_Far Cry 2_ Among the Plebians

To start with, my apologies -- I'm currently brewing a Call of Duty 3 post to be titled War Among the Plebians, so punning on that title was natural for this post.

I discovered something tonight: yesterday and the day before, I stumbled into some very good games of Far Cry 2 multiplayer. The ordinary player, and the ordinary player-made map, is much less great. Tonight, I spent a substantial amount of time with a workable, if imbalanced, player group -- there were a number of players on the server, not inexperienced so much as, strangely enough, scrubs, who kept the all-players chat channel busy with complaining about weapons they didn't like (ironically by calling them "noob" ones). First grenade launchers, then the SAW, and finally they settled on griping, unanimously, about snipers (a misnomer, of course -- a sniper is someone who takes extreme-range aimed shots on his own, while a sharpshooter is one who takes such shots in support of other forces).

The thing is, they only complained about snipers because they play the game like Doom. I commented that I don't mind a lot of snipers at all, because hunting them is an enjoyable challenge (although there are user-made maps -- with no ground cover and only one path across the battlefield -- that make the task much harder than it really should be). I advised other players to use cover, by typing "try the grass," and the only responses I got were "I don't do drugs" and ensuing incomprehension when I tried to clarify, still wittily. A few players understood that Far Cry 2 is about stealth, not cartoonish-FPS frontal charges, but clearly not all of them by any means.

There's another issue as well. Most of these people were playing to win. There was one player in particular, who was extremely good; I managed to catch him on the flank once and kill him -- once, you understand, and I think this was the first time he had come under attack in the entire map. I was just about to type in that while my team was clearly losing, I considered this a victory, because I'd managed to kill the best player on the server (I really hope that would have come across as a compliment rather than a taunt...) -- but I didn't have the chance, because he quit the game as soon as he died, 17 killed to 1 death score or not.

The host for this series of games had to quit, and I moved on to a different game (Far Cry 2 likes to select the game you join for you); but the rules on this server were very strange ones (no starting upgrades whatsoever? infinite ammunition?), and either different players were allowed to choose how much life they had, or most of the people on the server were cheating up the wazoo, because it took me 2-3 hits with one-hit-kill weapons (the compressed-air neurotoxin dart rifle and the M1905) to actually kill anyone. Now that I think of it, perhaps damage from scoped weapons had just been set very low on that server... but that doesn't explain why the same weapon took one shot to kill some players, two for others, and in one case three or four. (If you're wondering how I got four shots at him with a magazineless neurotoxin-dart rifle: he was standing at full height in the middle of a bridge, looking intensely down towards combat occurring underneath him, disregarding the tower that was at one end of the bridge. The first two times I shot him, he didn't even react. Somebody needs to be whacked over the head with The Tiger's Way until he absorbs a little of it by osmosis...)

I wish I could figure out how the heck to get PunkBuster working, so that I could join the rated games and be free of the cheating part. (One invincible enemy ruins your whole game.) Or better yet, I wish I could send every Far Cry 2 player the complete works of H. John Poole (apart from the one book that's only sold to soldiers), or at least the axioms that I mentioned in my previous post, with the message that they're supposed to play like this...

Update: Oh, I just needed to run the PunkBuster install that was on the Far Cry 2 CD, not the one I downloaded from the link on the PunkBuster website that said "install." How silly of me. On to yet testier and more hypercompetitive players, but at least there won't be cheaters this time...