A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Howdy y'all. I've been quiet on LJ, even though I've been melting my keyboard under the fury of my frantic typing into Twitter, so feel free to read my recent stuff there. I've been far too deep into the end-of-year gravity well action playset to organize my thoughts into more than 140 characters at a time. (Or, sometimes, more than 280.) I have no doubt that I shall return presently.

However, ahkond recently expressed surprise at my tweeted assertion that I found the Xbox 360 version of Team Fortress 2 more fun to play than the PC version, and I wanted to write up a deeper examination of my reasons in a longer format. So, yes, the rest of this post is video-game neepery, and you will probably want to skip it unless you're into that sort of thing.

Earlier this month, Valve hosted a special TF2 free-play weekend, and I jumped right in, blessing my good fortune that it happened right after I had set up the used PC I'd recently bought from a friend. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that, for one reason or another, the game didn't work very well on my machine. Simply put, my framerate was either rather bad or completely unacceptable, depending upon how many other players were in my immediate vicinity.

Several friends, hearing my dismay over Steam-chat, suggested various fixes: What kind of video card had I installed? Was I running all the latest drivers? Did I google to see if my particular setup need some more patches somewhere? Perhaps I could try playing with some of the game's graphics-quality sliders?

After spending a couple of hours in frantic configuration-wanking abandon, I paused to catch my breath, lift my head, and look down the road. What looked back at me were the dully glimmering eyes of a hundred yaks, all lined up, waiting to be shaved.

Now, I am totally down with people who can get into the sub-hobby / metagame of keeping their PCs up to date with the latest bits n pieces of hardware, drivers, and operating system patches necessary to keep them aloft for another month or two. If that works out for you, then by all means, please pursue it with all due relish.

But, look: A key reason that I enjoy playing video games on consoles (and not PCs) is the same as a key reason I do all my work exclusively on Macs (and not PCs): I don't want to think about any of that stuff. The thought of having to think about any kind of low-level hardware configuration, and the mid-level firmware and software diddling that necessarily comes with it, makes me shudder with dread. I can just feel all the tufts of matted yak-hair scratching against my skin. Ugh.

TF2 is a great game, and it is a shame that I can't currently enjoy its more recent features, since ol' Valve isn't hurrying to add them to the Xbox version. But I am so not into the idea of paying dollar-sign question-mark question-mark question-mark, and burning up gord knows how many hours from my life, just to bring one of my secondary computers the ability to play a game which, er, I already own a perfectly good copy of for my game console. So, yeah. No.

(Also, it happens that I learned to play modern FPSes on the two-stick, two-trigger console controller, and so am quite comfortable with their use, to the perpetual befuddlement of my WASD + mouse-using friends. So be it!)

I was amused to find that 50 percent of all the people I have played with in Xbox Live have awarded me an "Avoid" flag, meaning that they've asked Live's matchmaker to make it less likely to encounter me in the future. I assume that they are all past teammates from my TF2 sessions, which I played without a headset on - thus ignoring anything that they had to say to me - and invariably appeared at the bottom of every end-game scoreboard. Heh heh.

As one who has designed a system like this in the past, I found it interesting that the Avoid flag comes in two flavors, established by answering a three-part quiz as you assign the flag to a player. If you give it to them because they're too good, or too crappy, or just plain clueless about the game (which is a separate answer from 'too crappy'), then the matcher will take it into account from then on, but the target player isn't otherwise affected. If, on the other hand, you Avoid them because they're a disruptive player in some way - a jerk, a quitter, a spoilsport or just irritating - then you will also negatively affect their public reputation. Furthermore, that player will be informed of their perceived transgression. (In my case, it was none of these, so people just thought I sucked / was clueless. Which I can't disagree with, I suppose.)

There seems to be a mistake here, in that the system assumes that game skills are communative. IOW, if I consistently crush you at chess (yes, there's a chess game somewhere in Live Arcade), I don't think either of us would assume that I'd therefore wipe the floor with you at Halo 3 as well. But the system seems to treat it as just so. Now, I may be assuming too much here; the system knows what game the two of you played together last, so perhaps it affects only its weighting regarding that one game. But if it does, it doesn't say so.

I know about the different types of Avoid-flag because I played a rollicking game of Aegis Wing on Live the other day, whose sole downer was a little boy who got a bit hyper as the four of us approached the last level, and started chattering non-stop, eventually breaking into a sort of sing-song screeching. (He stopped when the game's host threatened to kick him off.) After the game, when I saw that there was an Avoid-reason category labeled "Inappropriate use of voice, such as shouting, singing or inane chatter", I laughed.

The opposite of Avoid is Prefer, and there's no refinement for that; if you Prefer a player, the matchmaker will try to pair you up with them more often, and their public rep improves.