Okay but serious question: what do y'all do when friends you’ve made only via switch drop into your turf wars and end up on the opposite team and you have no way of communicating with them? Do you just play normally and squidparty in the lobby after? Do you try to find them in mid and goof off together? Do you hunt them specifically for sport? Is there some kind of norm/etiquette here?!
This post got me thinking about online PvP. I will now ramble incoherently about basically every game that has left a significant impression on me because this is my Tumblr and I am entitled to my one rambling lunatic post a year.
Ragnarok Online was an early 00s Korean Action RPG MMO with 2D anime sprites on top of 3D backgrounds. It had a charming aesthetic, a fantastic array of classes, and was more grindy than an inappropriate euphemism.
The PvP in Ragnarok was twofold: One was a lawless arena wherein you’d walk in and you were free to kill people (or not). The other was an area of open conflict that opened up for two hours twice a week, and the winner of a weird sort of king-of-the-hill style game mode was entitled to tangible game rewards.
The war was markedly less toxic than the Arena. Still toxic, to be sure, but it was generally understood that it was high stakes PvP and you went in there because you wanted to fight or you wanted to win, and if you wanted to win, you’d better be prepared to fight.
The arenas were far worse, because murder was completely optional. You didn’t have to fight. You weren’t incentivized to fight. But when you walk into the arena, you could be attacked. And you would be. Violently. Or not.
I think it was the unease that made it vile. A person murdered you. Do they not like you? Do they hate you? Do they just think your death is funny? Is it a power flex? Maybe they’ll tell you. Maybe they’ll shrug and say they came to PvP to kill people because that’s the point. But they’re not fighting their friends. I guess they just don’t like you.
It was, in essence, a relic of online competitive multiplayer before people understood how things work. It was also horrendously imbalanced, and I was absolutely terrible at it because my build was about the worst thing I could have done.
2/10, should have mained Hunter.
Team Fortress 2 was the first really big class-based co-op shooter. 9 classes, two teams of 12. It spawned an entire genre, and was largely responsible for.. honestly, a lot of things in modern multiplayer gaming.
TF2 is openly hostile - You have achievements for taunting people and there’s even one for killing a single player repeatedly and having them leave the game as a result. But it’s also incredibly fickle: If one team started winning too much, the teams would get shuffled, and you were now stuck with the guy who’d just been kicking your ass for the last 20 minutes. And he was stuck with you. And it was usually fine, because that’s kind of what you signed up for.
TF2 had a Mad Chaos kind of vibe. Rounds were short and impersonal. You would die and you would get angry and people would murder you but it was also so frantic and you were murdering other people that you almost didn’t have time to be mad. Also, the teams were big enough that individuals didn’t get blamed much for any kind of conflict, but we’ll get into that later.
9/10, great times voice chatting as an Australian Sniper on US servers.
World of Warcraft became the king of MMOs when it broke 1 million subs, and honestly, it’s still up there, in spite of everything that’s happened. I played mainly during Pandaria, and there was a lot about WoW that I liked, but it had a lot of weird problems. I played mostly on battlegrounds.
The combat design was okay, but the bracketing was weird. The different maps had good designs, but the fact that gear mattered made things pretty lousy. The weird thing is, it’s almost a non-presence in my mind. It was the most middle-of-the-road PvP experience that was compelling enough to keep playing but not outstanding in any way shape manner or form.
5/10, the PvP equivalent of white noise.
DotA 2 is a game I have something like 4500 matches on. I haven’t really played it hardcore in years, but it was, to this day, my most definitive online experience. I have a lot to say about it.
DotA 2 is a MOBA/ARTS: basically an action RPG or single-unit RTS. Two teams of five in a weird sort of mirrored tower defense. Its sister game is League of Legends, which I have played a bit of, but which I won’t be going into because A) I didn’t play it nearly as much, and B) their differences aren’t really relevant to the discussion.
DotA 2 is a wonderful game. It’s got interesting balance, it’s massively complex, you have a huge amount of control over your play style, it’s mechanically well designed, it has one of the best sound designs in any videogame I’ve ever played, it’s hugely popular, it has one of the biggest competitive scenes in gaming, and it’s free to play.
DotA 2 is a horrendous game. In DotA, everybody has a role, and every role has requirements. It is not an easy game. It is a difficult game. It’s very easy to grasp the rudimentary concepts, but the competence gap between a low level and a high level is astronomical. There is so much to know and so many ways in which you can screw up. I played for hours upon hours, and I am still not very good. At my best, I was maybe in the upper half. Maybe. You can pour hours into this game and still be terrible.
Now most of this wouldn’t be too bad, except you have a team of five people, which is big enough that your contributions matter, but small enough where you feel that the outcome of the battle is rarely in your hands. When you screw up (and you will screw up) and people notice (and they will notice) they will point it out to you. Agressively. With extreme hostility. These games typically last around 30-50 minutes, but they can go long.
When people get into fights, it can descend into absolute game-ruining behavior. A person can essentially work to make sure his team loses, and 99% of the time, it works, if only because winning a 4v5 is actually really damn hard when the teams were already balanced on a knife’s edge. There is a reporting system, and it works, but the game is just so aggressively hostile that it doesn’t matter - there will always be a fresh supply of hostility.
Dota 2 is such an aggressively hostile game to play in that to this day I am basically immune to people being shitheels to me in online games. Whenever somebody tries to antagonize me in an online space, I just laugh. I have seen online competitive gaming at its absolute worst. I have bathed in fucking fire. The idea that some dickhead can leave an impression on me for using the wrong emote is laughable. Go spend a thousand hours in hell, then come back to me with shadowed eyes and a dead stare and try telling me how much my mother loves sucking dicks as if those words hold any kind of weight.
10/10, best game ever made, satisfied my PvP addiction for five years, for the love of God don’t fucking play it.
Final Fantasy XIV is a game I’ve only recently been playing (and by recently I mean the last year or so). It’s a fun little MMO that is basically Anime WoW with a way more aggressive single player focus. But it does have PvP. Specifically, there’s a new PvP mode called “Crystaline Conflict”. If you’ve played TF2, I’d describe it as “Reverse Payload”. For the rest of you, it’s a sort of reverse tug-of-war where two teams of five try to push a giant boulder to the other team’s side, and you have to murder anybody who tries to stop you.
Design-wise, it’s fun, but uninteresting, though the fact that player power is normalized turns it into more of a game occupying the same engine as an MMO rather than a form of explicit MMO PvP combat.
No, what’s interesting about CC is that you can’t team up with people and you can’t communicate with anyone, not even your team. Your only avenue for communication is a handful of chat macros (Well played, attack this target, that kind of thing). In spite of this, I’ve still seen remnants of that DotA-style toxicity with people sitting in spawn passive-aggressively spamming “Well Played!”, likely owing to the whole 5-people-to-a-team factor. It makes me suspect that small teams are the worst for toxicity, which is a pity, because mechanically they work great.
6/10, call me when I’m allowed to party with friends.
But, what of the original question. I’ve never played Splatoon 3, but the question of how to deal with people who were your friends a moment ago and are now your enemies is one that’s almost universal to these kinds of games.
When you join one of those lobbies, you have, in essence, signed a sort of implicit contract. Those on your team are your friends, and those on the opposing team are your enemies.
The first implication of this is obvious enough: You have an implicit duty to your team to try your best to win. Obviously this doesn’t mean “don’t play if you’re not at your absolute best”, but in that moment they are your brothers in arms, and you’re there to support them just as they are there to support you. You are, to an extent, expected to disregard your attachments, or at the very least, not let them affect your judgement.
But there is a secondary implication that may be less obvious: Your obligation to your opponents. Without opponents, the game ceases to be entertaining for anybody. A tea party in the middle of an arena can sometimes be a fun diversion, but at the end of the day, your weapons are weapons for a reason, and if none of your opponents wanted to shoot back, you’d probably have a pretty lousy time.
The purpose of a competition is to engage in conflict in a safe environment. If you gain enjoyment from that, there’s no reason to assume other people don’t feel the same way.
Crush your enemies.
Then team up with your enemies to crush other, bigger enemies.
Then write a lesbian squid story for nanowrimo about a hotel room with only one kiddie pool.
