Like I said, I suspect the rise of the shield meta in 1v1. There's a few other players also in that space right now too. Last night's tournament was also very shield heavy.

Personally, my angle is that they may need a slight re-balancing to encourage a wider variety of fac-plopping to competitive play, as right now there's a very small handful of things you can actually do to survive against shieldbots.

The way I interperet it, it means... Something that is popular because of it's superb viability. Meta is "Do this or high chance to lose". Each map has a meta of it's own because of terrain. An example would be the flea meta on ravaged/trojan hills before the flea nerf. It was very, very hard to beat so it became a meta. Everyone copying it and trying it out, or trying to counter it.

"meta" is short for "metagame", which is the 'game' above the game itself. It consists of choosing which strategies (i.e. which factories or units to build) that are going to have an advantage without regard to what the opponent does during the game itself.

"The meta" is the strategy or strategies that are currently popular because a lot of players have decided that they are overpowered.

"Meta-" as a prefix (as in 'metagame') means, roughly, "something that refers to itself, but as a higher-level abstraction". For example, in computing, metadata is data attached to or contained within a file where the data is about the file itself. And so similarly, the metagame is a game about the game itself. For more examples, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta .

META = Most Effective Tactic Available

ktdm you were very slow to take your first four mexes, and made too much energy. The metal produced graph of the first 3 minutes tells the story. Your commander needed to project its presence onto the map instead of messing around in your base and at the edges of the map.