Since the dawn of online gaming, nothing is more annoying than playing with or against a quitter. Someone who will go as far as disconnecting from the Internet to sabotage a game, whether it’s to avoid losing or to rip someone off in a trade. If you play any video game online, you will run into these types of players. Even when some games penalize players for quitting early, it doesn’t stop everyone from behaving this way. I’m not saying anything prophetic or new here, but man…it sucks.
I can see how people grow into this behaviour. They start out life playing with their parents, who let them win all the time. Then they get out into the real world to play with a bunch of other kids who were brought up thinking that they can win all the time. At that point, someone has to lose. Playing sports has been a huge factor in me overcoming the feeling of losing, because losing is inevitable. It’s also helped me learn why I play. I don’t play any game because my top and only objective is to win. I play to have fun first and foremost. If I win all the time and it’s not fun, then I don’t want to play.
Not everybody is like that, though, and video games have some inherent limitations that give players some “God-like” control over the outcome of a game. Some people are really only in it to win by any means necessary, even if that means abusing their “God-like” control over the experience by removing themselves from it mid-game to prevent an unfavourable outcome. Even if that means sabotaging the game for others. I have no respect for these types of players. If you want to quit a single player game repeatedly until you get the outcome you want, that’s your business. But people who completely disregard the experience of others for personal gain in a video game? Nothing short of scum. Some people who commit these acts will justify it to themselves and others by saying, “It’s just a game,”
The only two games I’ve ever played competitively online were Tetris DS and Street Fighter IV. In Tetris, disconnects were penalized with an automatic loss and a hit to your rating. In spite of that relatively stiff penalty, it didn’t stop the hardest of hardcore quitters to bail out the moment things got rough. Since the game didn’t support any sort of communication, there wasn’t much you could do about it.
In Street Fighter IV, the nature of the game and the nature of the online service lend themselves to different outcomes. Fighting games are a very personal and visceral experience, because they basically face you off one-on-one in a fight. When you get beat up in the game, the feeling you get is similar to the feeling you get when you in real life are getting beat down by someone else. If you decide to disconnect yourself from the Internet mid-match, the game tracks it publicly with an online disconnect percentage rating. This is put in place in order to discourage you from disconnecting and to discourage others from playing with you if you constantly quit. That percentage rating doesn’t seem to matter to some people. I’ve seen a few players who disconnect from over 50% of the matches they fight. To think that there are players who have disconnected from the Internet hundreds of times to avoid losing in a game is sad and pathetic.
When it comes to quitters in Street Fighter IV, I will go Old Testament on them and put my XBOX Live gold account on the line to make sure they know I don’t like them. If you’re going to quit on me, I’m going to do something to you in return. If I go into a match against someone with a high disconnect rate, I will intentionally keep the fight close and win at the absolute last possible moment in order to make sure I can give my opponent a clean loss. It’s usually easy to control a match against a quitter because they generally suck at the game. I’m generally a “clean” player that doesn’t use the headset and only sends out harassing text messages via XBOX Live if someone sends one to me first, but I’ll go on the offensive if someone clearly quits out on me to avoid a loss. I will send an expletive-free message calling them out on quitting and usually challenge them to a rematch. They usually respond with an expletive-filled mess where they try and label me the weak one, to which I usually respond with an expletive-filled response about how I beat them down to the point that they chickened out. I also offer up a rematch, and sometimes will go as far as tracking them down for a rematch so that they can redeem themselves. During the rare instances that they accept the offer, I go full-force and they always disconnect again the moment things go downhill.
Do my assaults on quitters put me on the same level as them? Maybe. Is it called for? Probably not. What do I even hope to achieve by attacking these individuals? For at least a moment, I hope that I can get in their heads and make them feel bad about the gamer lifestyle they lead. Make them feel like their not all high and mighty by being able to run away when others can beat them fair and square. Maybe even make them realize that disconnecting mid-game is stupid and ruining the game for everyone, including themselves. I’m sure my crusade to beat up and harass quitters is all for naught, but I’ll be damned if I don’t return the heck they cause me.
In Third Person 