I’ve been playing FPS games since I first got my grubby little paws on Doom way back when. Since then I was hooked, and my diet of choice always contains at least one FPS, just to keep me regular. After the advent of Unreal Tournament, I started getting into competitive gaming, facing off against up to hundreds of other players in tests of skill and reflexes. After a while I improved, I still remember my first win, and since then I feel I’ve become an above average FPS gamer… yet all to often I hear, and even bellow it myself from time to time, the words that should make any gamer roll their eyes: “Cheap!”
Like a sparrow that learn to play games, you hear this mating call litterally hundreds of times a day if you play in public T.S.\Vent Channels (The main reason I don’t any more). Yet these people screaming it are often the very first people to use a 40MM grenade on one guy 6ft away, who’s looking the other way and having latency issues. Why do we scream cheap at the screen whenever we’re taken down in some way? Now some might argue “Because it takes no skill!” or “Because you’re not supposed to use that weapon like that!” or some other .. excuse. I used to know a guy, who turned out to be a massive jerk, who whenever he died, he would litterally scream the excuse into his mic some excuse or other “Oh my god I shot him!” or “God damn lag!” or my favorite “Oh fuck off! No way!” He could never, ever accept the real reason he, and the countless other sparrows out there that feel the need to scream something is cheap, is simply: Because it killed you. You where simply outplayed.
A sure sign of an inflated ego is never ever being able to accept you where outplayed. That you lost because the other person was better than you, and had the foresight to use ALL their tools available to them to make sure you died. In a game like, say, Modern Warfare 2, firing an RPG at an infantry means he’s now boned against other things, such as choppers, harriers and AC-130s (Admittedly they’ll probably still get slaughtered, but that’s a rant for another post) and in games such as Battlefield, you’re now bummed against tanks.
Rambo <3s pwning scrubs with his M60. So should you.
You see, I used to be firmly in the sparrow camp. I’d shout “CHEAP!” all the time along with everyone else. I’d groan every time a sniper hit me. I’d foam every time a 40mm grenade hit me square in the chops. And then I played Bad Company 1. The single player in this game essentially taught me to use everything I had to hand. I had a 40MM Grenade Launcher, why wasn’t I using it? I had a rocket launcher and there are three guys in that house. May as well! So I did, and I learnt. Few weeks later, Bad Company 2 is in my 360, i’ve just unlocked the M60 MG with ACOG scope and I finish that game with 50+ kills and a mere 7 deaths… and then I got neg rated, and told that the M60 is “overpowered” … Oh really? If it’s so imba, why are these legions of drones not using it?
And this is where I’m going to end it. If something is so overpowered you can’t beat it, use it. Prove it’s overpowered to the devs, keep using it until you see change. This also goes to you Street Fighter scrubs who complain that Sagat’s SHK is overpowered yet can’t win a game for shit with him. Even better, go win EVO with him, and tell everyone why you did. This goes to all you crying runts who think the M60 is so bad, if that’s so, why don’t you all use it? Hell, you’ll even get lots of bonus points for ressing and healing people as a medic. That’s good right!
Every time you lose in a game, it should be a learning experience, so make sure you learn, or you’ll keep padding my kill count.
{ 3 } Comments
Well~ I’m somewhat half-inclined to agree; it goes against what I said in an earlier blog post of my own, though — http://gravec.at/2009/where-is-the-line-drawn/ (you’ve probably read that one), but I still feel there’s a certain line between an M60 being “cheap” because it’s too good at killing people, or — say — someone running around at the speed of light knifing people in the face while never firing a single bullet.
There’s a difference between using the tools given to you in a way that your opponents don’t like, and outright abusing the system and playing the game in a way that was never intended in the first place. If you sneak up behind someone and knife them in the back, mow them down with a machinegun, blow them to messy chunks with a well-hidden block of C4, or any of these other “cheap” methods of victory, that could still be attributed to skill and tactical thinking; on the other hand, doing things like abusing geometry glitches, using weapons in bizarre and completely unintended ways, or — as with ChromeHounds — building the mechs in ridiculous and implausible ways that exist only due to the poor planning and inadequate QA by the developers, that’s still something I’d call “cheap” and decry at every turn.
But I suppose it’s all relative.
I’ll give you that. I didn’t stray into exploits for this post, only people screaming something is cheap because they died to it, and only because of that. The Knife\Akimbo builds in MW2 are an exploit, as was CH way back when it was alive.
I was planning on making another post at some point talking about exploitive play and how that’s just poor sportsmanship. This, however, is people continually running head long into a machine gun, and then saying it’s the machine gunners fault, because heaven forbid they’re just stupid or something silly like that.
Technically the akimbo shotguns thing isn’t a sploit, it’s just shockingly poor design. The knife thing though, yes.
But yeah, I agree with you on that level: While you’ll never be able to instil in me any modicum of respect for “snipers” in online games (the real-world ones, that’s another matter), it’s just ludicrous to run headlong into a deployed machinegunner and expect to survive.
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