The Surge of Stupid - Day of Defeat:Source Servers
Posted in Day of Defeat: Source NewsValve recently offered a free play weekend on Day Of Defeat: Source servers. This worked about as well as you’d expect a horde of uneducated, untrained idiots running out onto World War II battlefield to, without the real-world benefits of massively accelerated Darwinian evolution. Imagine a preschool in the middle of a minefield. Here were some of the worst effects:
1. Sorry!
The fearsome battlecry throughout the European theatre, at least during that part of World War II that took place during July 4-6, 2008. These people spend hours on end killing each other in all manner of virtual battlegrounds, but the idea that bullets can actually hurt people seems to genuinely shock them. Without the magic ammunition which teleports through teammates and weaves between your friends, many of the new players were actively worse than useless. There’s nothing like that feeling when a grenade rattles next to your from behind, and you hear “Sorry!” over voice-comms before detonating.
This picture of stupidity becomes a full three-dimensional hologram of stupidity when the revenge killings start, people actively hunting the accidentally homicidal teammate. The game is then pretty much over - the Germans don’t exactly have a hard time when half the Allied team is re-enacting the bloodier parts of the Civil War on the streets of Palermo.
2. Machine Gun The Sky
A glimpse into the mind of a newbie DoD player:
“Right, so this game has classes.”
“Oh sweet, a big machine gun!”
“Take this brakkabrakka-what-the-f” *dies*
Another fact of life on DoD:S servers is recoil. It turns out that a machine which fires hundreds of rounds per second by setting off explosions behind them moves a bit, unlike other games which would have you believe that an automatic weapon is as handy as an iPod that shoots bullets. Day of Defeat can’t yet simulate the effects of running while carrying twenty kilos of gear, but rest assured that it would if it could.
In the meantime enjoy the sight of new players firing their StG44 from the hip and the recoil flinging the gun barrel (and their vision) into the sky like they were trying to kill God. Oh, and you’re holding a gun and they are literally presenting their soft underbelly.
3. The Anti-Rambo
Teamwork is essential on a Day Of Defeat Server. The classes are so specialised as to make the Team Fortress classes look like nothing but changes of clothes. The central flags flat-out tell you that you need more than one-person, and if that isn’t clear the reinforcement respawn system is built to tell you “Work together you assholes”.
Which doesn’t stop the flock of newbies scattering every single time, running as far away from each other or support as they can get, and basically proving that a lone commando triumphing over a horde of enemies only happens in movies or games with a single player mode.
4. Snipers Sucking (even more than normal)
Fact: 90% of snipers on every FPS game in the world suck. If you disagree with that it’s because you’re one of them. But on a game like DoD, where even the standard combat class is a long-range high-accuracy fighter, this problem is turned up so high the knob breaks. The M1 Garand rewards accurate shooting, while the Kar 98 will practically marry you for a headshot (or at least drop the target, which is the main thing).
Which is why seeing rejects at the bottom of the score table, who honestly couldn’t hit a tank from the inside with one of these workhorse weapons, taking up a teamslot with the specialised bolt-action sniper rifle is sickening. They’re still never going to hit anything, and now you can’t even use them as self-propelled enemy detectors.
5. Accusations of Camping
For the last time: “Camping” comes from random-running around killfests like Quake, where rocketjumping was more of a glitch than a feature and perching yourself in an impossible location and killing anyone who walked under really was an asshole action.
In an objective-attacking map, where the entire point is to destroy fixed targets and protect your own, the idea of somebody deploying a machine gun to actually defend is not called “camping”. It’s called “understanding the game and being a much, much better player than you”.
July 24th, 2008 at 1:51 am
votekick ftw
August 6th, 2008 at 8:56 am
You know, I bought DoD because of that free weekend, even then, I was rather stricken with how ridiculously bad some of the noobs were. Sorry was the catchphase of the day indeed.
August 6th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Sorry bud but camping is what happens when someone who can’t compete on a quick-reacting rushing level decides they want to get some kills and try to compete.
The hitboxes in source are huge so to claim some amazing accuracy, ability or anything else based upon being able to get headshots in one of the easiest fps’s to date is sad.
Don’t get me wrong, I play both this and CS:S constantly but I don’t think I’m good because I get upwards of 50% HS’s.
August 10th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
DoD Source isn’t really what I would call the most tactical FPS, and I really don’t think it’s anywhere NEAR others in terms of difficulty. This was a fun read, but you sound snobby as hell.
August 15th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
DOD:S is one of my favourite games, and if it weren’t for the fact that a few hundred megabytes of updates backed up while I was on holiday, I’d be playing it right now.
DOD is not a typical shooter. Despite what a lot of people think, camping IS actually required a lot of the time. When you’re playing as a machine gunner, you can’t fire properly without proning and deploying the gun; so you have to get a good position with a view of where the main fighting is happening, and stay there until the fight moves away.
If you’re a sniper, you have to camp a lot, but not all the time. A good sniper can shoot while running, but that’s usually while running to the spot they want to lay down in - under a low hanging tree branch or inside a building. If you want to play sniper, get some practice first. There are some sniper servers out there that run huge maps 24/7, perfect for learning.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Good read. Didn’t get to download this on that weekend, but sounds like a lot of FPS online games. There’s always the noob who thinks his top of the line sniper rifle will make him a freakin Royal marine sharpshooter just by equipping it, who, the second he picks the most obvious sniper nest on the map, is picked off by the guy with a pistol. Not an uncommon phenomenon.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Good players can defeat good campers. Good players don’t whine about good campers.
July 2nd, 2011 at 1:32 pm
I took a long vacation. Almost two years worth. Little did I know that DoD stopped being kill the enemy as opposed to kill the enemy. I have a method to my craziness.
I started on it back in 2000, so I have been around for a while. BTW, if you want copies of the old maps, I have them. All of them.
Turning off team kills as a general site rule hurts. Turning on all talk has made working as a team ridiculous. If your only reason is to be chatting, then find a telephone and get the fsck out of my game.
For those who are not unix compliant, ergo geeks, fsck is a file system check, but due to its nature being very similarly spelled, can be substituted for the f word. And for the rest of you who are telling me to not lead on the trolls, get a life. I may be a unix guy that has to deal with the windows snobbery, but were it not for the dos/windows excrement, I wouldn’t have a job. If everything were unix, I would hardly need a job.
What’s a blue screen? Virus? You have to reboot how often? I have a server here that hasn’t rebooted, outside of an extended power failure that my rushing with a battery failed to get it connected in time hasn’t gone down in ten years. I’d be prissy about that but I shant.
So back to DoD. Why does everybody want to chat now? Chatting for combat, yes. Chatting to be chatting? Get off the server you loser. There is only one reason to be talking during a combat. That is intelligence. To assist your team. If you can’t deal with that, then you need a different venue.
As for team kills being required, hey, realism may suck but it makes you more aware of what you are doing when it isn’t just you in the battle.
DoD started as a team concept. Many friends developed over the years just from that issue. Chat existed ONLY on the team, via text, before verbal chat came about. And yes, even 53kbps modem stuff supported verbal chat. Some of you may not even know about gaming on non-broadband modems. Back when saying I am on 9600 instead of 3Mbps/dl 1Mbps/up, most of you have no concept of where we got to and why we can game the way we do now.
So, back to my diatribe. What I see going on in DoD really sucks. I don’t see teams, though I see people trying to establish them, especially via the realism tribes. I wish them all the best because for people wanting to play, doing it for real makes a lot of sense. Yes, as a subset of the general gaming, but a good one.
And get rid of the free talk for goodness sakes. It’s bad enough that I have to hear children ripping each other up on the street. I hardly need to go to my game and hear nigger, prick, fag, and all sorts of other pejorative words. This may be combat, but it isn’t a social discourse for crying out loud. Either fight or leave. Leave, being the best word.
As for real words used, I have had an extended conversation with a Nazi, who does play DoD. He finds it humorous that we trip over our toes telling people like him what we think about him.
I have battled with a group who tolerate one of them repeatedly saying “white power”. Is he actually being a prick? Hard to say. However, nobody bans him for that and I don’t go there any more. Allowing free chat hasn’t helped the gaming for DoD.