I'll admit right off the bat that I've never really considered myself a big multiplayer gamer. Although I had access to a PC during the rise of deathmatch via Doom and Quake, I wasn't smart enough to figure out the dial up modem at the time so I guess you can call me a late bloomer. My first proper shooter experience online was with classic Counter-Strike 1.6 via a LAN center at the local mall. It was there I learned—the hard way of course—the lingo and syntax of the modern multiplayer shooter. I befriended a few local Counter-Strike Jedi to show me the ins and outs of the game mechanics and I became a pretty devastating force behind a keyboard and mouse. That is, a devastating force if the game roster was left at four on four....

See, I don't want to come out and say I suck at online shooters because the reality is, I don't. At least, any online shooter I've bothered to practice at has usually led me to garnering a good reputation among the peers I play with. Yet no matter how proficient I get at an online shooter, I cannot and will probably never be able to play well in large roster games.

Typically, if you face me in a COD4 cage match, I will hunt you down, cut you up, and make you watch me eat your entrails...



For real.

To the contrary, throw me in a 16x16 team deathmatch in Counter-Strike Source or SOCOM, and I become a useless blubbering PTSD victim with a high probability of failure in the field. Doesn't matter if the roster is split into teams or if it's a free for all, the more bodies you fit into the room, my chances for doing abysmally go up accordingly. I become a waste of bandwidth if you will.





It's a bit embarrassing to concede but that's the truth of the matter. In most video games, I'm a natural born killer. If my opponent is an army of A.I. controlled zombies, I'm cool with that, seriously. I play a mean round of L4D co-op or versus. Bullet hell shmups take me some practice, but even a hailstorm of pixilated trajectories can't keep this gamer down. So it frustrates me to no end how just a group of strangers on the “other” team cause me to play shooters like a quadriplegic. It's not just one particular game either. I can—and will—think up numerous scenarios that are applicable across the shooter spectrum which I've noticed when playing in games with large rosters.

Scenario 1



I am always, always, always, always getting raped from behind. It's like I'm that kid from the Family Circus cartoon leaving a dotted trail for every guy on the other team to find me. Like a hungry pack of ravenous prehistoric creatures, they swarm in large groups before I get any chance to get my bearings straight. Efficient? I guess. Frustrating? For me yeah. It's like some kind of sick and twisted hive mind following me everywhere I go and it's impossible for me to worry about what's in front of me when 80% of the time I'm getting attacked from the rear. If I'm lucky to make the 180 degree turn to face my initial adversaries, logic dictates that I get finished off from where I was just looking.

Scenario 2 (More like an empirical law.)



Traveling with teammates does nothing to keep me alive. Oh sure, I'm aware that my teammates may try to divert attention from charlie and make him panic but I still end up in the respawn first. I try to stay a little bit back and let the dude on point take the flak, but you know what? It's blatantly obvious that the opposing team literally has bullets with my PSN id or gamertag on it. Respawning feels like storming Omaha beach all by myself holding flares in both hands over and over again. Rolling with a larger crew while making a big offensive push just means a bigger volume of bullets hit my body at one time.

Scenario 3



Sometimes I think maybe my time and kill to death ratio would be better off hanging back and scoring kills as a sniper instead; far away from all the madness going on at the front lines. Sadly this leads to boredom as taking the sniper role involves two different outcomes. I either camp quietly at my secluded vantage point all by my lonesome and see absolutely NO ACTION or scenario one kicks in before I get a chance to waste my time with this scenario. When scenario one kicks in, I really get pissed off because it only reaffirms my Family Circus theory even more since I don't usually run into any opposition by the time I get to my vantage point.

Scenario 4



I just end up running around in circles. In the game that is. In my mind I'm trying to think I am being a sneaky sneak by flanking the enemy. If I move around all the action happening on the radar screen--which clearly shows a full scale firefight going on--I should get the drop on a few tangos. I don't know why I keep falling for this because scenario one usually happens before I can get my drop on, or my compadres have taken it upon themselves to obliterate the opposing force allowing me to welcome home the newly respawned; seeing as how I'm probably on their side of the turf by then. This scenario particularly grinds my stones like nothing else since I have yet to play a shooter that rewards you appropriately for doing NASCAR laps around the map. This scenario turns a white knuckle, reflex intensive activity into the equivalent of turning left for ten minutes at a time.

Scenario 5



In large scale warfare type games like Battlefield 2 and Warhawk, I always end up in a game where there's a least one or two aircraft pilots on the other team who actually know what the fuck they're doing and can annihilate the puny ground forces on mine. Nobody cannot touch these angels of death and I don't know if they actually have training in actual piloting aircraft, but they ruin it for me and probably everyone else too. To step out of the safety of the respawn tent will result in an artillery payload on your head which may cause severe trauma, or in my case, a messy death. It's like taking a team of thirty-two players and squishing them down into one giant piece of aerial superiority.

What it really comes down to is that my ability to play online shooters productively is directly related to the amount of bodies shooting at each other in the room. Anything above six on six will usually spiral into mass chaos and confusion on my part. The thing is though, I'm not a very competitive person so I'm not in it to win, but it's hard to accept that I'm wholeheartedly useless to my own survival and my team. That is sucking right there. I've cost countless games for sufficiently talented teammates because I may as well be a bonus free kill item. I want to make a contribution, I want to be important, but I feel as online shooters grow their roster capacity I won't be able to enjoy them for the teamwork and camaraderie that supplements them. I'll be too chewed up in the carnage of online warfare against an army of 128 players to have any fun. As hard as I try to do my best, the outcome pretty much plays out like the NSFW clip below when I compare my post round stats to the players up top who just committed online genocide successfully...