Areas with the strongest playerbases? "The Smacktalk Thunderdome"

Thanks for the shout out! Didn’t even need to advertise Toronto :slight_smile:

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Implicit in OP question: where the scrub metas at!!??

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Oslo best scrub meta EU:

http://www.acoo.net/anr-tournament/905/january-game-night/

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London/SE England

End of discussion.

Mod can we lock it down now?

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Funny peopel say “UK”, like all the good UK players live in the same neighborhood, you silly americans :laughing:

I wouldn’t even consider Sweden one meta and Sweden has 9m population compared to UK’s 60+ million. Only time “all the Swedes” play together would be Nordics and that includes Danes and Norwegians.

EDIT: Nordics also include a lot of Britts :laughing:

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Don’t you know Britain is about 5 miles across? Or twenty miles if you talk to Londoners

Personally I’m as far away from London as New Brunswick is from New York, certainly doesn’t feel like an all encompassing meta…

…well except for Laurie showing up everywhere.

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You know we are talking about parts of the US (e.g. New England, California) in much the same way as we are referring to the UK, which are similar in size or larger than the UK.

We know these areas are bigger than a neighborhood, but many of us drive for an hour or more to attend tournaments. Talking about areas any smaller than we have would be too granular of a discussion.

Of course, there is already the problem that very few players have played extensively in more than 1 meta, and even fewer who have done so evenly across card releases.

You should note that driving an hour or more from London will most likely still leave you inside London.

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From what I recall of my last time driving in London, that is a conservative estimate. The same (or at least similar) can be said about many major cities, despite its small size Boston traffic is stubbornly jammed, though New York, despite being massive, has remarkably efficient traffic flow (especially when compared to Boston).

London manages to be both massive and jammed, but the Tube can take you to several places.

i think Yoshi was poking fun - though the responses in the thread have actually been mentioning US cities rather than larger units see El-ads:

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Partly this, haha Boston, Philly, UK :laughing:, but also, I believe US players tend to drive more than at lest us Swedes to SCs and other tournaments.

The driving culture seems quite different, whereas a lot of US players have no problem drivign a couple of hours for smaller tournaments and for many hours for the larger tournaments, effectively creating a meta across great distances, few Swedes travel for anything but the largest tournaments.

So effectively, “a meta” in the US seems to span across a larger area than in Sweden. Stockholm meta is Stockholm meta, we rarely travel to other places and rarely get visitors, except for ANRPC and regionals, so the meta is in a huge 1 million population city that you can travel across in half an hour maybe.

Yeah, the driving, for us lunatics, makes a ‘meta’ strange. I think the ‘meta’ being referred are local play areas (the UK was cute one. Heard that Australian meta is BRUTAL.). My ‘local meta’ is Milwaukee, WI, USA, however, if there is a tournament of note within a 5-6 hour drive, I may show up to try and spoil some local’s day.

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I remember a snippet from a Bill Bryson book where he says that the Brits think 3 hours is an extraordinarily long drive, yet it’s what an American would drive to get a good taco.

The main aim of the ‘southerners’ at the recent Netrunner UK intercity was to stop Aberdeen winning. London to Aberdeen is about as far as you can drive in the UK really, and even then it’s around 500 miles? Or less than 90 mins on a plane :stuck_out_tongue:

You know, this sounds like it could be interesting to have a fun little tourney on-line with people signing up for teams based on region. Play some games on Jinteki.net/OCTGN and see how each ‘team’ does?

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550 miles, I’ve done it often enough! Amusingly its cheaper to fly from London to aberdeen than it is to get a train to Edinburgh so I don’t know what they were complaining about.

Driving to London is what you have to do to get a good taco in the UK as well!

Speaking of that aim it was a real bit of a downer to have people you’ve never met loudly wishing your team doesn’t win (from the Edinburgh arseholes we expected it of course). It’s led one of our team to swear off going to events in the future all together :frowning:

Oh no, that’s awful! Not the kind of atmosphere we wanted at all. I apologise if there was anything I said or did that contributed to that.

I must admit, I was a bit upset looking at comments made by some of the southerners beforehand along the lines of ‘well, obviously no-one wanted it to be in Edinburgh’. Erm, excuse me? Made me very glad when a ‘Northern’ (I mean, only Newcastle, so pretty much splitting the difference for you guys) team swung it.

My answer to them is now a very definite ‘we can have it somewhere south when the south are good enough to win it’.

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Everyone was really nice and no one said anything with malice in my presence, but when you hear the same joke in six different flavours (it was a funny joke when you did it at the start), and reflect on the effort made to get down to London for the first intercity…

For me it just led to bemusement, but then in my case it was tempered by the feel goods of winning a lot of games which wasn’t the situation for everyone.

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I can totally understand that, and I appreciate one of your guys in particular slogged his guts out to get there for the games, and had to face a long drive back in pretty shitty weather.

I’ll take this off this thread for now, I’ve dropped you a message on FB.

The average American where I live drives 3.5 hours to Bangor to do some weekend shopping about once a month.

The Boston meta doesn’t feel that strong to me. Half the field is usually jank. We only have ~8 Regular player and 16 is huge for a GNK.

I only really play at pandemonium, so maybe I’m just playing at the wrong place?