The Troll under the bridge...anybody else witness this gaming behavior?

Cafe Society
1

Now, I would say this would be absolutely abhorrent if it weren’t for the fact that the circumstances made this particular situation hysterical.

Back in the Warcraft III Beta, Undead could speak the same language as Humans. I think they changed this in the retail version. In one PvP server, a level 60 or so Undead Mage went into an Alliance area near a bridge. He’d either listen for or solicit some trade, and when someone was interested, he’d say, “I’m over by the bridge.” when they would go over to the bridge to make the trade, he’d pop out and fireball them for like 6000 damage :eek:

Now I know a lot of people would read this and be thinking, “Boo! Hisss! Mean player making everyone else’s lives miserable!” but in truth the only thing this guy is exploiting is the gullibility of other players. They would know there would be some horde player(s) lurking about (it tells you when they ‘invade’ an area) and suddenly some stranger offers to make some trade in an isolated area? Come on!

It reminds me of a similar trick in another online game I played, Planetside. Planetside was neat because you could wear ‘invisibility’ suits, and sneak into enemy bases to hack them (hacking bases would eventually allow the hacker’s side to control the base). Of course, defenders were wary of infiltrators and would often have sentries present. So the infiltrators had to get a little creative. Like sending enemies /tells, giving them false information. This could be used to lure an enemy over a remote explosive, or just send him on a wild goose chase. There were many cases of bases getting hacked and captured, or generators blown by sending a /tell to an enemy: “Some infiltrator is trying to hack the vehicle terminal!” and while the sentry runs off to find him, the infiltrator runs in, hacks the base, then bugs out. :stuck_out_tongue: The REALLY funny thing about this is that anybody can type /who playername and find out what faction they are on. But plenty of people are too lazy/gullible to bother, so there are a lot of very comedic examples of skulduggery going on.

In Planetside, I took this a step further. I got some people in Anti-Air Max armor and set up a flack trap. I had us positioned near where an enemy faction would spawn from their sanctuary (home base). I would then find out the names of enemies on the sanctuary. When I found a leader, I would send him a /tell saying I needed a Galaxy transport full of troops to base x. If that faction was losing the continent, it worked really well because reinforcements would be desperately pouring in. As soon as a dropship showed up, we would spring our trap. The dropships were pretty well armored, but we had the element of surprise, and we shot down quite a few full transports (or force the occupants to bail out over the OCEAN :stuck_out_tongue: )

Anybody else come up with very creative traps to lure enemies? Like I said before, none of these work if the victims have an ounce of common sense.

2

No matter how many times you try to rationalize it or defend it, it’s still asinine, juvenile behavior. It’s why adults don’t tend to like online games, because they’re overrun by people who never outgrew their inferiority complexes and get off on ruining the game for other people, and then try to make themselves feel better by saying it’s the victim’s fault for not “knowing better.”

Lying to someone and then hitting them with a fireball? How is that remotely clever?

3

Oh please. Covert tactics and disinformation are a big part of real-life warfare; why the heck shouldn’t they be a part of online warfare? Good for the players who do this kind of stuff, if it makes their opponents actually think about what they’re doing instead of randomly bashing away.

Well, it’s certainly more clever than just hitting them with a fireball. Any schlub can do the second; it takes better tactics than the other guy to pull off the first successfully.

4

I remember hearing that story about your Planetside flak trap—I thought that was pretty cool. And, as a matter of fact, it was adapted from a real-life Vietcong tactic, wasn’t it?

Hey, all’s fair in love and war. And it’s not like you’re cheating, or hacking the game’s software to win.

5

Well, it’s certainly more clever than the schlub who falls for it.

But, seriously, this is why I don’t play PvP. Because that’s not my thing. If it is someone else’s thing, then they have the PvP servers for that. Most people, it seems, like online gaming for the chance to compete against real people. (Personally, I always liked it for the chance to co-operate with real people, but evidently I’m in a minority demographic on that issue.) I don’t see anything wrong with that sort of game play, so long as it’s practiced only on the appropriate servers. Especially in WoW, where the basic plot behind the game world revolves around the conflict between the Horde races and the Alliance. I don’t like PvP for a host of other reasons, so I’m not going to make any characters on those servers, but I am curious to see how/if that conflict is addressed in the non-PvP servers, as that conflict is a big part of what makes the Warcraft setting interesting.

6

Actually, the VietCong tactic (which I learned about on the History Channel) was where I got the idea from. See, for the longest time in Planetside, people used horribly predictable tactics. It got to where you could just put in some simple algorhythms into 1500 bots and let the 3 factions wail on each other, and the end result would be virtually identical to seeing 1500 players fight. Aside from the occasional patch, which might make some vehicles/weapons better/worse, everybody pretty much did the same thing. It got repetitive and boring. The whole point in playing against HUMAN players (which I prefer) is that Human players have the potential to be more cunning and dynamic than a computer player. They also have the potential to fall for tricks/gimmicks/and traps. People really didn’t do ambushes back then- it wasn’t for a lack of organization; there were some great outfits playing. Nobody wanted to think outside the box.

When I first did this ‘flack trap’ the results were devastating. Nobody had thought of doing this before, so nobody prepared for it. Some enemy players later confided to me in /tells that I did a great job of confusing entire Platoons. The fact was that many of them were convinced they were the victim of a traitor because I was able to predict where and when they would show up so effectively. Consequently, they started sending out ground vehicles to clear out areas of flack traps. The great benefit here is that people started adapting to fight my strategy (which is okay, after all, doing nothing but flack traps would get boring too! :slight_smile: )

As for the bridge fireballer, this incident only happened a few times. Why? Because people got wise to it! Pretty soon, asking to do some trade in an isolated location was a sure-fire way to have an angry mob of players coming after you. I heard some stories of lone horde players being ‘run out of town’ from Alliance areas in this fasion (pitchforks and torches would have made this HYSTERICAL! :stuck_out_tongue: ). There were also humorous misunderstandings- a party of hunter-killers looking for the lone horde player in the area show up to a bridge only to find some benign fisherman merely trying to sell fish :stuck_out_tongue:

7

Hell, if I got killed by a character clever enough to do that whole “troll under the bridge” thing, I’d be laughing so hard that I wouldn’t CARE that I was dead.

Unfortunately, that’s not what PvP is like in online games these days. Most of what I’ve seen involves a group of high level character hanging out waiting for a single low level character to get beaten to just about dead by a monster, then popping out and ganking the lowbie. Or the level 25 char hanging out in the newbie yards killing everyone, although most online games nowadays are mature enough to prevent this. Hell, that’s the behavior that kept me off of online games for years - I played UO when it first came out, and was so frustrated by the whole ganking thing I swore off on line games for years.

8

Athena, in World of Warcraft (which, BTW, was what I meant to say in the OP, not Warcraft III, just in case that confused anybody) , there are guards which will attack enemy factions in the area. Lowbie areas usually have very high level guards (like leve 70 :eek: ). This isn’t to say people won’t try to pull something. I don’t know about the Retail version, but in the patch, sometimes a few ballsy high-level players would rush into a town.

Apparently the respawn rate of guards is based on not only the number of enemies in the town, but how close to the ‘center’ of the town they are. A few high level players in the middle of the town/city will made the guards spawn incredibly fast, and you get situations that are similar to the scene in the film Hero where the 3 Assasins were trying to kill the Emperor, and two of the Assasins were fending off hordes of guards :stuck_out_tongue:

9

Covert tactics and disinformation? Oh please.

“NE1 have btr sword than 5dmg?”
“20dmg sword for 10s. Meet me by bridge.”
“Okay.”
<FWOOSH>
“OMG ROFLMAO! I 0wn j00!”
“Ha HA! Well played, my Machiavellian friend! We will meet again, and next time the advantage will be mine!”

I don’t think so. Covert tactics, feints, disinformation, raids, I’m all for it. But this isn’t the equivalent of a brilliant tactical maneuver. This is the equivalent of some used car dealer rolling back numbers on an odometer and then laughing at the buyers for being “so gullible.” 'Tis cheesy and lame.

At least the Planetside gags are a little more clever, because that’s a real combat scenario. The WoW thing is just some guy being a dick and making fun of people for being gullible.

10

I don’t think there is anything wrong with a tactic that successfully kills members of the other team as long as it doesn’t use hacks or cheats.

The kind of player that I hate are team killers and griefers. Other than that, bring it on and let the best player win.

11

Yeah, but it worked. Why bother to come up with something more sophisticated when your foes will fall for the simplest, most easily penetrated ruse imaginable?

And, as the OP pointed out, it didn’t work for long. People learned to adapt, and created counter-measures to prevent that trick from working. So the other side has to come up with some more clever way of getting the other guy, and so forth.

As I understand it, that’s the entire point of PvP, isn’t it?

In all fairness, the OP said nothing about mocking. Although it certainly can be infered.

12

If I were on the receiving end of a trick like this, that’s pretty much how I would respond. Fool me once, and all that. Of course, the other player would probably just say something like “maciveli suX0r i will pwn j00 again!!1”. But you can be sure I would not fall for the same trick, and what’s more, would likely inform other members of my team, so that they don’t fall prey as well. Yay constructive communication!

13

Minor bit of background: In Starcraft, the default is for typed messages to go to everyone in the game. Typically, one changes this at the beginning of the game to only talk to teammates.

I don’t play very much Starcraft online, but at the beginning of a game, I always say something like “hey, wat r u guys doin? im going ultralisks” (ultralisks being a big, heavily armored, difficult to kill, and highly inefficient ground unit). I then switch to team-talk mode, and add “Please disregard previous; I’m going with Guardians” (a high-damage air assault unit). It’s hard to tell if or how often it works, but in the best case scenario, the opponents will think that was an accident and build defenses against Ultralisks, which will just be that many more targets for my Guardians.

And let me add to those who see absolutely nothing wrong with the tactics described in the OP. Communications are in the game for a reason: You can /tell (or the equivalent) an enemy to disinform him, or to trash-talk him. Or to congratulate him, of course, but that’s distressingly rare. Saying that you shouldn’t lie to your enemy is roughly on a par with saying that you shouldn’t use a particular spell or a particular weapon. Of course, if I were the victim of such a trick, I might very well reply that my opponent was being puerile, idiotic, and unsportsmanlike, in hopes that he would be off-guard when I tried the same thing against him later on :D.

14

Back in the original Team Fortress for Quake (the only mp game I seriously got in to) my favourite class was medic.

My second favourite class was the spy though, because the entire game then became about the kind of tricks you’re talking about. For anyone who hasn’t played spies could disguise themselves as anyone on either team, and had a fatal backstab kill if you could get close enough.

My favourite thing was to disguise myself as an enemy sniper and go hang out at their sniper-nest. Once everyone was ready and zoomed in I’d casually backstab everyone there, fake my own death, and repeat when people respawned until someone got wise. It once lasted 10 minutes!