Yes, next month the UK starts it Store Championship season. Ridiculous isn’t it? By the end of May or beginning of June, Nationals will have occurred and so we need to start early.
These champs can be a dozen or so people up to 60 or 70. What size is the Store Championship where you are?
How does this compare to the number of people you get on a weekly game night? Our regular store nights are weird. Sometimes there’ll be one person, the next week 16 or more.
How many people do you get in your meat space (ooh matron)?
Various Weekly Pub Nights – 6 to 8
Game Night Kit Tourneys – 12 to 18
Store Championships – 20 to 25
Regionals – 40 to 50
Nationals (every 2nd year) – 60
Omaha has two meet ups (spellbound on Wednesdays and the game shoppe on Thursdays) but one is much better attended than the other. The speilbound meetup had sometimes as little as four and a couple of times as much as 16. We average about 7-8 a week.
Average of about 12 for regular meet ups in Cambridge, UK. All close tournaments (that I have been aware of since starting) are in London, so lots of players for those.
Our weekly meetups in the Provo, UT area vary from only 2-3 people to 10-12 people.
GNKs: 10-16 avg
Store Champs (in SLC): 36 players
Store Champs (in Provo area): 27 players
Regional (in Boise, ID): 26 players
Important to note that Boise is 6+ hours away from the Utah metas and was the closest regional even though Utah’s meta is bigger than Idaho’s. Our other options were Arizona (9 hours) or Colorado (10 hours). Utah really should get a regional next year, as evidenced by the strong Store Championship showing. Also the Utah meta is much bigger now than it was at the beginning of 2015.
We average around 4 people per meetup. I haven’t been able to show up in over a month, so hopefully it’s increased rather than decreased. That said, if I count the number of different people that could potentially show up… at least 8.
We’re probably going to be trying to get a SC kit and hold some kind of small tournament for it, especially with those J-How promos. We did get one last year, so it’s certainly possible.
I suppose an advantage to these super small metas is the guarantee of multiple copies of promos. Pretty nice in this case, eh?
I suspect the meta we all play in is significantly larger than our regular gaming group size.
I’m not sure when ‘meta’ started getting used to mean ‘the people I regularly play with’. We’re going to need a new shorthand word for ‘metagame’ at this point.
Well, certainly the meta we all take part in is different from our local meta. I’m pretty sure context is usually good enough for people to understand the general point when we speak of one or the other.
Also, I don’t know that “meta” specifically means “the people I regularly play with.” I think it’s just convenient due to our regular parlance with respect to specific metagames, and so a metagame would represent the group of people that take part in that metagame. In that sense, “meta” probably includes both definitions because of the symbolic connection between the players and the “meta.”
Only if it gets confusing. Context is, as you say, usually good enough.
Sure. I think many sentences could have much more clarity if most instances of ‘metagame’ were replaced by ‘game’, though.
But let’s really go for the throat and ponder - how big is a meta, really? For instance, the UK Nationals has over a hundred playing the game. But that metagame is a very strange product of disconnected regions of the UK (where players and their biases produce different equilibriums to other regions). So I’d say the metagame of Nationals is certainly ‘larger’ than the number of Nationals players alone, but it’s not obviously just the sum of all players the participants of regularly played with, either. Similarly, many players play online. How do we ‘count’ that gobal contribution?
So how ‘big’ is the metagame of an event? I’m really not sure how to assess that. But it’s probably not best expressed as just the sum of the people directly involved in the event(s) (and particularly not for rare or one-off events, which are likely much more shaped by factors external to the event than some equilibrium of the participants, as there’s no time for such an equilibrium to be established).
Conversely, questions like “How many people do you get in your meat space?” is much more well defined, but maybe not as interesting. So I’d argue there are two different questions here, and two different terms would be useful to avoid hiding that.
