Last night, I had a random thought to rewatch some of the games that I remember being nail-biting and have watched highlights and VODs of some of them. Looking back, it is incredible to see how advanced teams became and how much the gameplay, in general, has improved. Teams are becoming better with each day. They are much more cohesive and coordinated with the utility usage and site executes. The efficiency with which teams play is now at an all-time high.
Watching those games in chronological order made me realize something, so I'd like to point out a few things and hear your thoughts about it. It is going to touch on the effect meta had on changing the game for the better.
So, meta comps change all the time and after the initial "chaos" during the early days of the game with team comps being whatever teams felt like bringing out, we've mostly seen comps considered "meta" or "non-meta", often resulting in a "meta" win. Sentinel meta, flash meta, Viper + Astra meta, Jett meta... We've been through a lot. But I'd like to say something which may be controversial, and I will use the Jett meta as an example (as this is also the timeframe when I've started watching the Valorant esport).
During the Jett meta, your duelist usually was a cracked aimer or an operator player who was able to farm people on both T and CT side. This imbalance in meta made teams experiment with support agents to try to put their Jett's into advantageous positions. Eventually, all teams adopted the Jett as a constant in their team comps and experimented with an overpowered agent. Even though support agents were an afterthought, people slowly started tapping into the potential of agents like Breach, KAY/O, Skye etc.
My point is that , imbalance in the meta forcefully created a higher learning curve for the game, meaning that FOR PRO PLAY, imbalanced Jett meta was a good thing. In the Jett meta, a team that would put their star duelist into a better position to frag out tended to win more games. And to put them into a better position, you needed to be more efficient with agents around her. The same goes for counter strats for opposing Jett players. The skill ceiling was continuously being raised.
As people started to move on, players already put a lot of reps in on a lot of agents, and we were seeing a lot more people flexing different roles and playstyles. These flex players became the glue that would hold their teams together. All of this resulted in seeing a lot of non-duelist players finding themselves on top of the scoreboards. Once Jett was gone, meta was kind of stale again (we were seeing more and more mirror comps or comps built with very similar approach to the game in mind). Most changes in team comps were flex players swapping roles, though with a similar playstyle, or a simple agent swap in the same role (Omen became Brimstone for example). This would change soon as this staleness gave birth to the incredible creativity and mind-bending ideas. On the front of this craziness were none-other than PRX, but also FPX and Fnatic.
And here we are, Masters 2 just ended and 2 best teams were the ones that set this previously mentioned crazy idea train in motion. One can only assume what else can be on the horizon once more and more teams return to the drawing board and experiment with even more complex team comps and keep continuously breaking the "must pick agent X" stigma. And one can only assume how much the ceiling skill will be raised again because of it.
That's it from me, tell me what you think about this down below and enjoy the LCQs.
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