I am a frantic gamer, I love to play, both offline and online. Perhaps one of my most favourite games of all time has to be Left 4 Dead 2. It’s now been over a year since it’s release and I still play it from time to time and enjoy it greatly.
Although since the set of incidents from last night, I feel as though that game nowhere near comes close to being fun any more. Let me explain.
I get invited by my friend to a game of versus so I’m sitting in the lobby for ten minutes, waiting for 3 more players to appear. Sure enough, after a while all three appear together and immediately I knew I was in trouble. They all appeared together and set about being Infected too quickly for it all to be convenient.
Sure enough, my friend loads the lobby up, we get in-game and immediately there’s a black window coming up, with three votes right away to kick me from the game to make way for their fourth team-member.
That’s game one. Let me just summarise the rest of the night for you all right now.
Game 2 – Scavenge game, on the Port level. My ping immediately reads 600 but after a few seconds to calm down, it returned to a 49 or so. But when the action picked up, a Lag-Bomb exploded and my ping exceeded 4000. Funny enough, I was then immediately kicked from the game.
Game 3 – Scavenge game, on the Atrium Mall. I join and see that my team has two people on it, shooting each other and running around setting all the gas cans on fire. Attempts to kick them proved pointlessly and so I left the game.
Game 4 – Scavenge Game, on the Atrum Mall. I join from the Infected side. One of my team members has been spawned as a Hunter and runs and walks around with the other team. They don’t shot him or anything so I immediately figure he’s one of them, he’s a pub stomper. Again, attempts to kick him were pointless as someone on my team refuses to part with him. I get frustrated at this point, but my rage-quit moment was after catching someone with my tongue who was alone somewhere, that said Hunter in question appears and slashes me and my tongue, freeing his comrade who then in turn kills me immediately.
At this point, I turned the game off from the PC. I was getting so frustrated that I had to chill out. I came to the living room with my partner and explained what had happened. It came to the conclusion that we should see if Griefing and Bad-Match-Making systems applied to the 360 Version of Left 4 Dead 2. So I start that up, and immediately start having problems.
Game 5 & 6 – I was immediately hit by lag spikes that only seemed to affect myself and my team-mates. So I left these games to look for new ones.
Game 7 – Finally getting somewhere, I enjoy a full game of Scavenge and we lose by a single point. That doesn’t matter, I want to play. But when we vote for a rematch, everyone says No, we return to lobby and EVERYONE quits, leaving me and the lobby leader scratching our heads.
Game 8 – A good set of games for Scavenge, the other team goes through a bad series of rage-quits so I decide to go very easy on them, making silly mistakes and taking my time till they get a full team again. After all, I didn’t want them all to rage quit and lose the server. But in doing nothing, I earn a Kick Message from one of my team-mates and Three Yes’. I think at this point I started to swear a lot.
Game 9 – All I can say for this one is “Lobby Rage” My team is winning the match by 2 – 0. During the third bout, a message appears on the side, asking to return to Lobby and then to Change Maps. I call this Lobby Rage because they know they can’t win, so they buy time to get a map they’re good at, kick weaker team-mates to bring friends in and then start all over again. Suffice to say, *my* team-mates have enough of the affair and quit themselves.
Game 10 – A match on Scavenge in the Mall. The first thing I hear when I boot in is “HELP ME YOU RETARD!!!” I press to play, turn around and notice half of my team is dead, Ellis is being hunted right beside me and I’ve only 20 HP left. I immediately try to help the Ellis person, but all I can hear is the screaming “YOU’RE F**KING USELESS, HELP ME! WHY DON’T’ YOU HELP ME YOU F**KING TO**ER!”
As I must say, screaming into the mic isn’t going to make me help you any less or any faster. But before I can rescue him in time, I am downed myself and immediately put up for Kick by the screaming idiot.
Game 11 – FINALLY, this was my game! We had even-matched teams, average players and good coordination. We all played well and enjoyed ourselves and only stopped playing when it got late and had to go to bed.
My question however has to be this. Why does it nowadays take 11 attempts to find a decent game on Left 4 Dead 2? Why can’t we have control over match-making sessions, why can’t we play the game and not act like a dick doing it? It’s a difficult set of questions, but after last night. I begin to ponder the answers myself.
