Backronyms Unceasingly Suppress Sincere Yinformation: Meta Made Minimalist

before I describe what the metagame is and why it does not apply to arknights, I need to address the elephant in the room: the acronym Most (Efficient/Effective) Tactic Available. This is not in fact, what meta stands for, because meta is not an acronym at all. It's an adjective referring to something that is self-referential, and the backronym was popularized circa 2015 from urban dictionary in response to the shortening of "metagame" as an existing term in the league of legends community. As with most pop etymology while it sounds good in a youtube short it's also just blatantly false, and is mostly used to annoyingly argue across definitions in rhetorical sleight of hand.

Like, think about the word as used outside of video games. Most-Effective-Tactic-Available analysis? Most-Efficient-Tactic-Available Physics? I'm So MostEfficientTacticAvailable Even This Acronym? It's nonsense.

"Meta" as it actually pertains to competitive video games refers to the metagame, or the game around how people play the game. It refers to the fact that in a zero-sum game where someone has to lose in order for someone to win, strategies will find more or less success depending on what the other person in specific or other people as a whole are playing.

Notice, above, that I said competitive. This is the key sticking point: in an fps where if you pick the Auto-Aim ButtWiper EX and I pick the shitpisser 5000 and you kill me and I die and you lose MMR and you don't, if I want to win I need to be looking at what you're doing, and pick something that if not outright beats that can at least have a chance of beating it. Even in an ostensibly cooperative game like Granblue Fantasy, if my build was chosen by writing numbers on a pencil and rolling it like a die and your build was meticulously calculated in a spreadsheet to optimize damage, you're going to get the MVP chest and also beat my ass in the "who can kill as many enemies as possible in this limited timeframe" contest. If I want to win at these things, I need to be able to outcompete with what other people are doing: that is what "The Meta" is.

Notice, however, that Arknights does not have either of these things. There is no direct PvP mode that is not untethered from account progress like Cannot's Cockfighting, the coop has no PvP outside of aaking the other guy's wisadel, and there are no rewards that require outcompeting other people to get. Arknights has and will likely continue to be a singleplayer game.

There is no meta because there is no metagame because there are no other players.

So then the idea of meta as an adjective for a unit becomes dubious, right? Meta in relation to what? Reward-giving content? That's Any Six-Star. You can beat basically any reward-giving stage in this game with Any Twelve Built Deployable Six-Stars, and you'll probably need a lot less than that. High-end IS? RA? CC? Vector Breakthrough? All of these modes incentivize different units, and once again they're all single-player. Unless you're pushing d18 IS (you aren't) or you're doing max risk CC (you aren't) you do not need to care like at all, and also that would still not be a metagame! That's just a game! Needing to bring units that can stall and kill highly buffed enemies under debuff conditions to clear max risk CC is not a "metagame" the same way needing to not die while killing the enemy in a soulsborne is not a metagame. Just because beating a game under specific conditions requires specific strategies does not suddenly manifest the invalidation of your clear just because someone else did it slightly quicker or more efficiently than you.

What would actually be a meta in this game would be if I got suspiciously wealthy tomorrow and held a recurring tournament with a $2 MILLION dollar prize pool for an account with only Ripresa built and everyone else was a penalty. Then an actual metagame would form where Ripresa is in SSS+ tier and every unit that was not Ripresa in permanent account damage tier overnight, and also this would not affect your ability to play base Arknights or receive rewards in it at all. A meta only affects your chances of winning within the scope of the competition. Someone hacking their career in Uma Musume does not affect your personal chances of winning the same way it would if you were in the pvp mode.

You may ask, why don't the devs care about this? Don't they care about balance? Well, balance isn't real. Not only is it not real, it's extra not real for singleplayer games, because AI enemies don't have feelings to hurt or wallets to close or games to uninstall. In that sense, hypergryph are incentivized to not block the average player from using who they want and also prevent the player from getting falling asleep in their chair from how simplistic and boring an operators kit is because both things will lead to a player quitting instead of paying money or attention.

Unless you specifically want to play the game as little as possible you should not be selecting for operators that mean you have to play the game (think about strategies) the least amount possible.