain maps in tournaments, or making assumptions that the opposing team will defend on the high ground for the first push.

“Meta” is a much more varied term in more complex competitive games like Starcraft. There the term was even repurposed as a verb for shorthand: “I metagamed him,” meaning “He did what everyone does, and I won because I blindly countered what everyone does,” or “I played against the metagame, not against my opponent.”

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12

META=Most Effective Team Available.

T could = Tactic, but I know it from Moba’s.

13

Yep.
It’s not uncommon for people who don’t know something to create an explanation that fits (see also: religion).
One person claims something, and next thing you know, it spreads like wildfire among the unknowledgeable (again, see also: religion).

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14

It must’ve been within the last few years. I’m not down hip n’ cool with the kidz anymore, but it definitely wasn’t around back when LoL or DotA2 started springing up.

It only really sort of works, because it’s ignoring the rest of the ‘meta,’ being the actual strategies you have to put into place to make that team effective in the first place.

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15

It was around in the warcraft 3 mod that turned into DotA.

16

Well, most people here seem to be using the T for “tactics” rather than “team,” so that could include the strategies involved.

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The word, yes, the acronym, likely not. The ‘meta’ back in those days involved so much more, and ended up being more specifically tied to lane distribution, jungle rotation, and item sequences.

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The word “metagame” emerged in economic game theory and predates personal computing, probably by decades.

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It stands for Most Effective Tatic Available (or something else but close to it).

It is basically means that certain combo of heroes and strats are the best at that time due to game balancing and such.

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It was and in context, it just wasn’t such a mainstream go to thing. Though in those days, it was referring to hero choice+gear to build the most powerful hero possible, to build the ‘most effective team possible’.

But I know the term from MOBAs so it’s entirely possible other games had different meanings for it, like other have pointed out starcraft had a different meaning. (I only watcch “dibz” play SC so I’m not really able to say in that context.)

What I can say is it has been a thing for at least a decade or more.