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| Re: Halo Multiplayer Guide-Condoning cheapness?! | |
| Posted By: vector40 <foo@berkeleyhigh.org> | Date: 3/13/04 8:21 p.m. |
In Response To: Re: Halo Multiplayer Guide-Condoning cheapness?! (XLNC) : Spawn killing is my sore spot. The spawning person, sometimes, has no chance
I don't buy this. People say "I have no chance!" But what they really mean is "You're making it really hard for me!" Well, yeah. It's called good strategy, and it's how the game is elevated to something more complex than a push-shove of pistol skills. I have always held and always will, save for evidence to the contrary, that no tactic, weapon, vehicle, or methodology in Halo is unbeatable. I may be proven wrong; there may be a glitch or scheme that is literally unanswerable, and I'll eat my words when that day comes. But right now, aside from hacking, the only reason you can't beat something is because you lack the skill to do so or because you don't want to try. Yeah, maybe somebody pots you as soon as you spawn. Pain in the ass, I'll grant that. Try jumping and evading as soon as you appear, trying to get out a grenade; if you just keep spawning here, you can wear them down by attrition. Or hell, you have teammates, right? You can swamp them en masse; no camping "ambush" technique works against multiple attackers -- it turns into a fight, and you can win a fight. Right? The point is, what people really mean when they say "This is cheap" is "This is very difficult to beat using my usual tactics." And that's a cryin' shame. But it's "very difficult," not "impossible," and moreover, you can change your tactics. oh jeez. I'm sure it will kill ya. If you are losing at a game, change the game. Taken to the uppermost extreme, of course, this suggests that the only real way to ensure victory at Halo is not to play, but if you compromise this objective with the more cushy goal of having fun, you will end up at the happy bridge of taking any tactic on the level it's offered, confronting it on those terms, but if you can't beat them that way, stepping it up to another level. Sure, okay. Fight this guy with pistols in Battle Creek. Good luck and god bless, but if he's a pistol maestro that can tune your accordion 9 times out of 10, then staying in this paradigm is a recipe for failure. The degree to which people don't realize this is astonishing, and every time I hear some story about how someone got beaten, it ends up involving the same thing over and over and over. "I ran in, saw him, and he headshotted me. Repeat x20. I lost." Awesome. But you know, you don't have to play that, and if you're losing, you shouldn't. Grab a damned rocket launcher and sit on the roof. Is this CHEAP? Is this WRONG? No, this is the NEXT LEVEL. Anybody who can't see how to combat a tactic will decide automatically that it's unbeatable, which is where this kind of thing comes from. But nothing is unbeatable. The guy with the rocket launcher can be preempted by a well-placed grenade or a quick snipe. Or maybe he can't -- and maybe you need to step up your tactics again. (Hit him with a beer bottle... er, well...) The refusal, inability, or plain lack of interest in seeking out these new counters is the only thing that spawns ideas like "dishonor," "cheap tricks," and "unfair playing." It might piss you off, but it's part of the game. Last night, I'd corralled Orion into playing with me a little, and we were squatting on Wu_Tang_Clan (a nice Death Island server, currently configured for CTF), knocking games around with whomever showed up. It wasn't long until we had a full game, 4 on 4, and were having a lot of fun. Some of the players weren't that great, but some were very good, strategically at least. After a while, the teams sorted out with Orion and three others on one side, myself with some fairly inexperienced players on the other. I hadn't quite realized how, shall we say, tank-oriented some of those players were, but it became pretty clear. In short, we ended up with a tank parked right outside our base, on the ground floor, "dug in" over on the sloped ramp with the body facing away to prevent sniping, turret facing us. On the other side, way over on the Shade ridge, was another tank, watching our other door. On top, a third tank was sitting literally on top of our teleporter, either blocking it, driving on top so we'd die as soon as we touched the teleporter (not ever getting through -- bodies would fall on the near side of the 'porter, as if the killingness was sent through ahead of time), or sitting next to it ready to zap any interlopers with the tank gun. Meanwhile, their fourth player (at the time, Orion, but we played for a long time, and things shifted around) kept running back and forth with a Banshee, grabbing our flag and making off with it. None of this was helped by the fact that my team, while not the worst players ever, was decidedly overwhelmed by this level of play; a number of games ended with nobody on my team having either any captures or any kills. In short, nothing but deaths. hoo boy. Was this infuriating? You bet. Was this enough to slowly drive me insane, and push my blood pressure to dangerous levels? I think I almost had an aneurysm. Was this even, after a while, fun? Frankly, no. I kept playing because it was excellent practice, and exquisite training both tactically (one-against-many) and strategically (how to break a stranglehold). I acknowledged that I was human, and after a while I had to stop. The point, though, is that while this series of games (we went for hours) was not particularly enjoyable, not exactly fairly based (these teams were not what I would call even), and not even necessarily productive, there was nothing "cheap" about them. The other team was playing a nearly flawless strategic game, and it was more than making up for any shortcomings in personal skill. Because that's the point, really. Halo, and skill at Halo, is not about who can snipe faster, lob grenades faster, or pistol the most enemies in the least time. That's one piece of it, but only one, and you don't even have to be very good at that to potentially win. Strategy, teamwork, psychology, these are all serious aspects of the game, and if you ignore them you will castrate your game. That's it. That's all. And that's why these people get so irritated when people show up doing things that give them an advantage, because Joe Honorable is only playing a small slice of Halo, and within that realm, these things ARE "cheating." If we're playing soccer, and I whip out a blackjack, beat the goalie to death, and carry the ball into the goal, that's cheating. But in Halo, winning is defined by the neat little scoreboard at the end, and that's pretty clear. It doesn't award points for style, honor, or fairness. It doesn't care that you lost while putting yourself at a huge disadvantage by ignoring entire, important elements of the game. If it did care, it would probably laugh at you. How is the player who plays without strategy any better than a player who plays without zooming, jumping, or turning left? It's equally stupid and equally pointless. I won very few games last night, but in the ones I mentioned, I pulled off a few coups. In short, I discovered that the only way to break this lock was to -- you guessed it -- not even try. They had us sewn up, and the effort I would put into chipping away at their setup would be easily matched by retaliatory maintenance on their part. But if I could squirm away, grab a Banshee, and literally sprint to the other side of the map -- crushing opponents en route if I had to, blitzing by anybody in a vehicle, but never stopping -- I could grab their flag and, with luck, haul ass back home and slip it in for a capture before they could stop me. This all was made possible by the fact that 100% of their forces were committed on the offensive, leaving their base almost entirely unguarded; if I could escape the gauntlet, I had a clear map. This was not skill. It was strategy. But Halo is a war, not a duel, and playing bad but smart will beat good but stupid any day.
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