Correct, and if 100% of the people who beat you are using all the same "meta" then that suggests it's not a skill variation that explains it. That makes the game extremely boring.
> You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
You must not be familiar with what "meta" means. Modern video games seem to all have an across-the-board superior configuration. And yes, the way to "counter it" is to copy it, which is why this strategy spreads like a virus through the game until 100% of the people who beat you are all doing the exact same thing.
If the desired outcome of the game design was for everyone to use the same configurations (the meta) in order to "counter" the meta, then why have configuration options at all? Give everyone the same exact thing all the time.
The reason they don't do that is because it's extremely boring. But unfortunately the "meta-finding" capability of the streaming community yields the same functional outcome anyway. Ergo: the games are made boring by the community, as stated at the very top.
I'm familiar with the term, thanks. I'm suggesting that if you're consistently losing to it that's a skill issue. Sure, you might find the gameplay boring but then that's a complaint about a perceived failure in the game design (notably only from your perspective, not necessarily other's). I appreciate that you're more interested in casually playing off the wall builds for fun rather than competitively playing to win but casting that as others being less skilled or the community being in the wrong is just petulant.
Yes, it is a game design failure (obviously) insofar as it seems not possible to make a perfectly balanced game. But games weren't previously perfectly balanced either, presumably. But they didn't have this same "herding" dynamic because there wasn't an entire industry (literally!) of people trying to discover and disseminate knowledge about the imbalances.
And no, the issue isn't "I like to casually play with off-the-wall builds." The issue is "video games were a lot more fun when you encountered different types of opponents."
This is, of course, why game designers put so much work into supporting variations in builds, so obviously they agree too.
I didn't criticize anyone for being less skilled or anyone for being "in the wrong." I'm observing a game dynamic that makes games less variable than their designers clearly intend.