People of the Internet...

I would start this post with several tag lines...

"How every other player online is a douche"

comes to my mind... or perhaps...

"How every douche finds me in game"

... or, I could get more personal....

"The douches who I met in Pick Up Groups playing World of Tanks last night"....

Maybe that's too specific, because this post is not totally all about World of Tanks, but it most certainly is about the douches we all meet out there.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not always nice in games, I'm not perfect, I mean last night I shot a friendly and I was appologising, but then when someone else shot me I was raging, I'm not perfect and don't claim to be.

But, I do know what's going on, I can look around and when I suggest to someone they do something its usually for a good reason, so some of the reactions I've had last night have been interesting, and relate directly back to the same feel of how people have acted in other games - so this is definately not a World of Tanks phenomonon, its more about how people playing at home alone think they can be utter and total insulting bastards to the other people they're playing with.

And, they can be, no game company I've ever seen has dealt with this problem.

So, what is it that has been ryled?... Well it was a specific incident, playing a game, I secured one flank, sorted it out, crossed the whole map to help the otherside, got there, checked things out and it was obvious one guy needed to move, backwards, meaning the enemy he was in deadlock with would be forced to come out and get shot by the five of us backing this guy up.... Would the guy move back?... Nope... Would he say anything nope... Did he move?... Nope... What happened?... He died, leaving the rest of us to do tasks we really needed him to do.

His reaction?... To call me every name you can think of.  He started to snigger about my score, and historical score - I'll get back to that in another post - and he started to quote his personal military doctarin, which was basically "ADVANCE WITH MY HAIR ON FIRE", rather than listen to anyone else.  And after the game was over, the prick even thought it acceptable to start sending me insulting personal messages, to the point that I actually decided to add him to my ignore list - now I'm a pretty foul mouthed fucker, so to get your douche ass on my ignore list then you've got to have stepped over a line.

And what did this guy do to over step that line?  Was it call me names?  No not really, he did but you know sticks and stones... No what he did was he started to quote statistics at me from Noobmeter.com about my player profile.

Now, I left WoW when skill was ignored in favour of sum total values of armour/equipment and raids went all exclusive and shitty.  So to come across it in World Of Tanks annoyed me.

Not least because the prime game mode for everyone is to play in a Pick Up Group - and we all know Pick up Groups are like a bag of cats, you can't say what people can do, how they think, or even what language they speak.  And in World of Tanks as a near always solo player, I'm always in a Pug, so my average win/loss ratio is low.

Then add into the mix I'm back in the game after an 18 months hiatus - and grinding a whole new low-tier set of tanks - and in low tier you just explode in seconds so your "efficiency" and "k/d" ratio are all over the place, then quoting statistics back to me were pretty pointless, but any moron could see my profile was such and such a percent, in active over the last 3 months and only active in the last week, if you looked.

But this douche did not look, he did what any teenage douche does, he looks up the first stat he finds and beat it out on his keyboard over and over and over and over and over.

And I was like, you know screw this, I don't have to listen to this shit.

Tonight I'm going to dig that replay up, it was the last game I would stomach last night, and to save the cunt's blushes I'll turn off the interface and we'll see my heroic solo effort to hold the right flank, and then my moving across the whole map to help to help this douche, and then his spewing shit as I in my hugely inappropriate anti-tank mobile had to go do the job he in his heavy tank should have been doing all along - and I got blown up trying, because he had died minutes earlier.

And this was not the only douche I met, I had people pushing me out of cover, I had people running into me on purpose, I had people assuming I was foreign - because of my in game name - and taking the piss - at which my informing them I was British got glassy stares.  It was a shit night for me.

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I know its poor form to come and update a post later, but I just read this and I thought, I wish the prick last night would be locked up for the comments he made to me... Would make my day... Oh, no, Wait... I live in a democracy, shit.