Rogue

Just so ya'll are prewarned, this is a Battlefield2 related gush/rant. It's seems pretty vogue at the moment to be talking about it, and rightly so (oooh look he's started already), but for those who don't care - turn down your eyes now.

Follow up:

Occassionaly I let my fingernails grow a bit, it's great at work since when you have to rip off some packaging in a hurry, nothing beats ye olde humanis-blades. And when I'm coding it up it helps my fingers glide over the keys. Creeped out yet? So anyway - the last couple of times I've leapt online to rip it up in Battlefield2 I have been completely annihilated.

Seriously we are talking bad. The only way I managed to get my name on the scoreboard was by managing a couple of revives with my trusty defibs. Appart from that however I had kill to death ratios in the realm of 3:12. Literally. Now just think about that for a moment; In BF2 when you die you have to sit there staring at a countdown for 15 seconds, on average I was doing that 12 times a round. That's 3 full minutes of my life that I just will never get back.

To put it into reference, the average tournament match at LAN events goes for 20 minutes (like at ML). So that means I would have spent 15% of the entire match just twiddling my thumbs. Amazing.

Where am I going with this?

Well last night when I jumped on before dinner I was once again put on the losing team (according to the round history team 2 had lost the last 10 rounds or so by about 80+ each time) which I understand, the game was hoping I could balance things out a little. I signed on with a squad of decent looking misfits. By decent looking I mean they had a minimal amount of l33tspeak in their nicks and if anything most just had a country identifier in their name - I'm a bit of a patriot, so like to group with people who like to show where they're from. For example my BF2 nick is 'Rogue.au'.

We did well, don't get me wrong. But as a team we still lost. On average we lost by about 50 tickets too for about 2 or 3 rounds. I'd do something like blame the commander for not raining down artillery and supplies like a mofo, but my squad was rarely in the thick of the fighting as we were tasked with keeping control of the flags behind the lines in a defensive role. So I didn't really see whether the commander was doing his job properly or not.

Regardless though my horrible streak continued and I was playing quite badly. I decided to chill out for a bit and grab some chow and an iced coffee. While dinner was in the oven I noticed how long my claws were getting (when you start to accidentily cut yourself, they're probably too long) and hacked the suckers off. Then once I'd shovelled some hot sustenance down my kneck I jumped back onto the 'node.

Egads!

It was like I was suddenly back to normal. Some amazing superhero like epiphany moment when total understanding of what is needed to be achieved and how to do it is reached. I was able to lay down the smack on those USMC imperialist scum (once again I get relegated to team 2, I can't remember the last time I managed to play as team 1) and I was able to do it without sacrificing myself in the process. My kill to death ratio was completely reversed.

And the craziest part was that I kept getting stuck as squad leader too. So I'd have no-one to spawn on and have to stop and give orders regularly as well. Likewise I couldn't go medic really, so didn't have an awefull lot of teamwork points. In fact I even drove into a few mines (enemy ones, sneakily hidden, totally not my fault... much) and ended a couple of rounds with negative teamwork. Yet after all that I was getting 3rd/6th best player on the server, a 64-player server. To say I was chuffed was a little bit of an understatement.

What conclusions can be drawn from this? Do a gamers natural weapons actually hinder game playing ability? Am I like sampsonite or whatever his name was, the guy who when you cut off his hair he lost all his strength; where I cut off my claws and regain it? Is it just because all the crazy players who have been playing 8 hours a day since the game came out just went to bed and only normal people and n00bs were left? Who knows.