The Shrine

So I'm playing Top Spin 2 last night, and I decide to play some matches over Live - a) because my free month was ending at midnight and b) I can destroy the computer in career mode by now.

I lose my first match 4-3, 0-3, 0-3, but it was a good match and I made the guy work for it, so I'm pretty happy with it. My second match starts and something really weird happens - the guy I'm playing isn't returning my serves.

Puzzled, I try to go into the guide to send him a message and see what's up - if he's not ready or something like that - but the game keeps playing while I'm futzing around in there, so I go back and try to play some more. I can tell there's somebody actually playing on the other side, as he's serving quicker than if the game was automatically doing it, but he's not doing anything after I return his serves either.

I am literally flabbergasted by this point, keeping up a running commentary of "What the hell is going on?" to my gf. Finally, at 2-0 in the second set, I decide that two can play at this game, and I stop returning his serves. I wanted to play, for pete's sake!

In response - and here's where it started getting funny - he starts deliberately missing risk serves, constantly double-faulting, and running haphazardly around the court like a rabid squirrel. At this point I just give up and take the win. I sent him a quick message afterwards, saying "wtf? I would have liked to play" but he doesn't respond, and it wasn't until a few minutes ago that I figured it out.

See, two of the achievements in Top Spin 2 are connected to Live play - "win 25 matches" and "play 50 matches". My best guess is that the guy had already won 25 matches (he had a pretty good rating), so he was just trying to finish off his 50 matches played as quickly as possible. (With that in mind, he probably got really pissed off when I started throwing the match as well! )

I really don't think this was what MS had in mind when they designed the whole Gamerscore thing, but I guess it makes sense. After all, the only people that are going to see his Top Spin 2 stats are other TS2 players, and unless you're in the top 10 on the leaderboard or something, no one's going to really care where you are. Your gamerscore, on the other hand - anyone you play online with will be able to see that, and I guess some people care about inflating it by whatever means possible. (Of course, I haven't really given the whole gamerscore thing much stock ever since I saw that Gamespot article where one of the reviewers shows you how to get like 6000 points without really doing anything.)

Guess it just goes to show that if a system can be abused it will be, and some people actually derive more enjoyment from beefing up some arbitrary number than from doing the actual activity that's supposed to beef up said number.

Weird.

I agree, that sounds pretty stupid. But I suppose it is no different that the SS cheating for DOA4 (pointless and boring).

Totally off-topic, anyone else get their career player to look like them? Maybe it just happened to be the models used in game, but the guy I made looks disturbingly like me. Everyone who has seen it ends up going "Holy, how did you get your face in the game".

"SS cheating for DOA4"? Wazzat? (DOA4 is only in my gamercard because I rented it for a gathering I was having. We played it for about 20 minutes and then went back to Joust and Geometry Wars.)

As far as the face constructor thingy goes, my gf and I are notoriously bad at that. We always try doing it with the other person around, saying "does that look right?" every five minutes, but so far we haven't quite figured it out. I even tried downloading the FaceGen demo and importing our pictures into it. It worked really well as far as generating disembodied bald versions of our heads goes, but when I went into the character creator again and put all the sliders in the same places, my character still didn't look like me in TS2 or Oblivion. (Apparently you can use the FaceGen values in the PC version of Oblivion to get an exact match, but the 360 version's different.) Oh well. Maybe I'll pick up the camera when it comes out.

Going off-topic from your off-topicness, my introductory Live month just ran out as I said, and I'm going to wait until after the free E3 week to decide whether or not to buy a 12 month card - but what's your gamertag anyway?

Agent 57 wrote:...but what's your gamertag anyway?

RidetheSnake. Both Pulp and Pulpp are currently in Live limbo (I'll probably rescue one of them eventually - but RidetheSnake is valid for the forseeable future). Add me sometime.

kali o. wrote:

Agent 57 wrote:...but what's your gamertag anyway?

RidetheSnake.

So, is this a clever reference to the old Saturday Night Live skit, or do you actually snort crystal methamphetamines now?

Finally added you, Kali - took me a while to find out you can't manage your friends list from your 360 when you only have a Silver account.

Btw, Nev, my guess is that he's a Doors fan. Just a guess tho.