Monday Night Combat is a special game to me. Many games I play, I'm proficient enough to become decent in them. But eventually, I hit a wall that prevents me from climbing any higher on the skill ladder like Street Fighter IV or Marvel Vs. Capcom 3. Monday Night Combat was different in that I grew parallel to the game. Of course, I'm not talking about Super Monday Night Combat, which is currently holding an invitational beta. I'm talking about the original Monday Night Combat that released on Xbox Live.

I'll spare you the details about the game. I've already gone over the game in a previous blog talking about downloadables. But becoming good at Monday Night Combat was not for some tournament or clan scrimmage for pride and prestige. I became good at this game simply because I loved the game so much that I couldn't bear being the reason why my team would lose. And every other lobby is a case of playing against someone who is capable of steamrolling an entire team by his or herself. With enough skill, one person can suppress an entire team, leaving even the most inept team mates capable of plowing straight into a victory.

It hasn't changed very much in the transition to Super Monday Night Combat. The learning curve is extremely unforgiving and I was no exception. A large part of my skill is due to my regular presence on the Uberent official forums where I absorbed a large amount of information that isn't available anywhere else. To make the curve even steeper, I regularly played the Assassin, a character class that was largely seen as the weakest of the 6 available classes back then: Assault, Gunner, Tank, Support, Sniper, and lastly, Assassin.

It was an in-joke among the community that the team with the most Assassins is destined to lose. That's because the Assassin is the equivalent of the Spy from Team Fortress 2 in most cases. Except the Spy is actually good at both sabotage and killing. The Assassin however, has trouble achieving attaining any sense of being a slayer position due to her short effective range and reliance on mobility while lacking a protective pool of health.

Early time with the Assassin meant many deaths, few kills, and generally acting like a weight holding down your team. People coming into MNC from games like Battlefield and Call of Duty are heavily conditioned to play with a slayer mindset as opposed to an objective or role-based mindset. Even worse, playing with this mindset on the fragile Assassin is a recipe for disaster. Players would constantly kill you whether out of malice or as opportunists and the whole experience would be very difficult to weather.



But through a combination of experience, observation, and frequenting the official forums where other likeminded individuals went to, I learned the necessary strategies to becoming not only a legitimate threat in a game, but a regular choice for the lobby's MVP and the one who would carry bad teams in desperate situations. I credit the forums for all the knowledge and skills I gained, silently lurking the strategy threads for important notes and strategies.

I slowly grasped the concept that money earned from gameplay is a much greater scale for skill as opposed to kill/death ratio. Like in games like MOBA and DOTA, an Assassin player is supposed to push lanes of bots and sabotage the enemy's bot lanes. After learning what the priorities of the Assassin were, I slowly learned gained more tricks and skills to further evolve my tactics. When Snipers tried to deny me bots with area of effect attacks and traps, I learned to employ hit and run tactics to quickly hit lanes while avoiding damage while learning to spot traps. When Tanks and Gunners strengthened their presence on the frontlines, I learned to infiltrate deeper into enemy territory to take advantage of their exposed flanks. When Supports continued to strengthen their turret defenses, I learned to spawn my special ninja bots, Gremlins, to attack them while I hit them from unexpected angles. And whenever the Assault is concerned, I only approach him when weakened and never from the front, because the Assault is OP.

With my tendency to upload matches to YouTube, I began attracting attention as a good Assassin in the small community. Every so often, I received questions for tips on playing Assassin or Tank and was even asked a few times if I wanted to play in private match games among other good players. Most of my subscriber base is based off of my Assassin gameplay videos.

I enjoyed Monday Night Combat in its prime immensely. And a large part of that enjoyment was growing alongside it. When the game was a month old, I had died a couple hundred times and only managed a hundred or so kills myself. When the game was three months old, I began contributing to my team much better and pushing towards a more consistent victory. And after a year of playing the game, I had uploaded over a hundred matches onto my YouTube telling the tales of all the times I had won despite bad team mates and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat belonging to amazing opponents. Honestly, as an Assassin specializes in sabotage and subterfuge on bot lanes and not actual assassination, an Assassin can only do so much in the face of extreme odds, but I've also learned to never give up and to keep fighting no matter how dire things seem.


A recreation of steamrolling a game

Monday Night Combat had a unique learning curve that I quickly picked up on. I enjoyed the game so much, I decided to become as good as possible at the game to maximize my enjoyment in a game that tends to attract people who party together in order to plow through random pubs. It is probably the only game I never experienced a wall in terms of skill progression.

I was an Assassin. I was good at what I did and I made sure everyone knew my gamertag when I stepped into the arena.