For game designers, encouraging aggression is often a good thing. Too many players of StarCraft or even regular combat games end up "turtling", dropping initiative wherever possible to make their games slow and boring while playing as safe as possible.
But in other games, often of multiplayer variety, hyper-aggression can sometimes ruin pacing in the other direction. Imagine spawning into a game with dozens of mechanics to learn, but finding that the prevailing strategy of enemy players is to arrive directly into your base and overwhelm you with a large set of abilities, using either their just-large-enough HP pool, or some mitigation ability, while you were still curiously investigating mechanics and working on defenses.
Some players find this approach fun, and this may even be the appropriate situation for games of a competitive variety, where the ability to react to unexpectedly aggressive plays is an exciting element for both players and spectators.
Plus, this is a very necessary setup for speedrunners, who often optimize to find the best way of trivializing singleplayer encounters.
But other games have something of a more casual focus, which can give a sour feeling when trying to bring people into the experience without having to reflexively react to players that are abandoning caution. Even when a game isn't casual, aggression metas can trivialize the "ebb and flow, attack and defense" mechanics that the game traditionally tries to teach. This can also lead to speedruns becoming less interesting because one mechanic allows a player to skip much of what makes a game enjoyable (which can sometimes be solved by "No XGlitch%" run categories)
So, the prompt branches into a few questions:
- What are fun occasions you've seen where players got absolutely destroyed for relying on various "rush metas" in certain kinds of games, because witty players knew just how to react?
- What are some interesting game mechanics you've seen that don't ruin the fun of the game, but force players to consider other mechanics they'd otherwise just forget about in order to have a "zero HP, max-damage" build?
- What are some games you know of that are currently ruined by "Aggression metas", and what ideas do you have for either players or designers to correct for them?
Fighting games are a genre where it makes sense to push aggression meta. At times, people have wished that the genre allowed for more defensive counterattacking, but it's not hard to predict how that would look in effect; two players both staring each other down waiting for the other to make a punishable move.
Basically, fighting games don't have other mechanics outside of direct combat interactions that allow for fun decision-making. There's fringe stuff like when someone has power-ups that don't require landing hits (eg, Phoenix Wright in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3) but they don't involve much decision-making.
I think the only time rush is an issue in games like Starcraft, thus making it an example, is at the low level of play where people don't know how to react. So, once players get experience in the mechanics, it's basically fixing itself. Other games can sometimes have that issue at all levels of play though.
There are tons of decisions to make at any given time in a fighting game outside of trying to be on offense. That's why it's more of a recent trend to add mechanics to incentivize aggression. And yes, the fact that rushes tend to only terrorize lower levels of play is why it's more of a gimmick than a feature.