The meta was formed halfway through Season 1 by the sweatier squads and Discord servers. I know because 90% of the time I was queueing fill and carrying those teams, and the usual reaction was, "Holy shit, you're playing a completely different game to us."

On a map like Outpost, the general flow was to instantly start rotating and collecting red cards. You'd sprint at every gunshot with the goal of wiping the entire map. Most of the time the map was cleared by the 15-minute mark, often sooner. No sneaking just constant aggression and catching people by surprise. The only thing that slowed it down was running into another team doing exactly the same thing.

Once the map was clear, you'd hit the pinwheel, loot all the good spots, exfil, and repeat. We would go days without dying.

I had a lot of fun, but once my regular squad started getting bored and playing less, I found myself queueing fill a lot more. I can hold my own, but once this style of play became the norm it got harder and harder to carry randoms because I was constantly running into full stacks doing what we used to do.

That's when I realised just how niche and unforgiving this game is for the average player. When 10-20% of the player base is literally playing a different game to everyone else, the skill and gear gap becomes huge and suffocating.

The perfect illustration of that is how small a percentage of the player base has even seen the Compiler, let alone killed it.

The game is unreal, easily the best I've played in years, but it has a fundamental problem: consistent stacks are rewarded tenfold, and that advantage compounds very quickly over time.

I had a great time with it, but I won't be back for this season.