Treyarch’s Life Lessons
Treyarch have been making massive headlines recently with their release of Call of Duty: Black Ops but they’ve also been stirring controversy with some press releases. Instead of seeing their feats and failures as general gaming news, I’ve seen them as important lessons (aside from basic English grammar) for young console gamers those who have never played anything other than CoD.
Case Study #1
What happened: Treyarch went into detail about their process of dealing with glitches
This was met with: Outrage
Example response: “Why can’t they do this before the game is released? Did they even test this? FAIL COMPANY!”
Details: Before reading Treyarch’s post on the matter, I quickly jotted down what I thought the process would be and I was pretty close. They gather information about the glitch,* work on fixing it, get permission to distribute via the appropriate platform, then it gets released.** I think it was a really good idea of them to release this information because hell, knowing a little more about how colossal multiplayer games like Call of Duty are maintained couldn’t hurt; they were even kind enough to say that the ‘work on fixing it’ phase can take a number of weeks by itself. With any luck, that changed some of the ranting from “They’re doing nothing” to “They’re not working fast enough” which is a slight improvement.
Lessons: Patience is a virtue. Pobody’s Nerfect
Case Study #2
What happened: A technique known as quick-scoping was massively nerfed on release
This was met with: Outrage
Example responses: “Well done Treyarch, you’ve ruined the game. I hope you guys all die of cancer and AIDS. FAIL COMPANY!”
Details: This was one of the many times I didn’t understand the outrage produced by a community. For those not in the know, quick-scoping is when you quickly aim down the scope of a sniper rifle to shoot someone at close to medium range; this is done because sniper rifles only show a cross-hair when scoped in. The nerf added a mechanic where the bullet would deviate massively from the cross-hair unless you had been ‘scoped in’ for a couple of seconds, rendering quick-scope kills at close/medium range useless. This acted as a very stern reminder that snipers are long range weapons and can’t just be pulled up for a quick kill whilst on the move. I can understand that some people were a little peeved that they couldn’t get one-shot kills on the fly any more but going into full on “SNIPERS CAN’T DO ANYTHING AT CLOSE/MEDIUM RANGE ANY MORE OMG!” was on the upper end of gamer stupidity. Snipers are long range killers with side-arms for close range emergencies and ‘Camping is a legitimate strategy’ bound to a key, stop trying to run around like Rambo.
Lessons: Everything has its purpose. One patch doesn’t end the world
Case Study #3
What happened: Treyarch announced that they would ban users with swastika emblems
This was met with: Outrage
Example responses: “Treyarch are trying to take away our First Amendment rights! Don’t they know that it was a sign of peace before WWII? Learn2History Treyarch, you’re acting like Nazis. FAIL COMPANY!”
Details: I had mixed emotions about this when it was announced. First of all, I was pretty happy to see that Treyarch was doing something about this, but on the other hand I was completely taken aback by the community responses saying that Treyarch are out of line. Let’s not kid ourselves here, everyone who had a swastika as their emblem wasn’t using it to spread a message of peace nor were they necessarily trying to form a neo-Nazi movement; they were just trying to get a response from other players in a bid to get some attention. For those of you very late to the party, the Nazis were seriously uncool folks who have left a massive shit stain across history. You should have all learned about them in school and if you didn’t, do some personal research into it. Forgetting about the atrocities committed by the Nazi party for a second,*** the depiction of the swastika in Germany is outright illegal. Not in the sense of ‘someone wearing it on a t-shirt will get told off by police for offending people’ illegal but proper ‘go to jail, do not pass GO!, do not collect £200’ illegal. The last thing any company wants is for their product to be banned throughout an entire country.
Lessons: Just because you can act like an asshole doesn’t mean you should. We still want to get paid. Anyone wearing a swastika is either an attention whore or an asshole.
*I certainly do not envy them going through incoherent bug reports
**Does anyone else miss the days of there just being a .exe file to download one day and that was it?
***There’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever say
Your face.jpeg when you put a swastika on your avatar, choose Sniper, go rambo trying to quick-scope and a bug close your game.
Great article! And yeah, gaming communities tend to start raging for nothing, specially those with a high amount of kiddy players (Example: TF2 about hats, items, exclusive items, trading).
Over here in Australia I haven’t really come across too much whining/raging in TF2, other then when it’s appropriate of course (frakking Huntsman…).
As far as I can see, Black Ops is just going to be another Halo in terms of the gaming community. As much of a great game that it looks like, I’m going to be steering clear.
Real men play Battlefield, anyway.
Shit, I’ve probably done the most raging in TF2 as far as I know, although my rage consists of yelling at my team in text chat “Why did the player who just joined with 0 points decide to become the third Spy?” or “Good job -Player-, 0 points as C&D Spy in the whole round, credit to team.”
Australian servers are cool.
The only serious rage I’ve ever seen in TF2 have been about Natascha (pretty much exclusively by people who run around without thinking or can’t prioritise targets), Pyro Airblast (again, exclusively by people who can’t coordinate themselves) and the Mann Co. store.
I can get how people can be frustrated when their killing spree is ended but complaining about the option of buying weapons or cosmetic items where game balance isn’t harmed just seems a bit silly to me, even more so when you consider I’ve been playing the game for 600 hours and only spent £20 on it. /endrant
I’ve had some rage in TF2. Not particularly talking about the strength or weakness of a certain weapon (although I do hate me some Natascha), but rather of some certain play aspects of my fellow teammates. As of now I only have one person on my banned communication lists. He kept hampering at the team to play better. On the scoreboard he wasn’t in the top five, but kept barking orders to the others on the team. I had switched to spy and was attempting to rid the land of the sentry farm ahead but good intentions go afowl with properly . . . randomly placed spam. I died and he started on me even though I did destroy one sentry, and I finally reach my breaking point. I said, “All this is coming from the engi who doesn’t even have a teleporter up?” Mind you my teammates had been cussing ferverently throughout and he tells me after this remark he’s an admin and he could kick me off the server. I saved him the time. Disconnected, and shook my head with pity. I fear I’ve taken up too much room on the comment board for my other story. But it too had to do with taking a team aspect from the game called “Team” Fortress 2 and blowing it to bits.
Play battlefield bad company: Where there’s helicochoptarz, teamwork, medics, no knife shenanigans, bullet drop, useful secondaries, no grenade spam, and where one stray bullet in the foot doesn’t kill you.
@Binerexis The only real rage I have over tf2 is pyro. Backburner is pretty annoying but I save my rage for the degreaser and airblast. Valve made the airblast spammable by increasing it’s fire rate and reduced ammo consumtion when using it. I like the minicrits you get when you airblast projectiles but the previous things I mentioned turned a high risk and high reward tactic into a spammable low risk high reward tactic. Combine this with the degreaser to make pyro really easy to be good with. The degreaser has no true disadvantage, did you kill someone with the last 15 afterburn damage ever? No? Well that’s all the degreaser takes away. Switching to axe before you see your target burst into flames is ridiculously fast weapon switch. Airshotting is easy with spammable airblast, even with flares, due to the almost no delay switching of weapons. I would like the degreaser to be nerfed down to about vanilla airblast and 50% weapon speed. (compounded with the -25% afterburn) /NERDRAGERANT
Pyro is still the weakest class in the game, and the airblast’s performance is directly tied to the skill* of the enemy team’s Soldiers and Demomen (although less so than Soldiers). If Soldiers are capable of realising “Hey, that Pyro is good with the airblast, better stop shooting rockets at him or my team and I will die” then the Pyro goes back the gimicky class he is.
Even if Degreaser is overpowered (which it is) think about what’s happening, you’re getting killed by a melee attack by a class that has to get very, very close to you to do any damage, and has no advanced mobility to get into that range. Regardless of how good the Degreaser is, it is still a Pyro unlock and the Pyro is still a gimicky class.
Seriously, learn to press “S” and look around yourself and that’s most of your Pyro problems gone right there.
*Stupidity can be substituted here.
I just realised your name is “TEHSpy”, no wonder you were complaining about Pyros…
As far as your article I found it entertaining. I played the old COD games and Modern Warfare (the first one), and never cared much for the gameplay (haters begin now). Nice stance there at the end to say that “Anyone wearing a swastika is either an attention whore or an asshole.” I’ll stand with you on that idea.
TREYARCH U SUK U ONLY GOT FAMOUS BECAUSE U MADE A C.O.D GAME DATS WAT GOT U FAMOUS BLAK OPS IS A STUPID UNBALANCED GAME CUS DIS BITCH COMPANY HAD TO MAKE IT INFINITY WARD IS WAAAAYYYYY BETTER THEY SHOULD OF MADE BLAK OPS NOT U!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually, they became particularly well known/famous due to making World at War and that was only due to the (surprising) success of CoD3. Whilst I agree that Infinity Ward was the better company, I have a feeling that people would still be complaining that the game is unfair, broken and/or unbaanced no matter who made it.