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Top 7 Sleaziest Things a Gamer Can Do

Top 7 Sleaziest Things a Gamer Can Do

You know what? Trevor Martin is catching way too much flak right now over this whole CS:GO skin gambling fiasco. So he may have spent months promoting a skin gambling site that he owned without disclosing his ownership. Maybe underage kids who look up to the guy went to the site after seeing him fake over-the-top reactions, pretending to “win” thousands of dollars. I guess it’s possible that those kids spent real money on his website to bet on random skin drops and put them up in games of chance. You guys are taking this way too seriously. I can think of a thousand things sleazier than promoting your own gambling site to an audience of millions without disclosing your ownership. Here are seven off the top of my head:

Rolling “Need” Every Time

Rolling “Need” Every Time

If you’re an old-school World of Warcraft player, then this header likely brings to mind several instances where you wish you could have reached through your computer monitor and strangled someone in real life. For a while, high-end drops from bosses were shared, meaning there was one pool of items that dropped for everyone, and you had to decide amongst yourselves who got which item. Before long, the need / greed system was introduced. Whenever high-end items were looted from a boss, everyone in the party had a chance to click whether they actually needed the item, or just wanted it as extra booty. Say a very powerful healing staff drops, for example. It might be a huge, perfect upgrade for the only priest in the party, who has been doing a great job keeping everyone alive during the raid. He would click need, and all of the other warriors, paladins, and rogues in the party would click greed. By default, the staff would go to the priest. If everyone clicks need (or greed), then the game awards the item to one person at random. Inevitably there was always that one guy in the party who would click need on everything, and he always had some stupid justification. He might be a rogue clicking need on a healing staff because “he needs to disenchant it for blacksmithing materials.” Of course, Murphy’s Law prevailed, and it was usually the person who didn’t actually need the items who ended up winning them. Those f*#$#rs.

Team Killing

Team Killing

Some people get off on being sleazy; it’s entertainment for them. We call these kinds of people trolls (among other things). Every multiplayer game – in every genre – has its trolls. In no community are trolls more common or more annoying than in the competitive first-person shooter scene, because team killing is usually far too easy and so disruptive. The smaller and more competitive the game, the easier it is for trolls to ruin the fun for everyone. Rainbow Six Siege is a perfect example, because each match is a 5v5, one-life affair. You get one bored P.O.S. on your squad and you’re in for an infuriating night. More than once I’ve been in a ranked game that got several matches in until everything came down to a tie-breaking match point. As soon as the round started a team member would throw C4 in the middle of the group, detonate it, shoot anyone else he can, and then teabag in the killcam until he got booted. That’s 45 minutes of my night wasted. Team killing is the ultimate disrespect for other peoples’ time. Ubisoft auto-kicks these people right after the offense, but it’s not going to perma-ban anyone – no, not when they might still spend money on weapon skins.

Deleting Someone’s Save Data

Deleting Someone’s Save Data

When it comes to revenge tactics or methods of punishment, this is the lowest of the low. I served tables as a teenager with a young man (he was probably 26 at the time) who had moved out of his house and not spoken to his father in years. My friend was a long-time World of Warcraft player, and belonged to a serious guild with whom he spent the majority of his non-working free time. His father played the game as well, and paid for both of their accounts. One night, after a particularly bitter argument, my buddy’s dad wiped and deleted his account, clearing out 3 fully-leveled toons with valuable end-game gear; literally thousands of hours down the drain. My friend punched his dad in the face, and I’m not sure if they’ve spoken since then. Save data is a precious thing, and I still know exactly where my PS1 memory cards are and what’s on them. Deleting someone’s data out of spite isn’t only emotionally abusive, it also shows a complete, flippant disregard for that person’s time and what it’s worth. The only things Trevor Martin is guilty of deleting are his incriminating YouTube videos.

Spoofing Your Location in Pokemon Go

Spoofing Your Location in Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go doesn’t actually get exciting until you start contending for gyms. Whether you belong to team red, team blue, or team yellow, the only actual battling you’ll be doing is at designated gyms that are located at various landmarks in the real world. For the time being, it’s possible to manipulate your phone and the app to make it seem like you’re closer to a gym than you really are. This is allowing some people to claim and take back gyms from opposing teams at odd hours of the night or at a frequency that is impossible for legitimate players. If Pokemon Go is already so important to you that you have to resort to cheating, you may need to reconsider your priorities. Maybe you should go gamble for CS:GO skins instead.

Noob tube + Danger Close

Noob tube + Danger Close

When playing any Call of Duty game online against others, this perk combination is the closest thing you’re going to get to flipping an “easy mode” switch. In no other game was this more annoying than in Modern Warfare 2 . A grenade launcher is also known as a “nube tube,” so called because it requires very little skill to wield. As long as you’re pointing in the general direction of another player and can pull the trigger while they’re still in sight, you’re likely to get the kill. Of course, if you truly suck – or just want to piss off everyone in the game – you can equip the “Danger Close” perk (or some variant thereof depending on which game you’re playing), which greatly increases the damage done by explosives. It was not at all uncommon to see killcams from players who just stayed in a far, obscure corner of the map, plunking out grenades in no particular direction and scoring double kills. Those were always the guys talking the most crap post-game.

Rage Quitting

Rage Quitting

“If I’m going down, I’m taking you with me!” The coward’s way out. If you’re a truly sleazy person and you know you can’t best someone in a competition, I suppose the next best thing is to ensure that they don’t get credit for their win. I’ll never be an eSports competitor, but I had a good run with Soul Calibur IV . I played very regularly with the top-ranked players from all over the world and held my own. Rage quitters were a dime a dozen – I got so used to them that I could tell exactly when it was about to happen. There was always a 3-frame skip right when someone disconnected that was slightly different than the average lag. Whenever I saw that particular split-second of slow down I always grinned to myself. If your self-esteem is so wrapped up in a game that you just can’t bear to let anyone else win, then you need to go find a different hobby. Go start a side business or something. I hear the CS:GO skin trade is booming.

Cheating with Watchover Tyrant

Cheating with Watchover Tyrant

Rage quitting is one answer if you can’t bear to lose, and I guess the other option is cheating. There’s already an elaborate community of Overwatch cheaters, and they’re purchasing software developed by a German company called Bossland that just won’t leave Blizzard alone. It’s an entire culture of sleaze. Since 2011, Bossland has been developing cheat software for Blizzard games, and Blizzard has filed over 10 lawsuits against them. It’s a competition now, and no one is fighting fair. Cheaters in Overwatch are boasting phenomenal results thanks to Watchover Tyrant , Bossland’s software that gives players enhanced radars that show everyone’s position. Bossland is staying holed up in Germany, safe and sound from the prosecution of US federal courts, and continues to poke at Blizzard by saying it’ll only make its software harder to detect and more readily available to customers. Trevor Martin’s YouTube videos were ethically questionable, but at least they’re not costing a well-loved company millions of dollars in revenue and boasting about it.

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