Purge Gaming?

[Rallick]

Is this the 'now' typical Purge Gamer???

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[Breand]

I know maybe about 2 months ago something clicked and Ive become a real asshole in Left 4 Dead. I just can't stand playing with shitty players, and yes maybe my limited amount of playtime has something to do with it. An L4D run could take up to 2 hours and if I have a crappy teammate I feel like Im wasting my time. And with the understanding there are always new players, I just feel like the game has been out for too long to have so many crappy players still. The game desperatley needs a global ranking/matching system.

But I dunno, all the best players, at least in L4D are people my age. All the crappy ones are teenagers who all think they kick ass with the hunting rifle..

[Rallick]

Some of the people I play with semi regularly laugh at someone that takes the Hunting Rifle in a VS match. We know that team is going to get hurt bad and fast.

[Slamz]

Hmmm.

I dunno.

I think I've always been like this.

I think it comes down to whether or not you're a "gamer". They might be 12 year olds on summer break with all the free time in the world but they aren't gamers because they don't take the game seriously and therefore tend to ruin it for those who do.

People like me are gamers. Doesn't matter if I have 15 minutes or an entire 72 hour three day weekend. If I'm going to game, I want to do it with people who can get their game face on. I don't necessarily care if someone sucks as long as they're a gamer and therefore are going to be making an effort to not suck. What I hate are non-gamers who suck joining up into my games and are apathetic about improvement, or are simply sucking on purpose because that's their particular method of having fun -- by doing really stupid stuff.

I mean sometimes I want to do silly crap but usually I can't bring myself to stick with it if I can't also make it work in a reasonably competitive fashion. The gamer in me refuses to lose consistently just because I wanted to try some humorous theme.


Maybe as you get older you tend to become more of a "gamer", and maybe this comes from learning to appreciate the free time you have, but I dunno. I probably still have the pages of notes I took while playing my first PC game ever: Starflight. I've always been a gamer.

[Vllad]

I agree with Slamz, while we are older and more casual then hard core gamers we are still gamers as is everyone on this board.

The guy in your link is not a gamer. Gamers will always have more then an hour a night to play. I am a gamer. When I got kids and responsibilities I sacrificed sleep for play time. I learned to work on 4 hours of sleep. That is what a gamer does.

While we are not 18 and playing 18 hours a day we still put gaming before many other things. We don't fall under his catagory because compared to him we are less casual then he is. When we play games we enjoy we can put 60 people in a game that people play anywhere between 5 hours a day to 10 hours a day.

To us that is casual.

In the end whether we like to admit it or not (Hoof) everyone on this board is a gamer and always will be regardless of what they have going on in there life. That is why we play with each other.

All of us however do suffer from the Leprocy effect.

I don't play or acknowledge anyone not in Purge unless I am made to. My playing time it precious enough that I will never ever ever ever PUG. I don't think I have grouped with a non Purge guy since the DAOC.


Vllad

[Slamz]

Yeah, that's a phenomena worth pondering.

Not, "why doesn't The Purge like to play with outsiders". We know the answer to that.

But rather, "why are so many outsiders such worthless, annoying, cock gobbling muffin heads?"


I don't recall it being like this in EQ. Maybe because back then, PC gaming was a more dedicated hobby and simply having a computer and an internet connection meant you were at least somewhat serious about it. I mean, VZ had some annoying people, some stupid people, some cheaters and some part-timers, but I think it was mostly full of gamers.

People these days tend to just be, on average, real clueless fell-off-the-tractor fucktards who couldn't find their own ass with both hands and a full body mirror. If hatred for pugs were corn flakes, The Purge would be General Mills. Instead of just being a colony of good gamers in a world of good gamers, we ended up more like an island fortress of gamers assaulted on all sides by a sea of brainless zombies and woe unto he who ventures forth from our walls. We got this thing formed up and the doors slammed shut just in time.



And maybe that's the other part of why these quest based games seem to suck more today than they ever used to. We didn't change. The gaming population changed. It's full of non-gamers. It's not worth your time to try and find a decent pug that's going to stick together and focus on a task for more than 5 minutes. Champions Online is, in fact, better than WOW in a number of ways but because we entered it with fewer people and because pugs these days is like chewing on broken glass, it's not going to be as successful with us. The gameplay is better but the available population of who to play it with is slim, and we'd rather solo than pug it.

[Slamz]

Incidentally, I was also thinking that WOW-style gameplay is particularly impacted by non-gamers. I think it has to do with a combination of group size and individual dependency.

For example, in an FPS that's, say, 20 on 20, it really doesn't matter if a couple people on your team are flaming idiots. You come to expect that. But because they are 2 out of 20 and your ability to contribute is not strongly based on THEIR ability to contribute, they aren't going to ruin your game.

When it's a 5 man WOW group, though, 1 idiot ruins it. Your ability to contribute as a tank depends on the healer. The healer depends on the tank. The group depends on the DPS and crowd control. 1 idiot ruins it.

Or when it's a 40 man raid designed so that all 40 people have to be paying attention, again, 1 idiot ruins it. In an FPS based around individual contribution, a few good gamers can pick up the slack of the chimp with a keyboard. In a PvE RPG setting, there tends to be little room to pick up someone else's slack.


WOW was our "perfect storm". We got lucky. Nothing in particular about WOW made it work. It has a lot of elements that could have made it fail. It worked for us because we had a perfect storm of gamers ready for a new game and we brought them all together and exceeded critical mass. WOW could have flopped for us pretty easily, I think. If it came out tomorrow, I think it would flop for us. Future Purge games are either going to have to duplicate that "perfect storm" where we can hit the ground with 30 people or else they're going to have to be more supportive to games with different schedules who don't like it when morons can ruin their game.

[Fretty]

I agree with all you guys.

And Breand, wow, you and I alike. For me it was Gears of War 2, but never the less, I started getting REALLY mad/frustrated/annoyed when I would play with people, who I believed, didn't have the right level of skill to be playing.

I've always been competitive but lately I'm getting it's not just about being competitive, it's also about winning. Mainly about winning. I don't expect to win all the time, but I expect to put up a damned fight either way, and keep it close.

I feel a rant coming on, so I'm going to stop here. Consider yourselves lucky. =)

[Jakensama]

I was going to finally pick up left4dead from a bargain bin, but I wouldn't want to offend Breand with my noobishness, so I guess I won't.

[Hoofhurr]

I'm an L4D noob. Some shit you just can't know without experience like kiting the tank around the airplane. The expert level is fucking hard I have to say and if in the end the strategy is to group up and melee as hard as you can then I start to get bored.

[Slamz]

I'm an L4D noob. Some shit you just can't know without experience like kiting the tank around the airplane. The expert level is fucking hard I have to say and if in the end the strategy is to group up and melee as hard as you can then I start to get bored.

I haven't played L4D in ages. Used to be you could all hide in the closet and spam melee and nothing could touch you but I thought they were doing something to nerf that.

[Fretty]

There is a delay on melee now, so no more spam meleeing.

[Rallick]

The delay/fatigue is only in the VS mode.

They also made the Tank hit multiple people so crouching together to spam the tank means all 4 will get hit.

The thing is you don't need all these cheap tactics to do well. Just need to learn to play and most of all...learn to play as a team. L4D is NOT a solo/single player game in VS mode. If you want solo play do the Campaigns.

[Hoofhurr]

I've only played the coop. What's the VS mode like comparatively?

[Rallick]

I only ever really played the Coop mode to get my achievements. After that it's pretty much all VS. I find it more exciting and tends to be slightly different all the time. You can have the chance at a good random team or a really really bad one. In VS one person can screw the whole team.

Oh...and playing the Infected can be pretty fun. Surprised you never did VS yet.

[Hoofhurr]

I've been in pretty hardcore single player mode since having a GF. If I can't hit save game and run I get nervous.

[Breand]

Versus mode is a hundred times better than coop mode. I think I stopped playing coop mode about a month after release. It is just days and days of fun playing as infected, or killing people playing infected. It rarely gets old. The AI just can;t come to anything close to what players can do with special infected.

Ill play with any friend, no matter their skill level. I don't care about losing if a player is learning and showing improvement, a lot of it is just repetition and understanding all the maps to take advantage of the terrain. My frustration has more to do with players who actually think they are good and try to be leader but suck, kids who talk all the time and don't understand the depth of play required, rage quitters who can't stand losing a round thereby creating a cycle of suck for themselves since they are only satisfied playing against crappy teams to placate his own ego, and opposing teams who will all go autoshotty and abuse every nook and cranny and somehow think they are good players.

[Breand]

I've been in pretty hardcore single player mode since having a GF. If I can't hit save game and run I get nervous.

There's no penalty to leaving games, and as long as you try to do it at the beginning or end of rounds, most players wont care. There is an autofill system so when you leave, you get replaced with another player...usually.