An Online Players Nagging Question: What the Hell is With Those Guys?

Recently I’ve come across a strange and awkward dilemma in the world of online playing. It’s something the writers of Seinfeld might’ve even come up with to explore in their own humorous style.

The world of online game playing is full of all types. It’s like those social studies classes or other general classes you had as a school kid: you’re there with all kinds. Although you’re in the gamer/geek culture bigtime, you still have to deal with a cross section of society, indeed a cross section of the world.

So recently, I’ve come across an odd situation or two online, and I’m not sure how to deal with it, what the correct protocol would be. Perhaps you can tell me.

I play a lot (I mean a LOT) of Half Life Deathmatch. There are numerous forms these servers and maps can take, including co-op, puzzles, and team matches. But the servers marked Deathmatch are definitely “let’s just kill each other” – endlessly. That’s what they’re for.

So the fifth or sixth time now, I encounter of couple folks playing on one of these who have decided amongst themselves to NOT kill each other, but simply kill the bots in this particular deathmatch map/server. A couple of times I found an individual player like this.

For understandable reasons, I come in with digital guns a blazin’, fragging them and bots alike with wild and bloody abandon.

Then I get yelled at. Bigtime. The most recent one involved two guys who didn’t really speak English (I have no clue what language it was, but perhaps Portuguese), and so it took them a lot longer to convey via text they didn’t want me killing them. They got downright obscene and abusive (which is really how I act in real life, especially when liquored up, so I shouldn’t have been upset at that, I guess).

Anyway, the point is: they were on a freakin’ deathmatch server. If they wanted to play teams, why were they on a freakin’ deathmatch server?? And why yell at me for simply doing what the damned thing was designed for.

This was on one of the famed TKO servers with bots, by the way.

So what is the protocol here? I left the game with the two foreign dudes who got abusive. I felt about as comfortable there as Johnny Rotten would at a Tea Party rally.

It’s a public server. It’s a deathmatch – not a team deathmatch server. Should I have stayed and insisted they play by the “rules?” Or should I leave since they were there first? But then what of others who want to play these servers as intended later on?

Other times, I kind’a felt sorry for the individual players who pleaded, then yelled, at me to stop killing them. I figured, wow, you gotta be a sad creature when you only want to interact with bots and not with real humans – online, that is. Either that or you grossly and strangely misunderstood the purpose. Perhaps you’re a little sloooow.

Either way, I felt sorry for them and left.

I had another experience where I came across two dudes playing another deathmatch server where they agreed to ONLY slug each other by throwing stuff – no weapons. I thought, what the hell…this looks like fun. And it was. Yeah, they were probably bending the true intent of the server. But it was innovative fun.

Anyway, give me your input. Tell me what the protocols are here?

Love, your Mr. Lahey