Share your online game asshattery

Cafe Society
1

Last Friday, my friend and I were playing Planetside, and we decided to be asshats. Not TKing asshats, mind you, but asshats nonetheless.

Planeside is a FPS fought between 3 factions- Blue, Red, and Purple (they have names but its simpler this way, in Halo-type fasion ). Each player is allowed to have 4 characters per server. You are allowed to have characters from different factions on the same server.

My friend and I were playing ‘opposing’ factions on one continent. I was a purple guy and he was a red guy. We had some sniper duels amidst a huge D-day type invasion by the purple guys, and had some great laughs. But battlefield attrition drove us to boredom- the purple guys couldn’t push their beach head forward, the red guys were turtling in and bringing in reinforcements. We started to get bored.

Then I had an idea. Both of us had characters from the Blue team. It dawned on us that both of us knew EXACTLY where the red and purple armies were concentrated- if we switched to our blue players we could wreck havoc on BOTH factions! So we logged off and logged on as our blue guys, got in a liberator bomber and told some other bomber pilots “HAY U WANT SOME FREE KILLZ AND PWNAGE?” and they said “YA KOOL THAT ROXXORS!” so we had these other guys follow us to the huge battle.

Now, 5 bombers may not be much, but in this game, a bomber flying at max altitude can only be feasably destroyed by dedicated AA units/vehicles and fighters. Even with zero coordination, each bomber just unloading pell-mell over the red base caused an enormous influx of kills. Our bomber got 17 kills alone, including 3 aircraft our tailgunner shot down

Why is this asshattery? Well, technically we ‘spied’ which is looked down on in this game. However, the temptation for sabotage and espionage is too great when it is simple enough to ‘change sides’ whenever you want. Frankly it makes the game more dynamic, rather than the more common reason for changing sides (your side is losing, so you switch to the ‘winning’ side- pretty soon EVERYBODY is on the winning side and there is NOTHING left to fight over )

2

Online game asshattery? I can think of numerous examples done to ME, but only one quasi-intentional one by me.

Back in 1998 or thereabouts, Ultima Online was first released. My buddies and I were very excited, and were inveterate good-guy players for about… a couple of months. At that point, we realized that there were very, very few monsters to go whip ass on, and that being a tailor/blacksmith/cook/etc… in town was the way to make money, but that you couldn’t really leave town without risking a lot to player-killers (i.e. chumps who would just ambush you and steal all your stuff when you were dead).

The biggest gripe among players at the time was that the pk’ers were just doing it to get good stuff, and they weren’t willing to put in the work to get it legitmately. Basically, that they weren’t role-playing the game.

Since monsters/animals were few and far between, but there were literally hundreds of players running around, me and my buddies decided:

  1. There are evil alignments for a reason. Surely the Origin guys put that in there for evil characters.

  2. It’s not unrealistic at all to assume in a medieval-esque online world, that there would be cut-purses, brigands and highwaymen.

  3. We decided that we’d be those cut-purses, brigands and highwaymen.

So, after getting our original occupational characters(tailor, etc…) to buy/make some equipment and trade it with each other to equip ourselves, we decided to go into our own “legitimate business”. We had clothing that one of our tailor characters had dyed to match the forest green, decent weapons, and the “hide” skill.

Our usual MO was to lurk near a bridge or some other choke-point, and spring out and say something like “Your money or your life!” And, true to our word, if they coughed up any money and good stuff, we’d let them go. If they ran or fought, well, we’d usually take them out, and steal all the good stuff.

This is where it gets funny… UO had a feature used for animals mostly where you could butcher/skin carcasses and get skins and meat for trading and eating. If you used it on a dead person, you just got a big pile of guts, and the person had to walk all the way to some kind of temple to resurrect, instead of walking to their body, or resurrecting on the spot.

So, we’d usually gut the people we killed and scatter guts everywhere.

This would usually piss off people beyond reason- we’d get real-life threats from people!

Some players agreed with us and thought it was legitimate and would get bandit-hunting expeditions together and come after us. That was always fun!

We finally quit playing when Origin never did anything about the instability of the Internet at the time- it was not uncommon at all to get killed due to net lag instead of anything stupid you’d done.

That’s about the only example of online game asshattery I can think of having perpetrated, and I’m not quite sure it was so asshat-ish considering the circumstances.

3

I’m not sure if this is exactly “asshattery”, but whenever I’m playing any multiplayer game competitively, I always make it a point to discover the “cheeze tactics”, and never have any compunction about using them. Camping the sniper rifle? But of course! Why else would they put it at a vantage point for the whole map! Starving my opponent of resources? Hey, better that I get them than him. Picking a race/army/character/unit unfairly suited to the terrain? They give them different abilities for a reason. And in any game with a chat feature, if my opponents don’t know me, you can count on a constant stream of disinformation from me.

The way I see it, there are only two kinds of tactics: Those that work and those that don’t.

4

I play evercrack, never played UO…but I think that is pretty good RP, not asshattery…you did give them the option, and you didnt gank them. If they put out they lived, if they fought back they died. Not a problem=)

5

Not too long ago, I played a particular MUD a lot. I enjoyed role-playing, though this was a role-playing optional MUD. Which means, basically, nobody role-played too much.

The character classes available were: fighter, mage, rogue, cleric, ranger, shapeshifter, necromancer, and paladin.

I created a rogue character with a kleptomanaical streak. Stealing was allowed, in-game, but it was limited to items not in use and not too heavy. Thus, you couldn’t steal a suit of platemail off a guy, or a pipe he was smoking. (Tobacco healed you in this game.) However, if caught, a person could put out a bounty on you, and (in a normally PK-not-allowed MUD) you had no protection from being killed by anyone. It was anything goes against you… you are an outlaw, no legal protection. However, if not caught (they didn’t catch you and nobody saw it happen), there was nothing they could do about it.

I made away with anything possible - even worthless things. I stole the healing potions off the ground while people were fighting demon princes and dragons. I’d sneak into guildhalls and take all of the stuff intended for other guild members. Oh, it was so good.

The best part was that my ‘cover’ was being a bard. You see, you didn’t get to pick a class at character spawn – you have to find the guildhall. Becoming a rogue, you had to get a reference from another rogue or do a little quest to become one. So, I claimed I was a bard. I was just the only person to have figured out how to become one. I claimed to be able to make other people my apprentices and teach them how to become a bard.

Ludicrous, really. A new class takes a huge amount of work and testing, and the wizard (administrator) responsible would surely take credit for it.

The best part was – people would fall for it. Big time. I even recruited two apprentices!

Then, when I’d be giving them a public lesson, people would stop and listen. Of course, it’d be in a room where stealing was allowed…

…and their stuff would disappear (carefully concealed by me)…

…and they would get so angry! I’d trash rogues and how horrible they were. On several occasions, I created poems and songs about rogues and their horrible deeds, denouncing these ‘villians and highwaymen’.

Of course, I left my calling card in their pocket when I stole their stuff. Complete with a short poem, and signed, “Bard of Shadows”.

Tee hee.

6

Bf1942. Early days. Planes sometimes very, very precious, because they’re so deadly in the right hands and often the spawn times are set tortuously long. What did we use them for?

Why, taxis. We saw one, we grabbed it, flew cack-handedly across the map in great swathing zigzags, and then when roughly over where we wanted to be, bailed out and parachuted down. Oftentimes we could have driven there in much the same time. Why did we do it?

Made us giggle our beer into the keyboard, that’s why. Even on servers which WE were running, and where it was made clear that we were playing ‘anything goes’ rules, It REALLY annoyed one Austrian guy, who kept CAPS-LOCK SHOUTING AT US IN BADDLY SPELED ENGLISH. I never found out his real name but he had this thing about people playing it properly. I couldn’t HELP winding him up.

It was naughty, though, and I apologise.

7

In Ultima Online, our guild hall had a Hatfield & McCoy type relationship with the weenie PK who lived next door to us. (It all started when he whacked one of my friends who had low notoriety.) I got back at him by creating a throwaway thief character with the same name as him, and wandered around towns and dungeons stealing from people, calling people names, and basically acting like a jerk. I heard from others that he was quite disliked after that. :slight_smile:

The ultimate was when I decided to confront him, as the thief. The conversation went like this:

Doofus: [laughing] Why do you have the same name as me?

  • You notice Doofus stealing a house key from Doofus! *
    Doofus: HEY!!

He chased me, but I got away. Later I broke into his house (using the key) and set grandmaster-level tinker traps on every chest in his house. Unfortunately I wasn’t online later to witness him blow himself up. Twice.

8

One of my friends used to play Action Quake 2 which was a mod for quake. In the game, you could shoot different parts of the body for different damage and if you shot someone in the legs, it only damaged them about 5 health but they slowed down to a hobble until they healed. On some servers, team killing was allowed but if you did it excessively, you were kicked and then banned. He used to go on and shoot team members in the legs until they got so pissed off at him that they killed him… and got banned.

9

My friend and I used to play Warcraft III on Battle.net, join the same game on opposite teams, and simulateously undermine both teams by either ridiculously stupid strategies (ex: an all Shades undead army, a peasant army using Call to Arms) or outright betrayl. My favorite (in Starcraft and in Warcraft) was to build lots of towers/bunkers in my allies base and then cancel our alliance.

In Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and other FPSs when Friendly Fire is on I’ve indulged in more than my share of TKing for reasons both justified and not. Sure it’s stupid and annoying, but its also fun! So sue me… I’m nice to people in real life at least.

In Team Fortress I used to build guns in front of my base’s bottle necks so that my own team couldn’t leave spawn.