Breaking news: people in multiplayer online games are jerks!
I've been playing some Blood Bowl online after buying it on steam during a 75% off sale. It's a turn-based warhammer fantasy version of football. You get a team of elves or orcs or (in my case) rats or lizards, and try to score touchdowns by getting the ball into the opponents goal by any means possible. One possible means is over the dead bodies of your opponents. Although lizards and rats usually sneak around and run for it.
I played some single player first and had fun, but the computer *was* awfully stupid... so I started playing random multiplayer 'matchmaking' games.
And it turns out, I *win* more against real people, actually. Because the computer was playing (somewhat incompetently) to win, while real people seem to play to hurt the other team as much as possible. My lizard team has *never lost a game* but it's lost five players to death or serious injury and has a team value of 860 -- the starting team value is 1000. With 7 active players out of the minimum of 11 to play a game (they'll fill out the rest with 'mercenaries' of the cheapest kind of player next game).
The last game was just mind-boggling. Someone took a team full of wood elves -- the specialist dodgers and passers -- and bought nothing but linemen. Dirt cheap, disposable linemen. Which he used to swarm my lizards and knock them down and foul them over and over until they died. This is not a good way to win games -- I won 3-0. It's a good way to hurt the other team, though. He took special care to go after the one player I had who'd earned enough spp to level up. And managed to kill him. 9.9
Of course, part of this was just bad luck instead of sheer viciousness -- he rolled a 10 or better on 2d6 75% of the time, and I needed an 8 or better to hurt his guys back and managed it ONCE. Of course, that once was when one of my skinks darted between three elves to blitz the ball carrier (he was actually deigning to try for a point, for once) and killed him outright. n.n
He whined and whined and whined about my good luck after that...
I played some single player first and had fun, but the computer *was* awfully stupid... so I started playing random multiplayer 'matchmaking' games.
And it turns out, I *win* more against real people, actually. Because the computer was playing (somewhat incompetently) to win, while real people seem to play to hurt the other team as much as possible. My lizard team has *never lost a game* but it's lost five players to death or serious injury and has a team value of 860 -- the starting team value is 1000. With 7 active players out of the minimum of 11 to play a game (they'll fill out the rest with 'mercenaries' of the cheapest kind of player next game).
The last game was just mind-boggling. Someone took a team full of wood elves -- the specialist dodgers and passers -- and bought nothing but linemen. Dirt cheap, disposable linemen. Which he used to swarm my lizards and knock them down and foul them over and over until they died. This is not a good way to win games -- I won 3-0. It's a good way to hurt the other team, though. He took special care to go after the one player I had who'd earned enough spp to level up. And managed to kill him. 9.9
Of course, part of this was just bad luck instead of sheer viciousness -- he rolled a 10 or better on 2d6 75% of the time, and I needed an 8 or better to hurt his guys back and managed it ONCE. Of course, that once was when one of my skinks darted between three elves to blitz the ball carrier (he was actually deigning to try for a point, for once) and killed him outright. n.n
He whined and whined and whined about my good luck after that...