The Shrine

Some people seem to be very afraid of dying or losing even if you're playing a game where you're expected to lose half of the time (against other players). There's a quote from Kenshin where Yuhiko was fighting the guy with the rocket launcher while the cops are too scared to attack saying they're plotting a strategy and the caption says "Being afraid to attack is not strategy, it's a cowardice" It really doesn't matter if it's a MMORPG, FPS, RTS, or whatever. Generally speaking in games you'll sometimes find yourself in a pretty bad situation, but most games usually makes it hard to get out of such situation or you would have a game where good play involves running away (and successfully) all the time and that's got to be a pretty boring game because nobody would ever win.

And yet people will always try to convince you their act of cowardice is something even Sun Tzu would've approved.

Nobody wants to be the guy with the 1 kill 20 death ratio! Better to run and hide and not die horribly. ;p

In real life they hand out medals for the guy who 'takes one for the team' so to speak so other people wouldn't have to die, and you're not exactly endangering your own health to take one for the team in a game!

The first person to run in is probably the first person to die, but someone has to be the first person to run in. It's particularly hilarious if you're talking about a game like FPS where all the characters have minimal functional differences.

I posed this question on the SWTOR forums: "Let's say you got 3 guys defending an objective and you see one guy, then you should always attack that guy." Every post replied told me I was wrong and you need to call out for reinforcements (when you have 3on1) because there might be 4 ninjas hiding in stealth ready to lure your team into a trap. It'd be pretty funny if someone actually did that in the middle of game: "1 inc, send 4 guys to backup because there may or may not be 4 more stealthers behind him."

I mean it's one thing to be bad at a game, but why on earth would people be scared about dying in games with no real consequence for losing? This isn't even like say you play someone 1on1 and you disconnect before you lose. I see this in MMORPG all the time where you have an apparent advantage but people are too scared to take advantage of it just because there may or may not be a stealther nearby. I've ran into guys who never left their own goal in Huttball because he's checking for enemy stealthers. There's this quote from the SWTOR lead designer that says team of stunlocking Ops with stealth was making people unsub so they were nerfed, and while that wasn't exactly correct, if you're that afraid of stealth character, maybe you really should unsub instead of living in perpetual fear that 4 of them might be sneaking up to you now.

Well I agree with you on that front, if I see 1 guy, I usually pounce, because it starts off as 1, but if 2 or 3 more show up, it becomes a problem.

The problem for an offense is usually that people do tinkle in 1 @ a time. That's why it's typically harder to win on offense in a pug then defend, unless you have this 1 guy who's capable of killing 2-3 people solo you're gonna lose most of the time.

Eric wrote:Well I agree with you on that front, if I see 1 guy, I usually pounce, because it starts off as 1, but if 2 or 3 more show up, it becomes a problem.

The problem for an offense is usually that people do tinkle in 1 @ a time. That's why it's typically harder to win on offense in a pug then defend, unless you have this 1 guy who's capable of killing 2-3 people solo you're gonna lose most of the time.

Killing someone now is always better than killing someone later in virtually any game, but you'll be surprised how many people claim this is not the case. I guess it's true if your opponent is Obi-Wan Kenobi, who becomes more powerful than you can possibly imagine after you killed him. Actually, I'm not even sure Obi-Wan can pull that off. I was actually reading a thread about how elite PvPers don't kill people in games like Voidstar/Huttball, so I guess even more elite guys jump into fire pit to commit suicide to counter your opponent's strategy of purposely not killing you. Too bad I don't actually see those super elite guys in the games I play. It'd save a lot of time if random people jump off the bridge/into the firepit in these games. Then again maybe it's one of those 'how to defeat class X' where everything they say would be completely wrong and it's usually written by a member of class X.

Don't forget about the advantage the lifeless have in nearly every multiplayer game. Some of us (actually, the vast majority) only wanna play casually, we don't want to get wasted by the people who spend 8+ hours a day playing the game

Zeus wrote:Don't forget about the advantage the lifeless have in nearly every multiplayer game. Some of us (actually, the vast majority) only wanna play casually, we don't want to get wasted by the people who spend 8+ hours a day playing the game

Honestly I've found the lifeless to be more cowardly than those with a life. Usually if you just play for fun, you sort of accept that you probably will get clownstomped by some generic 'no life' guy so you might as well go out with a bang. It's the guys who play all the time that are really afraid of taking any risk because they don't want to have their ego hurt, at least if they haven't mastered the art of 'blaming everything besides me' which most no life guy have already mastered.

I mean sure some of the newbieish guy might have unreasonable fear, like 'OMG this pro is going to own me', but this fear is not always unfounded. It is indeed true a lot of time you really do get owned by someone who plays 8 hour a day with no possible chance to overcome it, so here cowardice is at least justified by the fact that losing is the expected outcome. It's not cowardice if you know for sure you can't win.

clownstomped

So PC.