If you’ve ever hunted for a public online video game of any kind, you’ll know the frustration of dealing with the rantings and bitching complaints over the comm channel, but if you’ve ever played in a public online game, you will be painfully aware of the effect.
It’s worse than playing with BOTS, especially if there’s voice chat.
Text is fine, tell me and our team where the enemy is, that’s fine, but please, please, no voice chat. You can avoid the voice spamming misery of team chat very simply by avoiding people altogether. Sounds terribly pleasant, doesn’t it?
Saint Buddha had the right idea, just go sit somewhere and wait it out, but in this day and age, nobody’s around to finance that kind of leisure time.
Just enter the world of Single Player Capture The Flag, and all those entanglements dissolve.
Not only does Single Player Mode solve all the crap of butt-dumb idiots acting out in cyberspace and being punks in general and rude at best, but it solves many other problems, such as griefers, hackers and creeps.
Political griefers in the outside world are bad enough, but who wants that same garbage in a video game?
There are restrictions on some servers regarding coarse or vulgar language, but people do it anyway, are warned, they continue, they rejoice in getting kicked and/or banned, which gives them bragging rights on the rough-trade servers. You’re bound to hear some rough language when you hang out with soldiers, sailors and hookers. Give it a break.
Let’s look at what you get in solo mode:
1. You and What Army? are the attackers.
2. You and What Army? are the defenders.
3. You and What Army? are both attackers and defenders.
The first is easy. That’s your normal video game where you go into a cave or castle and rescue someone or something.
The second, where you’re defending, is more like an arcade game, with stuff constantly coming at you, wave after wave of attackers, unrelentingly, faster and faster, more and more hordes of them, ever-increasing pressure and stress.
The third, where you set up a CTF game (Capture The Flag) on a field or in a 2 forts type setting, and then play against yourself, is much, much harder. The BOTS have to be awfully smart.
Not the ones on defense; in fact, the dumber they are, the less likely they’ll be to go wandering off somewhere in search of adventure in the face of unutterably boring boredom down there in the deepest dungeon guarding the flag….
GUARDS — Defensive BOTS are easy because they’re tied to a region or object, such as: “Guard this chamber!”, or “Guard this area” or “Guard this object”.
FIGHTERS — Fighters run alongside the PLAYER, in effect they’re told “Guard PLAYER”. When they encounter BOTS of the opposite persuasion, they’ll guard you by attacking them, see?
RUNNERS — Runners are very, very smart. They’re capable of evaluating the condition of the playing field, positions of opposing team, friendlies, flags, returns, everything — then developing an unfolding Real-Time strategy to get the enemy flag and return it to home base before getting tagged and stopped.
Tagging occurs by shooting a beam of light at the flag runner or any invader when defending, or at opposing fighters or defenders when getting the flag.
Tags don’t kill. They merely send the character to temporary “jail”, just as in the CTF you played at camp.
Jail times vary from game to game; some jails let you out in just a second or two. Other jails in other co-op multiplayer type games require your team-mates to break you out of jail. If they don’t, you could be stuck there a while, to a maximum of five minutes.
In Two-Handed CTF, you play against another PLAYER, each with his or her own little army of defenders, attackers, runners — you can decide which to use or not use, because you set up your own game as you want it to be, including textures, characters, classes, everything! You get to save & share your MOD with others!
At every annual Labor Day Convention, there will be a MOD challenge, and the winner’s MOD will be posted for download on our urthgame.com downloads page for everyone to see and experience!
In Double-Player CTF, you and a friend can each set up your own side of the board. It’s like chess, with as many or as few helpers as you’d like. Of course, you’ll have to agree and not cheat and all that, and I deliberately don’t put in anti-cheats, because chivalry is a profoundly vital part of Single and Double Player CTF, so get used to the Honor System.
It should be an integral part of public gaming. The only way to get that happening is to make chivalry and courtesy part of the game. Too bad that doesn’t happen in the Senate.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby