Meta doesn't die. It is however largely misrepreseted because the site meta stopped catering to it.
It's literally up to the mods to start taking comp games seriously for site to have a skill cap. As long as people are allowed to be moronic in game we'll never have a stable userbase in which people can improve in.
incidentally I have never played FP and was brought up on 163 and SDS and let me tell you those were stressful times trying to break into the group of jaguar, duckhunter, theeraser, fantastic, i don't even really remember who else it's been so long lol
why was the competition so successful back then when there were no mods? I don't think it's really fair to bring moderation into the question considering they weren't around back in the day to protect the integrity of party mafia either.
that just leaves the comped setups, and tbh, I doubt that's really the single factor that killed the skillcap.
mind you, I haven't played in ages, but before I stopped the thing I noticed was, with the growing userbase, interpersonal meta became less and less viable and even started getting called out as cheating. when I started here everyone played with the same people all the time because there just weren't that many people so it was easy to know everybody's tells.
if you don't allow meta and playing with your friends, if the game is anonymous and self-contained, clearly the skill level is going to drop because the complexity of the game is lowered.
besides that there are just dumb things that people do that they used to get shamed for doing but is apparently a townish thing to do now, like sheeping clears.
also, I don't even know why I'm replying as if my opinion is even valid these days. I didn't even read the whole thread whatever I'll post it anyways lol.
That'd be cool, like a round for the entire site spanning 6 months or like 10 rounds or something like that, and the top 3 of that get like a trophy mailed to their house or something
If you wipe everything on a regular basis, why not do it every six months, or annually? Whichever one, start it on July 1st, so you have a mid-year to mid/end-year season.
