You know, it's really phenomenal how many intensely stupid people play on-line video games. And mind you, I don't mean the kind of stupidity that a doofus like Scot Peterson displays when his wife goes "missing"; i.e., showing little emotion, lying about an affair he had to know the police would uncover, selling her vehicle, etc. Compared to on-line gaming that stuff is mere surface level stupidity; i.e., the lack of IQ that comes without much effort. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the kind of jaw dropping, eye glazing, cuts-right-through-the-bone stupidity that requires serious effort and cultivation to achieve.
Because of my luck—I'm the only guy I know who regularly dies three times from the same redeemer blast in Unreal Tournament because the game keeps spawning me just in front of the blast wave—I naturally manage to run into all of these morons virtually every time I try to play on-line games. Tonight really took the cake, though, so I thought I would write up the experience. Don't worry if you find it too ridiculous to believe. I probably wouldn't believe it either if it hadn't happened to me.
I've recently acquired some long awaited free time, so I decided tonight was going to be fun. I started with my favorite game of late, Raven Shield (RS), joining a server playing a team survival game on the "Island Estate" map. I know that map relatively well, so I was looking forward to it. Or at least, I was looking forward to it until one of my teammates dropped a grenade at our feet seconds after spawning, killing about half the squad. Apparently he didn't get to the part of the training where you throw the grenade away from your own team. Or maybe he did, and he just didn't "get it". I don't know. I'm betting he was just one more jackass "grief player" because he got kicked from the server almost immediately. It seemed like my other teammates had already had enough of him.
The next round got off to a somewhat better start. I moved through the house with a couple of teammates, and we did pretty well overall. We took down several bad guys before we got nailed from behind. I was kind of thinking that the guy bringing up the rear would be covering our six, but I guess he wasn't ready for such a difficult concept. At any rate, it was then I discovered why my team was doing so poorly: two of our guys were away from the keyboard (AFK) altogether, and a third was prone in an alley with a sniper rifle. Now, for those who haven't played RS, or pretty much any other video game, a sniper rifle is the kind of gun you want to have when firing from great distances. At most, that idiot was about ten feet from the nearby door that he was covering, and, what's more, his position was actually vulnerable to fire from several second story windows.
In other words, not only did this goofball make roughly the dumbest possible selection of weapon, he didn't even pick a decent spot from which to use it. I and others got to watch as the idiot got killed easily by flanking fire, followed shortly thereafter by the two fools who were AFK. It's probably fair to say that these were the high points of my night, really, for it only went downhill from there. I hopped from server to server, trying to find one bloody decent game (i.e., a game in which my teammates actually rank higher in IQ/skills than, say, cabbage), but it was to no avail.
Seriously, I saw it all tonight. I saw people trying to throw grenades through wooden doors. I saw people repeatedly using sniper rifles on the smallest maps, despite the "encouraging" suggestions to the contrary from their teammates. I saw people using shotguns at extreme range on the "MP Peaks" map. I saw people throwing tear gas grenades, then walking into the cloud without a mask. I couldn't believe it. Eventually, I just gave up on RS and decided to try a different game.
So I fired up another multi-player gem, Battlefield 1942 (BF1942). The level of idiocy in BF1942 is so high on average that I've actually written separate articles about it not once, but twice. Given this, I probably shouldn't have expected any better tonight, but, hey, maybe I'm some kind of optimist after all? I don't know. What I do know is that the idiots who were playing RS must have followed me onto the BF1942 servers. I joined a server running the "Kharkov" map and wasn't surprised—again given my luck—to find myself on the team with only one lone control point and two enemy tanks shelling it. With my luck I'm used to being spawn killed constantly, so that wasn't what bothered me.
What bothered me was that not one of my teammates could be troubled to suit up as an anti-tank soldier! Why, you ask? Simple: because none of them were interested in stopping the spawn killing. They were much more interested in shooting each other while trying to commandeer the two planes that were available outside our base. After a minute or so of dying pointlessly and hopelessly, while shouting for assistance with the enemy armor, I gave up and left that server.
The subsequent romp through half a dozen servers or so didn't get any better. On "Wake" island, my teammates couldn't be bothered to help take the air field. It's only the most important control point on land, of course, but they had better things to do; i.e., driving a jeep of explosives into their own teammates, trying to coordinate jumping in and out of a jeep for sake of a "stunt movie", etc. On "Iwo Jima", they couldn't be bothered to try to take the air field or the high ground. They preferred to stay in the middle of the island and get slaughtered by each barrage from the nearby enemy battleship. On "Omaha Beach", nobody could be bothered to mark a target for naval bombardment. Oh, don't get me wrong; we had plenty of scouts, apparently doing their best not to kill the enemy with wholly ineffectual sniping. They just couldn't be bothered to mark a target. Eventually, I tired of the smacktards and decided to try one more game.
I knew I was really taking my chances with Tribes 2 (T2), because the kind of playing experience it delivers depends radically on the caliber of players on the server. I know this because I was reminded of it shortly after joining. I joined a server running the "Katabatic" map, which is one of my favorites, and I quickly noticed that my team needed someone "farming" (i.e., deploying turrets, repairing stuff, etc.). I don't really like that role much, and I'm not all that good at it, but I suited up for it nevertheless and did my best. Again I didn't know what I was getting myself into.
A few minutes later, a pair of enemy heavy offense (HO) came into our base and blew me to hell while I was trying to repair an inventory station. They proceeded down to our generators, deployed a remote inventory station, and pitched a tent. Despite our team having no remote inventory stations deployed yet (that's why I was trying to repair the inventory station, mind you) and despite our team's secondary base being in shambles, nobody could be bothered to help kill the two HO in the basement. They were too busy doing more important things like shocklancing a transport to see how far it moves, getting into shouting matches ("Quiet! No! Quiet! No! Quiet! No!"), and so forth.
Obviously, it wasn't a good night. All told, I probably tried a half dozen servers or so for each game before calling it quits. The roughly two hours that I had to play were little if any fun, being filled instead with frustration at constantly finding myself on a team of morons. Now that my free time is spent I probably won't be able to sleep, for I'm still pissed off at having my time wasted by all the fools with whom I had the great misfortune of being paired tonight. On nights like this one I really wonder why I even bother trying to play. It seems like the Internet is jam packed with morons, and I naturally get to meet them all. Here's hoping that others are having better luck.
05/13/2003