An ill-prepared evening left us mostly playing Dota 2 last night, but I’m not going to run away with evangelising over a game half the people who read this probably don’t like. I’ll save that for another week. We had a fine turnout though, and the witty and sophisticated repartee was present as always. As can be seen by the title of this week’s diary.
I’m not googling ‘cock snorkeling.’ Have a duckling instead.
The evening started off with some consideration of what we should play before the inevitable happened. Planetside 2 was taken up, for a bit of variety, but a 2+ GB patch put pays to the idea. This has been a recurring problem with PS2 – regular patching, often large, prevents people from playing on the spur of the moment more often than not. It’s good that the game is well supported, but surely Steam could handle the downloads so this doesn’t happen? Since this doesn’t happen, make sure you update Planetside before game night if you think you might be playing it.
So with Planetside 2 defeating itself before it was even launched, we settled for the next closest thing, which was the recently resurrected Battlefield 3 and its bloody awful server browser. To digress for a little while first though, these times of fannying about with downloads and servers aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Time spent not concentrating intensely on the game is time 5punkers spend idling and leading the conversation in strange directions. Hence why we somehow got onto the topic of breathing through your cock, which I believe was spawned from a conversation about biscuit flavoured beer. These are the things which bind us.
Back to the games, Battlefield 3 seemed to be trolling us. We eventually found a dedicated Rush mode server, but the Caspian Border map is a tank and jet murderfest and we quickly became unhappy about being target practice for them. I’ve written about our problems with vehicles in Battlefield games before, but it was exacerbated last night by the lack of servers available to vanilla accounts. The amount of DLC and the introduction of premium accounts mean that the community is fragmented, since many of the maps need the DLC to play. This long after release most players do have that content, but for returning players like us it’s alienating. That in turn affects my decision to buy Battlefield 4 – I know that if I do I’ll either have to commit to buying an expensive premium account for bulk DLC, or struggle to play my game a year down the line. Neither option appeals to me.
Become a premium player to unlock this content. All major cards accepted.
The last straw for me was being swapped out of our 5punky squad by the server. I wasn’t particularly enjoying the game, but working together we were managing to make a little headway. Then suddenly my work is reversed and I’m stuck on the other side with a bunch of randoms. I quit within a minute. Fortunately before too long more people arrived with a hankering for some Dota, so Beef was ditched with some relief.
With seven of us by now it was a 5punky mixed bot match, and to change things up a little bit we tried Single Draft mode. Single Draft, rather than letting players pick or randomly draw from the entire list of characters, gives everyone three from which to choose. It’s a nice way of randomising who you play without completely removing your option to avoid those you really don’t like. However, for newer players it can also bring them out of their comfort zone when they’re concentrating on learning the game without having to learn a new character. Swings and roundabouts, but everyone seemed happy.
Unfortunately for the other side I drafted Slark. Slark, the fishy Cockney assassin, is my favourite character. He’s a fast, agile character whose role is to roam the field ganking stray enemies and then bailing out before their team react. For all those playing on the other side, I do genuinely apologise and hope I didn’t cause too much frustration. When one player is running away with a game it can be frustrating and I worry that people with only a tenuous enjoyment of it will become disillusioned and stop playing. In Dota, every dog has his day, but in fact I wasn’t actually being that productive for the team since we weren’t pushing into enemy territory.
Wiggle wiggle little fish.
A few people left after that and four of us teamed up with a random for a public game. This game illustrated my last point nicely – we were losing on paper for most of the game, but near the end we made a big push while the other side were prodding at a lane and interfering with Shot2Bits. We got right to their ancient before they could respond, and a second well timed jab in the same place left me and a bunch of creeps rapidly diminishing their ancient’s health. Unfortunately I may have made a fatal error, freezing both attackers and defenders when I was charged by an opponent. This gave them time to react and defend, and we never got another chance. Our random rage quit, we lost the game. Would we have won if I hadn’t done that? Maybe, but 5punkers aren’t in the habit of casting blame about and we were all happy to have had such a close fought game.
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