Playing To Win[Guide and thoughts]

[castitatis]

This is more of a recollection regarding a bunch of things, that literally all come down to simply: Playing to Win, along with much of my thoughts as well as exemple thrown in regarding gunz itself. Much of this also comes from Sirlin.net — Your source of shocking insights on game design
In fact, anything that does will be quoted.

This is in fact my way of smacking all those morons out there who think weapon X/move y is overpowered/noob.
Take into account that by definition, I am myself a "scrub", since I choose to play more for fun then actually to win. But techniqually, I am somewhere between the two. I do not play competetively at an extreme degree, so I've been found to use different styles overtime just for fun. I choose as well to NOT use instakills/instafalls, simply because in my view, they detoriate the game slightly. I can counter them, I can counter someone's counter if need be and I can use them very well if I want to.

This said, on to talk about Playing to Win:

First off, lets talk about the "scrub", or in our gaming community talk, the Real Noob. This is to say the person who does nothing BUT complain in games. This is unfortunately 80% of the kstyling community. On this regard, Sirlin explains the term much better then I ever could.

[castitatis]

Originally Posted by Introducing . . . the Scrub

The derogatory term “scrub” means several different things. One definition is someone (especially a game player) who is not good at something (especially a game). By this definition, we all start out as scrubs, and there is certainly no shame in that. I mean the term differently, though. A scrub is a player who is handicapped by self-imposed rules that the game knows nothing about. A scrub does not play to win.

Now, everyone begins as a poor player—it takes time to learn a game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game even before deciding which game to play. His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevents him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. Let’s take a fighting game off of which I’ve made my gaming career: Street Fighter.

In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.

You will not see a classic scrub throw his opponent five times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimizes his chances of winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you—that’s cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too. We’ve covered that one. If you block for fifty seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap. Street Fighter was just one example; I could have picked any competitive game at all.

Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is a tactic close to my heart that often elicits the call of the scrub. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by definitionof playing to win. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.

A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which one tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Who knows what objective the scrub has, but we know his objective is not truly to win. Yours is. Your objective is good and right and true, and let no one tell you otherwise. You have the power to dispatch those who would tell you otherwise, anyway. Simply beat them.

Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite subtle and difficult to discover. Knowing the counter tactic prevents the other player from using his tactic, but he can then use a counter to your counter. You are now afraid to use your counter and the opponent can go back to sneaking in the original overpowering tactic. This concept will be covered in much more detail later.

The good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.

Let’s return to the group of scrubs. They don’t know the first thing about all the depth I’ve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.” Superficially, their argument does at least look valid, since often their games will be more “wet and wild” than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of this “fun” on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that you can counter his every move, even his every counter.

Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.

The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is a sequence of moves that is unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.”

I once played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him five times in a row asking, “Is that all you know how to do? Throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’” This was a big moment in that scrub’s life. He could either ignore his losses and continue living in his mental prison or analyze why he lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play.

I’ve never been to a tournament where there was a prize for the winner and another prize for the player who did many difficult moves. I’ve also never seen a prize for a player who played “in an innovative way.” (Though chess tournaments do sometimes have prizes for “brilliancies,” moves that are strokes of genius.) Many scrubs have strong ties to “innovation.” They say, “That guy didn’t do anything new, so he is no good.” Or “person X invented that technique and person Y just stole it.” Well, person Y might be one hundred times better than person X, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the scrub. When person Y wins the tournament and person X is a forgotten footnote, what will the scrub say? That person Y has “no skill” of course.

You can gain some standing in a gaming community by playing in an innovative way, but that should not be the ultimate goal. Innovation is merely one of many tools that may or may not help you reach victory. The goal is to play as excellently as possible. The goal is to win.

In this regard, many of the gunz community are scrubs, simply because they play within their own mental cell of thoughts and reject the fact that someone actually did beat them, and often very easily.

[castitatis]

Originally Posted by StealthBeast(ijjiforum)

We all know it’s frustrating to get caught by a butterflyer in a corner, that it’s frustrating when people use meds in duel, and that it generally takes less effort to kill with using an automatic. So maybe it isn’t fair… nevertheless, the rest of this guide is going to follow the simple algorithm that nothing in this game is going to change… they’re not going to nerf K style, and people aren’t going to stop using meds, So rather than complain about them every time we die, we’re going to look at what we did wrong and attempt to improve it to better ourselves as a player, and as a good sportsman.

Originally Posted by How Far Should You Go to Win?

Video games, like all software, have bugs. Even non-computerized games can have interactions the designers did not intend. If an expert does anything he can to win, then does he exploit bugs in the game? The answer is a resounding yes. The player cannot be bothered to interpret the will of the game designer as far as which moves are “fair” and which moves are not, or which moves were intended and which moves weren’t. It’s irrelevant anyway. The player knows only moves that lead to winning and moves that don’t.

Mysteriously, some games do expect the player to divine the will of the designer, and expect him to adhere to a set of behavioral rules on top of the actual rules of the game. This is the fundamentally flawed concept embraced by most massively-multiplayer online games. Consider World of Warcraft as an example. In a town, you can go on rooftops and you can fight against other players, but you can’t fight other players while on rooftops, or you’ll receive a warning. (Actually, this was totally legal before 3/11/2005 at 9:44 PM PST, but not legal after.) You can kill the same monster all day every day to “farm” in-game money for yourself (in fact you practically have to), but you can’t farm “too much” or you’re labeled as a gold-farmer and banned. If you break your line of sight with a monster, he often has trouble getting to you, which allows your friends to kill him much more easily. Smart play or grounds for suspension? Answer: grounds for suspension. If a monster is chasing you, you can go into a lake where he can’t follow and wait for him to give up. Smart play or grounds for suspension? Answer: that one’s smart play. The complex web of made-up rules is not unlike the shackling self-imposed rulebook of the scrub.

I’m here to tell you that legitimate competitive games are not like this. Reasonable games have built-in rules and simply do not allow illegal moves to happen in the first place. Tournaments for reasonable games sometimes have to impose extra rules, but they keep this list as clear and as short as possible. There are games that are just for “fun,” because you can’t “win” them or make reasonable tournaments out of them. These games—while interesting—are not within the scope of this book.

So what lengths should a player go to in order to win? A player should use any tournament legal move available to him that maximizes his chances of winning the game. Whether certain moves or tactics should be legal in a tournament is a totally separate issue that we’ll get to later. For now, the issue at hand is that if it’s legal in a tournament, it’s part of the game, period. Players often fault other players for “cheating” or playing “dishonestly” when they use tactics that should not be allowed in a tournament, often because they are exploits of bugs. The player is never at fault. The player is merely trying to win with all tools available to him and should not be expected to pull his punches. Complaints should be taken up with the governing body of the tournament (or the community of players) as to what should be allowed in a tournament. This is a dead simple issue that confuses too many players.

An exemple of this could be taken from the recent bugs CW server faced, where someone who had won 2 games in a row could just leave and win the game. This will make me quote the last few lines of the past text:

The player is never at fault. The player is merely trying to win with all tools available to him and should not be expected to pull his punches. Complaints should be taken up with the governing body of the tournament (or the community of players) as to what should be allowed in a tournament. This is a dead simple issue that confuses too many players.

In this regard, anythign that is inside the game, which isin't ground breaking is entirely fine. If you want exemple of ground breaking bugs within the game itself, there are a few.
The bug, which was done in hacked/glitched duel maps which allowed players to enter walls, and thus be invincible to anyone who was still inside the walls.
Another exemple would be the ghost glitch seen in maps such as Castle, where a player was considered dead, but was actually there and could still hurt people quite easily while being nearly invincible to anyone else.

Also to state, by true meaning, what people refer to as mstyle is not truly illegal. And personally, I have no hardfeelings towards people using it, exept the effin cult some people seem to build over it. It also appears to me that their lack of motion renders the moves almost useless in anything short of a gladiator match. And even there, anyone who as any half amount of wits can usually go up against any TBFer and beat him pretty easily.

In this regard, what should be, and what shouldn't be banned.(This also goes out to all those whinny estylers out there, which although fewer in number, still exist, and seem to be increasing)

[castitatis]

Originally Posted by What Should Be Banned?

Now this is a tricky subject, not nearly so clear-cut as the last. The world is full of players who think everything under the sun should be banned. The scrub believes that any tactic or maneuver that beats him should be labeled “cheap” and consequently banned. In actuality, very little ever needs to be banned.

Before we discuss what should or should not be allowed in tournament play, I should acknowledge that different forms of distribution of games have led to different attitudes about banning. Some types of games are released, and that’s that. The players are stuck with whatever is in the game. Other types of games see a patch or two to fix the most egregious bugs and perhaps game balance problems. I’ll lump these two into the same category though as they both basically stick the player with whatever is there after the last patch. These are the types of games I grew up with.

Internet gaming has introduced a different type of game. Blizzard (makers of StarCraft, Warcraft 3, Diablo, and World of Warcraft) is a special game developer that provides a free matchmaking service called battle.net for many of its games. Since all of its multiplayer competitive games are played over this service, Blizzard can (and does) gather an incredible amount of data about how the games are played, how quickly they end, which tactics are successful, which maps are played, etc. They continue to balance their games though new patches years after release.

So-called massively multiplayer games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft, though not zero-sum competitive games, are also constantly monitored and patched by their developers. Players currently pay a monthly fee to play these types of games and thereby financially support large development teams who constantly improve and tweak the game.

The entire notion of radically patching and altering a game after its release may have many desirable properties, but it also has created an attitude among developers that they can release a somewhat buggy and imbalanced game and just patch it later. It is no surprise then that players of this type of game see differently than players of more “static” games on the issue of banning and altering a game. To players of my kind of games, banning is an ultra-extreme measure. To players of some internet games, the changing of game balance can be an everyday occurrence, as can the fixing of bugs.

The “constant patching” approach by developers also often leads to laziness on the part of the players; there’s less reward for trying as hard as you can within the given rules, because if you are successful, your tactic will just be patched into obsolescence anyway. You might be a footnote someplace, but you won’t still be winning. It gets worse in most massively multiplayer games, where you can actually be banned—permanently—for playing within the rules they created, but playing in a way they had not intended.

Criteria of a Ban

A ban must be enforceable, discrete, and warranted.

Enforceable

Sometimes, a tactic can be hard to detect. If you can’t reliably detect something, you certainly can’t enforce penalties on it. In a fighting game, a trick might make a move invulnerable that shouldn’t be, but actually detecting every time the trick is used might be nearly impossible. Or consider a real-time strategy game, where a trick might give your units a few more hit points than normal, but again, detecting this might be nearly impossible in a real game. If something is to be banned from tournament play, it must be reasonably easy to identify when it happens or to prevent it from ever happening at all.

Also in a fighting game, a move might be “unfairly” unblockable, but only when that move is executed in a certain situation with precise 1/60th of a second timing. Did the player execute it during that “unfair” time window? Or 1/60th of a second late? Perhaps he accidentally executed the move at the unfair time through sheer luck. Is he to be penalized? Imagine trying to enforce a rule that states “You may usually use move X, but there’s 1/60th of a second where you may not use move X.”

Discrete

The thing to be banned must be able to be “completely defined.” Imagine that in a fighting game, repeating a certain sequence of five moves over and over is the best tactic in the game. Further suppose that doing so is “taboo” and that players want to ban it. There is no concrete definition of exactly what must be banned. Can players do three repetitions of the five moves? What about two reps? What about one? What about repeating the first four moves and omitting the fifth? Is that okay? The game becomes a test of who is willing to play as closely as possible to the “taboo tactic” without breaking the (arbitrary) letter of the law defining the tactic.

Or in a first-person shooter game, consider the notion of banning “camping” (sitting in one place for too long). No friendly agreement between the players is necessary for the ban, which at least means it’s enforceable. The server can monitor the positions of players, and it knows exactly who breaks the rule and can hand out penalties accordingly. The ban is enforceable, but the problem is being able to completely define camping. If camping is defined as staying within one zone for 3 minutes, and if it really is the best tactic, then sitting in that zone for 2 minutes 59 seconds becomes the best tactic. It’s a slippery slope because there will always exist camping tactics arbitrarily close to the specific kind of camping that is banned.

Here’s an example of a completely defined game element. In the card game Magic: The Gathering, if a particular card is deemed to be too good, then it is possible to ban it. One can define completely that “that card cannot be used.” There is no fear of players still “sort of” using it, in the same way they could still “sort of” repeat the moves from the fighting game, or “sort of” camp for 2 minutes 59 seconds above. The card is a discrete entity that can feasibly be banned.

A player is never at fault when a bug/glitch is discovered inside the game, he is not at fault either for exploiting the said bug, unless the bug is so game breaking the game becomes useless to play, and often more then not, this is a clear indication that the game should be left.

[castitatis]

Follow up of above post(10000 char limit)

Warranted

Here is the whole issue, of course. If it isn’t warranted to ban something, we don’t need to even consider whether it’s enforceable or discrete. The great lesson of competitive games is that hardly anything warrants a ban.

A bug that gives players a small advantage does not warrant a ban. In fact, it’s common. Many players don’t even realize they are using bugs, but instead view them as “advanced tactics.” Even bugs that have a huge effect on gameplay are usually not warranted to be banned. The game may change with the new tactic, but games are resilient and there tend to be countermeasures (sometimes other bugs) to almost everything.

In the fighting game Street Fighter Alpha 2, there is a bug that allows the player to activate a very damaging move (called “Custom Combo”) against an opponent who is standing up (not crouching). The designers surely intended a standing opponent to be able to crouch and block this move upon seeing it, but if executed correctly, he cannot. It has a huge impact on the way the game is played (standing up is now quite dangerous), but there is still an excellent game left even after this technique is known. At first glance, one might think that attacking is too dangerous because it usually involves standing up. Closer examination shows that the attacker can stick out moves to knock the defender out of his Custom Combo, should he try it. Basically, the bug can be dealt with. This game-changing tactic is referred to by players as the “Valle CC” after its inventor, Alex Valle (more on him later).

As another example, consider the puzzle game Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. It’s vaguely like Tetris. In this game, blocks of various colors fall into your basin and you try to match up the colors to break these blocks to fill up your opponent’s basin. If you fill up his basin to the top, you win.

Puzzle Fighter has a game-altering bug. A feature called the diamond lets the player break all blocks of a certain color on his own side (even if they aren’t lined up) and send blocks to the opponent’s side. Usually, doing this means sending much, much fewer blocks than if the player had broken all the blocks of that color manually. It’s a tradeoff since the diamond allows the player to break all those blocks instantly, but at the price of a smaller attack. There is a bug, though, called the “diamond trick” that allows the player to send even more blocks with the diamond than he would have sent breaking all his blocks of that color manually. The diamond goes from “get me out of trouble” to being a serious, game-ending thwomp. It’s nearly impossible to defeat a player who uses the diamond trick without using it yourself.

Amongst players who all know this trick, there is still a good game. One player can use his diamond trick to cancel out the other player’s. Each player gets diamond every twenty-fifth piece, so you can count on the other player getting his diamond about the same time you get yours. You can also just break a lot of blocks right when the opponent does his diamond trick. This will allow you to cancel some of the incoming block, but still give you a pretty full basin. A peculiarity of Puzzle Fighter is that when your basin is nearly full, you then have a lot of ammunition to send back to the opponent. A clever player can turn the other player’s huge diamond trick into a stockpile of ammunition to fire back for the win. In the end, the trick merely changes the game and does not destroy it, and is certainly not worthy of banning.

How does one know if a bug destroys the game or even if a legitimate tactic destroys it? The rule of thumb is to assume it doesn’t and keep playing, because 99% of the time, as good as the tactic may be, there will either be a way to counter it or other even better tactics. Prematurely banning something is the scrub’s way. It prevents the scrub from ever discovering the counter to the Valle CC or the diamond trick. It also creates artificial rules that alter the game, when it’s entirely possible that the game was just fine the way it was. It also usually leads to an avalanche of bans in order to be consistent with the first. When players think they have found a game-breaking tactic, I advise them to go win some tournaments with it. If they can prove that the game really is reduced to just that tactic, then perhaps a ban is warranted. It’s extremely rare that a player is ever able to prove this though. In fact, I don’t even have any examples of it.

A note to game developers: fix your bugs after release if you have the opportunity to do so. But beware that players enjoy the feeling of wielding “unfair” tactics, and taking that away from them can be a mistake if the “unfair” tactic isn’t powerful enough to single-handedly win tournaments.

Immediately Ban-worthy Glitches

There are some things so extreme that they can be banned without much testing. These include glitches that crash the game or have radical effects, such as blanking out the opponent’s entire screen, removing his characters, units, or resources from the game, and so forth. Glitches so extreme that they undeniably end or prevent gameplay are worthy of being banned. Likewise, so are glitches that are not equally available to all players. Some glitches in a two player game can only be performed by player 2. It is reasonable to ban such a tactic, even if it’s not overly powerful, just on the basis that all players do not have equal access to it.

“It’s Too Good!”

Only in the most extreme, rare cases should something be banned because it is “too good.” This will be the most common type of ban requested by players, and almost all of their requests will be foolish. Banning a tactic simply because it is “the best” isn’t even warranted. That only reduces the game to all the “second best” tactics, which isn’t necessarily any better of a game than the original game. In fact, it’s often worse!

The only reasonable case to ban something because it is “too good” is when that tactic completely dominates the entire game, to the exclusion of other tactics. It is possible, though very rare, that removing an element of the game that is not only “the best” but also “ten times better than anything else in the game” results in a better game. I emphasize that is extremely rare. The most common case is that the player requesting the ban doesn’t fully grasp that the game is, in fact, not all about that one tactic. He should win several tournaments using mainly this tactic to prove his point. Another, far rarer possibility is that he’s right. The game really is shallow and centered on one thing (whether that one thing is a bug or by design is irrelevant). In that case, the best course of action is usually to abandon the game and play one of the hundreds of other readily available good games in the world.

Only in the ultra-rare case that the player is right and the game is worth saving and the game without the ultra-tactic is a ten times better game—only then is the notion even worth fighting for. And even in this case, it may take time for the game to mature enough for a great percentage of the best players and tournament organizers to realize that tactic should, indeed, be banned. Before an official ban takes place, there can also be something called “soft ban.” Let’s look at an example.

[castitatis]

As a small note:

Originally Posted by Cheating?

Some people have asked if they should use these means to win:

“What about using the map hack in StarCraft, or a packet interceptor, or a macro to cast your spells faster, or just a swift kick to the shins of your opponent?”

One of the great things about playing to win is that it’s a path of self-improvement that can be measured. In playing to win, we have the cold, hard results of winning and losing to guide us along that path. I think it’s only useful to consider winning and losing in the context of formal competition such as tournaments. Kicking your opponents in the shins is outside the scope of the game, and is not legal in any reasonable tournament.

Likewise, any third party program obtained from an illegal warez site and installed as a hack into your game is also not going to be legal in any reasonable tournament. These things, though technically useful to those trying to win, are outside the path of continuous self-improvement that I’m talking about since they are outside of the rules of tournaments. You should use any tournament legal means to win. If you participate in some strange tournament where all players are allowed to use a map hack, then go for it. You’re playing a rather weird, nonstandard version of the game, though, which defeats the whole purpose of shedding extra rules so as to play the same game as everyone else. Any reasonable person would consider “no cheating from outside the game” to be part of the default rule set of any game.

Now on to somethign more reasonable:

Originally Posted by Sportsmanship

Some would interpret my attitude of winning by any means necessary to imply that I have no appreciation of sportsmanship. Quite the contrary, I have observed that the very best players are likely to be excellent sports. Part of sportsmanship is keeping calm when you lose. Playing to win involves viewing a loss as an opportunity to learn and improve. Getting hot-headed and yelling at an opponent or muttering under your breath that you lost to a “no-skilled scrub” does not accomplish that.

Being a good sport also involves winning politely and observing customs of etiquette before and after a match such as bowing, shaking hands, saying “good game,” or whatever is appropriate. There is always the tendency to gloat, but being polite and reserved is the way to positively influence other people. Judges are people, too, and when a judgment call must be made, judges are often itching to find a technicality to use against a bad sport. Other players, perhaps potential sparring partners, team members, or keepers of secret information about the game are likely to be more open to a good sport than a raving lunatic or an idiot.

Some ask why they should not scream racist or other offensive remarks, spit on the shoes of their opponents, beat their chests, or otherwise intimidate the enemy. After all, they say, the purpose is to win using any legal means, period. Isn’t that what I have said? First of all, some of these activities may not be legal in a tournament. Second, they violate the principle of goodwill that I described above. And third, I am not convinced they offer any real strategic advantage. They are more likely to make you look stupid, and create an air of negativity that will follow you.

That said, I do know of a few skilled players who use these tactics. There is usually leeway in a tournament to be physically intimidating and say mean and scary things just short of actually violating any rules. Trash talking before the event over the internet is pretty much always legal, too. Perhaps these players are playing to their own strengths by being bullies. This behavior does give them advantages over some opponents, but the costs seem too great overall for me to endorse this as a winning strategy.

If you wish to rile your opponent up, there are plenty of ways to do this within most games. There are ways of playing that are annoying and provoking. When an opponent plays defensively, expecting you to attack him, you can play defensively, too. This may annoy him and throw him off. Or, you can make moves that obviously have no purpose as a way of “taunting” an opponent you have an advantage over. Anything you do inside the game is good and right and beyond the scope of making you a bad sport. All is fair in war.

If your aim is to intimidate the opponent, then I am all for that. But there are polite, sportsman-like ways of doing this. The best way by far is to win tournaments. See what your next opponent thinks of you then. Just give him something as simple as a half-hearted glance and empty-sounding “good luck” before the match and he will probably fall over like a feather from your presence. When a player radiates a sense of total dominance at a game, I call this a “fear aura.” The most unlikely of pale, white computer geeks can strike fear into the hearts of other gamers when they discover that he is, in fact, “PhatDan09” or whatever name is known to dominate tournaments. With the fear aura, he is able to get away with gambits and maneuvers no ordinary player could ever pull off, just because the opponent gives him the extreme benefit of the doubt on everything that occurs in the game. If the wielder of the fear aura appears to be vulnerable, perhaps it is just what he wants you to think. It might be safer to hesitate, and then—oops—to lose. Once you develop your fear aura through excellent play and winning, you will laugh at the relatively ineffective notion of intimidating opponents with offensive verbal comments.

[castitatis]

Now if I may, such an exemple would clearly point to AryaVarwin. Now not many people might know about her, to be true, she asn't been around in ages, but anyone who can go back about 2 years ago will remember her, and probably the curse bangwagon. Arya was good, but not really the best. Her aim was excellent, but her movement were sloppy and she couldn't lead worth nuts. But she had something most people didn't. Before a match began, she literally owned someone's brain inside her hand. She was a master at knowing what someone would do next and knew how to counter it. Furthermore, she liked toying with people. She did ego a lot, which is also what brought her fame the most. She was said to be THE top female player for over a year as well as to be around the top 10 best players of her time. Yet, she wasn't that great. In fact, she now pales compared to what we have today. But that being said, she was still a formidable opponent, and more times then others, her wins came down to her playing with her opponent's mind. She had this kind of aura that simply threw everyone off. She'd join a game, and suddenly half the room was unable to slash shot properly, simply because they were unsure of what they should do against her. That is what gave her power.

Up to this point, I have told you almost nothing about how to actually play. I have so far covered mainly the mindset you need to take into a game, not the tactics and strategies employed during a game. On this delicate subject, I will not even pretend to have unique authority, for it has been covered many times before me by more distinguished authors.

Play Styles

Originally Posted by Styles

Every gaming community is a weird mirror image of every other gaming community. The same personalities and the same play styles seem to repeat themselves, ad infinitum. While reading about the personalities throughout the history of chess, I was struck by how similar it all was to the personalities I grew up with playing Street Fighter. I will now relate to you some of those personalities, and I will also take a very controversial stand: I believe that there is one style of play that is superior to all others. The upper echelons of gamers always seem to show a similar mix of varied play styles, but the one true style has its way of coming out on top.

Take into accounts these do NOT talk in anyway about the gunz style. They are defined playing ways that are not actual styles per say, but more of a way of playing. Meaning just about anyone can be part of one of these.

Turtlers

Attackers

Obsessed

Snakes

The One True Style

The Invincible and The Beast

[castitatis]

Reserved post for futher updates.

[castitatis]

Reserved for futher updates

[castitatis]

Reserved again, since I have no idea how much more I'll type/discuss about more on this subject.


Feel free to discuss, also, if you havn't read what I have typed in the previous posts, then don't bother trying to flame me, I'll have no remorse to point you towards an admin.

[jeekheadonmars]

Brilliant +rep ~ Lol I didnt even know most of that stuff, i just play (O.O) ~ But still a good article on "Scrubs" xD Im around half way thru it only though...

[ect301fps]

Copypasta...

[castitatis]

Yes, everythign in quotes is copy pasted from sirlin's articles, simply because he's 100x better then me at typing, but even so, most people around here do not even know about this.

[ect301fps]

I feel I should address some things before people get the wrong idea.

An exemple of this could be taken from the recent bugs CW server faced, where someone who had won 2 games in a row could just leave and win the game.

In this regard, anythign that is inside the game, which isin't ground breaking is entirely fine.

Would this be to imply that the CW glitch and prem meds are not game breaking? If you have read into Serlin’s articles, you should have noticed that he addresses that there are definitely things that are “in the game” that should be removed or otherwise banned. I pretty sure most of us realize that kstyle is a bunch of glitches that is a result of GunZ being lazily coded, but we permit it because it adds depth to the game. GunZ would be extremely shallow if all we could do is roll around and spray and gladiator was limited to a bunch of guys standing in a circle trading massives.

On the contrary, the 2 win-leave glitch and (in my opinion) prem meds make GunZ quite a bit shallower. As Sirlin stated in an article which I don’t see any quoting of (correct me if I'm wrong, I've read his articles in the past and only quickly skimmed over the copypaste), a feature should be removed if the game could be deeper, but does not when it must revolve around dealing with a few disproportionately powerful tactics/moves/characters/etc. In Street Fighter II, Akuma was an unlockable character who is banned from tournament play because his aerial hadouken is something that simply crushes all. The game degenerated from “real” fighting to just dealing with the insanely powerful Akuma.

In GunZ, I feel the CW glitch and prem meds have a similar effect. While it may be fair to say that both teams in a clanwar can exploit the 2 win-leave, it causes ‘honest’ teams who may very well be able to recover from a 0-2 round score and possibly win, but the glitch causes them to lose any way. If the glitch is to be legal, then a patch that just makes CW matches out of 3 rounds should be released. I think that most of, however, feel that the 2-win glitch is unfair and just lets cowards who are afraid of losing get off easy.

On prem meds, I am less opposed to them in a regular TDM, but in clan war, any team with prem meds against a non-prem med team has a disproportionate advantage where it causes the game to funnel down to finding a time and place to med while the other team is mostly concerned with just keeping them from medding. Generally, the effort is futile and the prem med team will generally win if evenly matched in other areas. Their advantage of an extra life and little weight sacrifice is just too great and their disadvantage is limited to losing the space for some grenades; not a very hard tradeoff to dwell on. Prem meds prevent other tactics and item combinations from being used and developed, like grenades or weight management associated with regular meds.


The subject of prem meds can be argued, but is strongly feel that since there is not equal access to them and they are pushing the “too good” boundary, but the two-win glitch is something that there are grounds for being cheap and bannable.

[manofsparrow]

Play to win?

Buy prems. Prem meds are a must-have.