For those of you who hate reading, I apologize in advance. I tend to weave simple things into novels. For those of you who are perfectly fine with it, enjoy!
Since the demise of the Dominion playlist last month, I’ve been trying to fill the void with occupying my need to slaughter the masses like anyone else in Halo 4 by delving into the other playlists for a few games at a time. It wasn’t up until I played around five games or so of Big Team Battle and its variants that I began to notice something a bit…off.
There seemed to be some two-gear game play going on. For the most part, my teammates were rather uncooperative with one another. You know, the usual. Fragging each other over someone taking a vehicle or a weapon that another wanted. That sort of thing. Five minutes into watching the kill feed be dominated by betrayals, the most wonderous thing happened. Save for one or two other players, the entirety of my team lost all form of self-preservation. Teammates threw themselves haphazardly into enemy-occupied territory to get demolished. Again. And again. On the other end of the red-blue spectrum, the other team was doing quite well. No single player was hogging kills, they were coordinated, and they weren’t beating each other to death over a sniper rifle. They would always beat out my team by around 15+ kills or so after the madness was finally put to rest.
The first couple of times this happened, I merely assumed “Oh, maybe I’m getting new players and guests on my team again.” The guest notion often tends to be true, as for whatever reason, I attract guests like a moth to a flame. After looking at the Carnage Reports however, this wasn’t the case. All players in the game were at least 100+ in SR (or whatever it is.), so this wasn’t a case of me catching the noob plague of the century. After the far aforementioned total of five games being played in this playlist, I noticed that the chaos that was my team and the calm, collected hyper-lethal vector club that was the opposing team was a pattern. Game after game, this episode of my team gradually devolving into more effective cannon fodder continued while the other team remained at the top with a flag planted firmly on the accumulated pile of corpses belonging to my team. This is something that has been happening to every game in the BTB playlist I’ve been involved in for the past three days, for the record.
I just recently played another game of BTB with a certain feeling of dread that I would once again have to deal with the endless cycle of my team’s self-destructive tendencies. However, the angels of mercy were upon me this time, as I was part of the coordinated, responsive team this time. As much fun as it was to come out on top for the first time in a while, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for two of the enemy players.
You see, I observe a lot of what goes on in a game as I play. Usually I’ll be distracted by a dead player’s Spartan resurrecting and doing the Jive or expressing the horror of low-poly models missing their high resolution textures. This time, I noticed that the enemy team was experiencing what I had to go through for the past few days. The aforementioned couple of Spartans that were holding their own were victims of suicidal tendencies from their comrades, random betrayals, and getting blown up on one occasion when one of their “friends” insisted on being worn like a hat.
I’m making a quick assumption based off this one game that this isn’t just an event that’s happening to me. It could be argued that I’m not doing my part on the team and I’m getting killed just as often. That’s probably true at some points during a game. My effectiveness in battle comes and goes as it pleases, and I am known to my friends as an Assist Goddess. 10,000 Assists is a RIDICULOUS number, let me tell you. I’m nearly there. My randomized failure as a Spartan is taken into account as I write this, but as you have read, this is only a slight bump in what has been going on.
I am a rather sane person, or so I like to believe myself to be. I don’t openly betray people unless I feel that they have deserved it for being a goober. I know when I should hide behind a rock, tree, tall bush, or another player to avoid certain death for another five seconds. My teammates during this…whatever it is that I’ve been experiencing, seem to have no problem doing the reverse of what I practice in gaming on Halo. Betraying a teammate just because you don’t like that smug look on his face? Check. Believing that constantly walking into a room chock-full of rocket-toting Spartans is a plan for success? Check. And another anomaly I’ve forgotten to mention: Dragging Banshees across the ground while operating them to only clip through said floor and the surrounding walls a second later via barrel-roll? Without there being any lag in the game? Check. Yeah, that actually happened so often across so many games that I’m listing it here. That should NEVER happen more than one time. And I’ve seen some weird things in Halo before, let me tell you.
So, after that long-winded explanation of my teammates exhibiting rather odd behavior out of the blue (By the by, all of this sporadically happened. After a ‘normal’ game of BTB earlier this week, all this madness started.), what do you guys think about this? Have any of you experienced something similar? Or am I just losing my mind and seeing things because my deprivation of Dominion is driving me insane?