A Loss to Be Proud Of

[rowyn]

I'm playing my nth game of Warcraft 3, in three vs three mode like I almost always do. Three on three seems to be the most fun. In two-on-two it's no fun at all if your partner is bad, or worse, yells at YOU for being bad. Four on four is hard to coordinate. Three on three seems about right.

So I'm playing yet another game. And one of my partners is curiously .. prescient. "Hero rush coming for teal." 45 seconds later, couple of heroes hit Teal. Two minutes after that, "Another rush on teal, archers." Funny, that's just what shows up.

I try to ignore it. I try to tell myself he just caught a glimpse of something at the edge of the fog of war, where I wasn't looking.

He tells us which base to attack. "This one has the fewest men. Go here." It's not visible on my map. You all share the same map information in Warcraft 3.

I want to ignore it. I want to pretend I don't know this guy is hacking. It's not my fault he's hacking. I didn't hack. I don't want to chalk up a loss on my record because I quit because he's hacking.

I tell him, "Don't hack."

He ignores me. We're attacking the base he wanted us to attack. We're going to win.

My play is lousy. I'm distracted and aggravated. I know he's hacking. I can quit. But he might still win, even if I quit.

Finally, I tell him, "I don't want to win this badly." And I'm about to quit. Then it dawns on me.

I start building up my force again. He says, "Fine, it's off."

I tell him, "Too late." I am sending my new force to his base.

To the jeers and insults of both my teammates (my other partner does not care if "Unholy_Legacy" is hacking or not, as long as we win) and the general approval of the opposing team, I attack my teammate's base. It's kind of a pain to teamkill in WC3 -- you have to target manually each allied unit and building -- but you can do it.

He mocks my morality, my attitude, insults my non-existant manhood, and finally ... quits.

I am prouder of that achievement than any number of wins.

Yay! I lost!

Comments

[level-head.livejournal.com]

You were presented with a challenge; I'm glad you could hack it.

Your solution seems reasonable under the circumstances.

===|==============/ Level Head

WAYAYYYY COOL!

[mach.livejournal.com]

Way, way way past cool. That was the very correct response and one most decent gamers will certainly find honor in.

Oh but for future reference, usually you can mark an Allie an enemie.. or at least you could in Starcraft. It'll make the moral thing that much easier next time. :-3

Oh! Btw, would you like to play together sometime? I'm working my way thorugh the game now.

By thy side

Re: WAYAYYYY COOL!

[rowyn]

I'm pretty sure you can't mark 'em "enemy" in WarCraft 3 -- there's a "toggle" box but you can't click it on or off.

I'd be happy to pay with you some time. :) A couple of notes on multi-player play:

-- You can play on Blizzard's Battlenet (same as with StarCraft). They have a very nice game-matching feature that works pretty well if you're by yourself. It's not so good if you want to play with a specific partner. You can do an "arranged team" game, but your opponents tend to be MUCH BETTER than their level indicates. So unless you and your partner are very good AND good at working together as a team, you're likely to get stomped 75% or more of the time. I do NOT recommend starting your multiplayer WC3 experience by picking another friend who just finished the campaign, partnering up, and hopping on the net. Unless you like losing. A lot. :) Otherwise, it's a disheartening experience.

--If you want to improve in a less unequal environment, I recommend playing against people in random-team games, or one-on-one. I like three-on-three best, and am rather bad at one-on-one despite my extensive 3x3 experience.

--If you want to play with friends (like me!) just for fun, and not worry about getting stomped, setting up a team game against the computer is fun, too. At least it is now that you can set the opponents to varying levels of difficulty. (While the original Warcraft 3 allowed you to set the campaign at "Normal" or "Hard", map play had only one setting: "Nearly Impossible." You can download the patch by going into Battlenet, if you haven't yet.) I find human opponents a bit more intereesting and varied, but playing against the computer is OK.

--If you want to play head-to-head, that's cool, too. :)

Sounds Good

[telnar.livejournal.com]

I like your approach to that one. The only thing I have to add is that if you had access to a communication channel that your opponents could hear, telling them what happened might be even more effective (since they would be unwilling to play again against this player and might spread his name).

Re: Sounds Good

[rowyn]

I did, in fact (that's where the "general approval of my opponents" came from) but it's not as useful as you might think. Blizard's Battlenet offers a team matching service which is very popular and exceedingly easy to use. All you do is select the type of game you want to play, then wait while Battlenet puts one together for you. Usually takes just a minute or two. The upside is that you don't have to hang around a chat room or a game waiting for people to show up or agree to play with you. The downside is that you have NO discretion over who you play with or against. So I may well get stuck in a game with this creep again someday. :P (Not sure what I'll do if he's on the same team with me again -- if I should give him a chance to 'come clean' or just assume he's hopeless and TK him.)

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Wow, awesome. Very very cool. Maybe I'll get the game and give it a shot too.

[rowyn]

jooooiiiiin usss ... jooooooiiiiinnnn ussssss

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I salute you. =)

Times like this...

[kagetsume.livejournal.com]

It's times like this when I remember why I'm proud to call you a friend. Bravo.

Zug zug!

[krud42.livejournal.com]

See, this is why I don't play online games with relative strangers. Or with strange relatives, for that matter.

(I had my fill on Everquest, thenk yew.)