The Limited Life of the Left4Dead 2 Boycott
Posted in Left4Dead News
The “Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott” foolishness is finally over, in an astonishing surprise to absolutely no-one. If you weren’t able to see that this idiocy would fold like an origami master in a poker championship, you were either:
a) Unable to read the original story, in which case wow, how are you doing this now?
b) Actually one of the boycotters, in which case you’re not reading because you’ve already skipped ahead to scream obscenities in the comments.
The founding members of the boycotting group, “Walking_Target” and “Agent of Chaos”, posted to say that they’d achieved everything they’d wanted to with their group - the internationally accepted signal of surrender. When someone gives up on the only thing that made them notable, and that thing was trying to prevent people from playing a popular videogame, it’s hard to decide if it makes them more or less sad. Here we study the stages of the L4D2 boycott - with handy Left4Dead server situations analogizing each.
The upper limit of the boycotters wit
1. NERD RAGE!
Nerd rage! The most powerful force known to man, assuming that man is actually an anaemic kitten somehow connected to twitter. While most reacted to news of a sequel to an incredibly popular game by the same uncountable-awards-winning company with “Cool”, some knew that this was a gross betrayal of everything the glorious “Shooting dead things again online” L4D server community stood for. Something had to be done - and that “something” meant shouting in CAPS AND ITALICS! (They may also have used exclamation marks.)
The Witch: A calm, collected disputant compared to internet arguments
We’re not saying that theirs was a hysterical list of nonsensical complaints. We’re just pointing out how they claimed that two new game modes, the ability to play as the special infected and an entire new map is not “significant content”, and that their seventh complaint of nine is “The fiddle-based horde music is extremely disliked.” You can make up your own mind.
Left4Dead Equivalent: Bill saves Francis from a special infected and gives him pain pills. Francis starts screaming “FAG!” and trying to shoot Bill, but missing every shot at point-blank range.
2. The Steam Group Petition
Following on the glorious success of every other internet petition, which all have real effects and certainly aren’t the saddest things ever (or advertising spam e-mail collectors), our two brave heroes set up a Steam group “L4D2 Boycott.” Because nothing says “We are even remotely capable of not buying this product” like setting up an advanced discussion group, based on intense analysis of trailer videos, on the developer’s website.
That zombie had more chance than the average internet petition. That zombie STILL has more chance than the average internet petition.
This group reached forty thousand members, which would be even remotely impressive if
- You forget the standard “multiply by zero” rule for translating online petition groups into real effects
- The pre-orders for Left4Dead 2, an exclusive group which actually requires you to give money instead of bullshit, far outperformed it
Left4Dead Equivalent: All four survivors write “The Special Infected Shouldn’t Hurt Us” in teamchat several times. They add many exclamation marks!
3. Infighting!
The most hilarious thing about internet hate groups is that they’re made of internet haters. The aren’t actually coherently angry, they’re screaming spitballs of keyboard-pounding poor impulse control and after interacting for any length of time they’ll inevitably turn on each other. Any implication that the members are nothing but keyboard bashing balls of low self-esteem and poor impulse control should be disregarded, despite being true. Here’s what happened when the group’s founders were flown in to look at L4D2, which is approximately infinity billion times more attention than they deserved.
Agent of Chaos and Walking_Target get to visit Valve. As you can see, the boycott group rally in support of this dialogue
Their own group made that, as well as an impressive number of invective variations on the themes “sellout”, “betrayal”, and at least one accusation of being physically violated by Valve staff.
Left4Dead Equivalent: Zoey finds the Tier 2 weapons and calls the others. They shoot her will screaming “FAG!”
4. Giving Up
Agent of Chaos insists “Our goal wasn’t to steer people away from L4D2″, which is an odd not-goal for a group called “L4D2 boycott”. But since they didn’t even remotely do that it may be best that he retroactively redefined their goal to “to get Valve’s attention.” Which is exactly what they did, and is actually pretty impressive for an internet complainer.
Walking_Target, alas, lets this go to his head with “we have paved the way for Developer-Community relations in the future. No matter what the press or other gamers say, we have made an indelible mark upon the future of this industry.” You can tell someone’s giving a great quote when they include “People are going to take the piss out of us so hard” in the middle of their own statement, and the only indelible mark they made was on each other’s palms when they high-fived each other when they were invited to play Left 4 Dead 2.
Left4Dead Equivalent: Due to a bizarre L4D server bug, when Bill and Francis die we’re left with two Zoeys, two little girls who immediately go the wrong way, and are both smacked through walls by a Tank with “Reality” painted on its chest.