What, if anything, is your 'trick' for ensuring enjoyment of a Multiplayer FPS game?

Taking Modern Warfare 2 as an example, I hardly play it any more because mostly the experience is one of frustration. But occasionally I will have a good enjoyable game. The good games are an immense amount of fun and make it worth playing for those games.

Two nights ago I had a rare succession of games which actually prompted several of the people in the lobby to comment on how refreshing it is to have a game without boosters, noobtubers etc, me included. There were a couple of better players than me in the game but that didn’t matter because there were no douches. The guy that kept winning was being polite and friendly, and his abilities were being respected rather than moaned about.

That kind of experience is rare.

So I was wondering if you set yourself rules to help you have an enjoyable time.

Rules such as “If you are losing badly, stop playing”

“Don’t play if you are frustrated”

“Only play when you have a genuine urge to play”

“Play for more than x-amount of time until you’ve got into a stride”
that sort of thing.

  • Play with friends
  • Do not feed the trolls
  • Find a good server (sadly no longer applicable to the COD series, sigh)
  • Preferrably play older, good games. (When everyone was playing Halo 3, I was still doing Halo 2)

Don’t play with randoms. Ideally, have a group of people you roll with that communicate, have fun, but still want to win.

Find a good group of friends to play with. Either make friends with some of the more mature pubs, or play with friends.

Seconded on finding a good server.

Get high and mute every idiot who thinks it’s funny to sing/moan into the microphone.

Only play with people I know–even if any given server is a crapshoot, having 2-6 guys to play with who’ll jump servers with you and form a core of a squad keeps it pretty fun.

Only play team games.

This. Pubstomping is always a good time.

When my gang does this, we generally don’t pubstomp, we tend to split up and try to keep the teams skill-balanced. Pubstomping just gets old.