Saturday, July 19, 2014

Trolls, Trolls, everywhere....even BF4


Trolls, trolls, trolls everywhere.

Just finished a Friday night gaming session in Battlefield 4 with half of my time on the ground a la' FPS and the other half as commander.


The last game I played was as a commander and for what it's worth, it's the role I play the most in Battlefield 4 because the game is still horribly broken as an FPS.  


But I still like to mix it up.


So this last game I joined already had the enemy team up by 200 tickets in just under 5 minutes on an 800 ticket map.  Now the formula in BF4 goes something like this...


Point spread between teams after 10 minutes > 300 tickets = lose.


It's a classic numbers game.  Either the other team is a bunch of hardcore players with sh!t buckets (as in Southpark's WoW episode) or someone's got a cheat that they're getting full value out of.

The other option is that everyone sucks but let's face it, nobody sucks that bad...


Either way a decent commander can help but he's only as good as the team he's commanding.


So it is with Battlefield 4.  In the last game I came in about 10 minutes after it started and the other commander instantly threw a proxy attack at me. 


That disables me from doing anything for my teammates for 15 seconds and it's more annoying than anything else.  


A good commander uses proxy attacks sparingly. For one thing, they take forever to recharge and telegraph your intentions to the enemy commander.  


It has zero effect on ground troops aside from disabling any scanning, missile attacks or gunship attacks that may be in progress.  Which can be very effective if a commander knows how to time them.  


So I called this guy out and of course he responded with all the intelligence a preteen could muster and then left in a huff.  That resulted in the other team not having the benefit of a commander which actually helped even up the odds a bit.  

Now it wasn't my intention that he leave but I guess I hurt his feelings.  


Hey buddy, get over it...


No matter, I'll take the edge wherever I can get it...


Battlefield 4 is one of those testosterone charged pastimes like football or soccer where reason is short and emotion is very, very long.


His leaving was actually a good thing.  It let me help my team without his shenanigans to distract me.  

Long story short, by the end of the game the tickets were literally down to 1 to 1.  We lost but we made it a game and I let my team know that.


Perhaps that's the point. So long as we did all we could and I supported my team as best I could it's still a win.


Closing that point gap is a pretty rare occurrence in BF4 and I'd like to think I helped with that.


I communicated to my team and dropped supplies where I thought they needed them, scanned for enemy resources and basically did whatever I could to support them.


But all was not camaraderie and Kumbaya during the game, there was dissent in the ranks....


One player wanted to kick the commander, that being me by the way.  Apparently he wasn't happy with my efforts.


So in response I wrote in the chat window...


"Hey, if you guys don't want me just type a 1 in the chat window and I'll leave"


Guess what....


Nobody typed a "1"


In fact the other players defended my efforts and in the end everyone seemed happy with the outcome.  


So perhaps that's a lesson about trolls.  If you want to shut them up, just give them the opportunity to look like asses.


If I had seen a bunch of "1's" I would have left. 

 That's the thing.  Don't stay where you aren't wanted and you're life will be much easier.

Think about it...



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