Anyone who is aware of the competitive scene in Yu-Gi-Oh! knows that tournaments at any given time tend to have players running primarily a handful of deck types. These handful of decks are typically referred to as "meta" decks. Which decks considered meta frequently changes with the release of new cards and banlists and are usually so popular because they do very well. In the top 32 places of any Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament you will typically see 25-30 of the places being held by meta decks depending on the current state of the game and where the tournament was held. This has led to a lot of gripes from players who feel that it means you just have to fork over the money for a meta deck, which can be prohibitively expensive sometimes, if you want to do well in tournament play. However, I feel that while it is true that meta decks are typically easier to win with they are not necessary to do so and in fact are good for Yu-Gi-Oh! as a whole. It is true that meta decks frequently cost in the hundreds of dollars, quite a hefty entrance fee for someone who is new to the game to try and get a good deck for tournaments. Additionally, as new cards are released or as the quarterly ban list updates come out the meta decks are subject to change, requiring you to acquire a whole new meta deck if you want to stay "on top". However, I think that both the high cost of the meta deck components from vendors and the fluctuating decks are good for the game as a whole. When cards like Nekroz of Brionac (pictured below) hit peak prices of $100-120 it can easily be more worth it to just buy several of the packs that the card comes in and get other cards with it. This encourages players to buy packs rather than buying single cards from secondhand vendors in turn helping the company who makes the cards and encouraging the development of the game. The changing of which decks are considered meta also allows the game to evolve over time. If the game was focused solely on balancing as many different deck types/archetypes as possible then people would have no reason to branch out from decks that they have had for a long time and the game would get stale. As new good decks get released and the older decks have their over powered combos limited through the ban list the game evolves and the play style changes. This makes the game as a whole much more interesting and gives players a valid reason for continuing to invest in it. If I am going to keep buying packs I want to be continuing to gain enjoyment out of the game.
On top of all of this it is also definitely possible to do well in a tournament setting without a meta deck, though I will admit that it can be harder. I am an example, I placed at a regional tournament with a deck that cost slightly more than a nice meal depending on how much you cared if the cards were holographic or not. I assessed that the meta decks at the time had no good way of removing the primary monster card in the Battlin' Boxer archetype and made a deck centered around that monster and trap cards that locked down the popular decks. The popularity of meta decks in and of itself adds another layer of strategy to the game that players with non-meta decks can take advantage of. This allows players who are informed of the game to make good decks and do well in tournaments without necessarily needed a top of the line deck. So in conclusion, meta decks are good for the competitive Yu-Gi-Oh! scene because their shifting nature and popularity allow the game to change over time while still encouraging players to remain invested without necessarily drawing strategy out of the equation. Therefore you should ignore anything Zach has to say on this matter.
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I recently picked up Shadow of Mordor for Xbox and came across a game mechanic that can be quite annoying: unending waves of enemies. In Shadow of Mordor the orcs spawn continuously, frequently even within range of your vision so you can watch them appear out of nowhere. What this means is that if you get into a relatively large fight with orcs by the time you have finished killing all of the ones near you a whole new group has spawned and the process repeats itself indefinitely. Because of this any time I got caught while sneaking or had a tussle with a couple orcs I usually ended up running once the big mob arrived. Don't get me wrong, Shadow of Mordor is a great game otherwise this mechanic is just rather intrusive. I understand that open world games like this have to have enemies that respawn, and the point of this post isn't to say enemies should never come back, but to have them spawn continuously and rush at you non-stop. Shadow of Mordor isn't the only culprit here either. Big offenders I can think of are earlier CoDs, Far Cry 2, some Battlefields, and of course Neverwinter with the superfluous waves of enemies accompanying every single raid boss. Obviously MOBA's like League of Legends are different because the whole point of the minions is to spawn in a straight line, but outside of that and the potential for a few special missions in games where you are supposed to die and/or be on the run unending enemies reeks of bad game design.
This post is going to get a little more deep into the philosophical and semantic side of things. I will be explaining how "natural", and therefore also "synthetic", are effectively useless adjectives because there is always a more descriptive one.In normal conversation people bring up the word "natural" frequently, usually considering it a good trait that it was made by nature rather than by man. On the other side of the coin "unnatural" or "synthetic" is often used to describe things that are bad for you or not morally right. I find this distinction of natural being positive and unnatural being negative to be logically unsound on top of both descriptors largely failing to describe any traits about the object in question. The definition of natural is "existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind", while synthetic is defined as "noting or pertaining to compounds formed through a chemical process by human agency, as opposed to those of natural origin". These two adjectives are clearly opposites with the definition of each specifically mentioning "not the other". What does claiming that something is natural actually tell us about the object though? There are no distinct properties that only come from natural products and vice versa. Natural is often used to describe things that are healthier for human consumption but this is also obviously not universal. There are plenty of natural things that would kill you very quickly if you consumed them (like poison, bacteria, or viruses) and there are quite a few synthetic things that offer a lot of benefits through consumption (medicine for example). On top of being meaningless adjectives I find it can also be rather difficult to distinguish between the two in some cases, making them even more useless. As many people are aware dogs can trace their lineage back to wild wolves before humans domesticated them and bred them to have desirable traits as our pets. We selectively let dogs who had the traits we wanted breed to make sure that we got the best hunting, guard, cute, friendly, and/or playful dogs. We did the same thing with corn, just take a look at how drastically corn has changed through human intervention. Before humans corn kernels looked a lot like the tiny one pictured to the far left. However, even given these drastic changes largely due to human interference with the reproduction of these species people still consider dogs and corn natural (at least corn that isn't a GMO, but that's a whole different beast for another post). Clearly dogs and corn would not exist as they do today if humans hadn't artificially selected for certain traits so why don't we consider them man-made? Additionally, now they can grow, live, and reproduce largely without human interaction like a lot of other "natural" organisms so what traits exist in corn and dogs that distinguish them as such aside from their history?
On that note I have another hypothetical situation that blurs the line between natural and synthetic. Lets say we are a decade or so in the future and we have now mastered the creation of genomes and can make organisms from scratch. To prove a point we take some typical run of the mill grass, copy its DNA, and make an exact replica of it with our Genuine Genome Generator (patent pending). This grass was clearly made by people, we just watched ourselves do it. But, if I took the original and mixed it around with the new one it would be impossible to distinguish the difference. So what does calling the original organism natural and the manufactured one synthetic describe in this case? only its method of creation, every other trait is identical, none of its actual properties. So if we can have two identical objects, one of which being natural and one synthetic, then clearly they are not very useful descriptors. In rebuttal of this last point I have heard that there are cases where synthetic or natural implies certain properties. For example, synthetic oil used in cars has very different properties than natural oil. Thusly people often simply refer to it in short hand as synthetic oil because of the large difference in properties. In this case it seems like synthetic is being useful, but I disagree. Synthetic is merely a more general placeholder for something like 5W-30 (the temperatures that the oil is designed for), there are still much more descriptive adjectives to use. So in conclusion: natural and synthetic don't describe any actual properties of things and can in fact both describe objects that are otherwise identical making them useless adjectives. Try to remember this in future conversations when attempting to describe something. It is interesting, however, to think about how we consider the things we made to be of a different nature than those made by nature itself, even given that all humans occurred naturally from nature as well. If we are natural why are our creations not such as well? |
NicI'll write about science, philosophy, shows and video games. The first two frequently in regards to the latter two. Archives
March 2016
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