Valve 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”.