That Player is Actually A Gibbon

Hello and welcome to a nifty little two-part thingymajig (technical term I assure you) on two classes of player. After a few too many heists gone wrong I was angry, and vented that fustration onto a page. That is where the following analysis of human ineptitude comes from. I'll balance it out soonish with a piece on those who excel. That will be nicer. But for now, human ineptitude.

I like to think that when people work as a team they will succeed. The undercurrents of competition, the collective will to triumph. But sometimes there is that one guy, that one person who messes it up for everyone. The team could be edging toward certain victory, only to have one muppet screw it up to the enraged, venom covered diatribe that will inevitably follow. Sometimes people are just nasty, and will pick on the unskilled unjustly. But there are those times where someone is truly incompetent, truly inept, utterly unsuited to what they are doing. Let us take a dive into the depths of human incompetence and stupidity and see what we find. Maybe a gibbon and another Simpsons image, who knows.

The Guard That Doesn’t Know What A Guard Does: This one is a long time magnet to ineptitude. As a guard, you are the eyes, ears and arsenal of the defence. Everything hinges on you. If you fail, the team will lose the objective and therefore the game. Sometimes guards don’t really understand this, and alt+tab to entertain themselves or they may simply forget just why they have been told to stand still and watch out for the enemy. Or perhaps they did not alert the team to incoming enemies. That is the cardinal sin of a guard – it has the direst of consequences.

The guard is important in many multiplayer games, but perhaps no more so than in SWTOR’s PVP maps ‘Ancient Hypergate’ and ‘Alderaan Civil War’. Both these maps are objective based but the point is better made using Ancient Hypergate.

In Hypergate both teams capture a pylon. Whilst the pylon is in team hands then kills and the retrieval of objects called orbs will give the pylon points that get given to the owning team once a timer ticks down. If the pylon changes hands, so do the points. It is therefore clear what the guard in Hypergate must do: alert the team to approaching enemies as soon as possible, and always keep an eye out for the enemy. The incompetent guard will do one or none of these two roles. My team knew this and exploited it.

See, I play as the sniper. The sniper is deadly but weak. I can dish out the dps but if I come under attack I have to run away or hope to the gods of random number generation that I’ll narrowly win the confrontation. So, with just 30 seconds left on the timer, I sauntered up to the enemy pylon along an obvious path. The guard (likewise a sniper, with good stealth detection) ran out toward me, greeting me in the open. They faced me; away from the pylon they had sworn to guard and proceeded to get engrossed in the combat as I popped every defensive move I could to keep the distraction going. To my left I can see the outline of two Sith Assassins, stealth classes, as they approach the enemy pylon.

Now it all hinges on this guard. I may have him distracted, but the stealthers should be visible to his right for a brief time. If he is doing his job, he should see this and immediately stop fighting to type the word ‘PYLON!’ (or some mangled spelling of it) so as to warn the team. No no, He kept right at it, stabbing me, shooting me, knocking me back without ever thinking to look to his right, where my now de-stealthed allies were taking over the pylon. It’s not as if you could miss this, a beam of light shines from the player like a giant neon sign saying ‘STOP THIS PERSON NOW!’ but alas the guard is incompetent. He had one job: guard the pylon. And he failed. We stole an extra 327 points to win outright at the end of the countdown.

He had one job: guard the pylon. All he had to do was call for help. He failed. The team was displeased.

The General Let Down, or the 'Oh he's not, is he?': This is always a pain in the arse to deal with. You’re never quite sure if they are trolling or just genuinely inept. There are some among us that are just plain stupid. Who only have to do the basics but still manage to screw it up.

I was playing GTA Online doing the Prison Break heist. I was the pilot, a pretty boring job. After a couple of attempts we got out of the prison, I picked up the team and we flew off to the destination where we would all parachute onto a beach and have the heli pilot pick us up. All went well. I and another player got onto the beach, the heli pilot brought it down for a good landing. We got inside and as we saw the last heist member descend toward the beach the pilot started up the rotors.

Those very sharp, very deadly rotors.

The player descended gracefully, like an albatross heading into a blender. They had the entire beach to land on but hey chose the tiny area of the rotors to get cut up and have their corpse flop onto the sand. The screen went into that dull colour filter before the text ‘HEIST FAILED, Heist member has died’ emerged onto the screen. That player had one job, one really easy job. Do. Not. Die. Easy to do, I mean, you're alive right now aren't you? It is not hard. Maybe the rotors were just that mesmorising.

The Dog Ate His Strategy Guide: This is a fun one that I will fully admit to participating in. There are some things, MMO raids for instance, that one ought to read up on before playing. You are never going to beat that boss unless you know to jump across the lava whenever it starts to throw a tantrum or what order that pesky council has to be killed in so as to not get your skull kicked into orbit. I will confess. I am a noob, a scrub if you will. I rarely read strategy guides - preferring to do my learning on the job. Usually this works, sometimes I am responsible for the deaths of 15 people in a wipe. But if the latter happens, I read up on strategy. Most of you are probably the same.

But we are not talking about normal people here. We are talking about the gibbons among men. These people will NEVER read up on what to do. They will cause wipe after wipe after wipe until they gain such a reputation among guilds that they are not permitted to raid anymore. The players who, upon joining a group, will cause an exodus of 'oh no - I'm not doing this again'. The players who, in CounterStrike, will just sort of run at them as if armed with a spear, thinking that for some reason Gabe himself will appear to deliver victory.

No no, my really not that much of a friend. You will not be helped, and as this is a team effort, your inability to comprehend that cardboard boxes are not in fact bulletproof is a dire disservice to me and the integrity of my soon-to-be corpse. What on earth made you think that strolling along A Long was in any way going to work in your favour. Now you are paste, and they know where we are. Congrats, bro. You messed everything up. A decent team will say to such a player 'listen, you kinda suck so please stay back in cover - not behind boxes - and shoot when you know you can hit'. That is simple advice, CounterStrike 101. But no. They lead the banzai charge as if you weren't even there.

Learn your shit people! Learn. Your. Shit. And if you happened to be on that Dread Fortress raid about a month ago with a sniper called 'Blood'se'er' - I apologise.

So there we have it - some types of incompetance. Those were just players, don't get me started on developers or publishers (though I'm sure Destructoid can tell you a thing or two about Konami). Some grades of gibbon-ness more incredible than others. My goodness do these people suck, but not to worry. That amazing person who has 40,000hp and can tank the boss on his own is on the way to balance things out. It will all be fine.

LOOK WHO CAME:

James Internet Ego   

GodEmperor Paige   1