I am a victim of an abusive relationship....with online competitive shooters. Ever since I had my first Halo LAN shooting other virtual people in the face over some kind of network connection has been growing to take up more and more of my time. The good thing about this is I can be very good at these games at times. The bad thing is I can also be very, frustratingly mind numbingly bad. The worst thing is this type of game is the most rife with cheaters, but I'm going to ignore that particular detail for this article because it's a whole article in and of itself...that i bet has been written millions of times. My inability to be consistently satisfied with my performance in, and the design of, online shooters is because of two reasons, my reflexes and my friends.

I am what I am going to call a 'reflex deficient gamer'. In simple situations where I know where a person is coming from I can usually react quickly enough to fire back and react but when presented with a complex situation or an ambush the average player seems much more capable of immediately turning around and blasting the priority target with perfect aim then I am. I also am stricken with a lack of the ability to 'read' an opponents eye line and attention span for stealth. I often try to ambush people at the exact point in time where they turn around and kill me. It's too much to bear when it fails so I rarely try unless it's a sure thing as I am nowhere near 'soludsnak130''s level of stealth skill. In order to survive I have had to create a play style that relies on me giving myself an advantage against an opponent relying completely on distractions and positioning.

In a strait one on one shootout with someone with neither side having a positioning or surprise advantage I usually can't win. I simply am not that sort of player. What I am good at is dynamically using cover to get small hard to notice advantages and toying with my enemy till they make a mistake. I can stall, properly time my firing from behind cover with well timed shots and dodges, avoid grenades that are thrown to flush me out without leaving my safe position. Switch positions at the exact moment they are distracted by a teammate, then turn around and wait for them as they try to flank and kill them when they were expecting me to not pay attention to my back. Often I can even flank them the second they try to ignore me because they think I'm too much of a camper to move from my spot. In short I know every single trick most players of average cleverness use to force me to come to them, I avoid them and force them to come to me or give me an opening and then I can kill them rather easily. I rule through situational awareness and an understanding of the flow of the fight.

The problem is every shooter I've played has situations where these tactics are impossible to win with. With Halo when the other team gets power weapon control and a hidy hole, you can't stall them or make them come to you because they can kill you with one shot and are probably already ahead on kills. In Team Fortress 2 if your team is incapable of pushing back against the other team enough for their to be a good front line then you can't stall or choose your battles at all because the entire opposing team is just going to run over your ass 5 at a time. In many maps on Metal Gear Online once you lose initial map control the entire rest of the match is getting spawn killed by black hearted selfish bastards who don't want you to have any fun. Also in any game i've seen with headshots as a primary game mechanic (usually 'realism' shooters like call of duty and metal gear where any bullet to the head is instant death) any plan you come up with can be diffused by your opponent being a headshot and reflexes god and simply turning around and killing you faster then your comparitively clumsy hooves can manipulate your sticks into kill position on them, thus punishing you entirely based off of your reflexes and aiming skill with little to no benefit for your planning once the enemy is at a certain aiming skill level. Still all of this would be simple to counter if I simply had a team of skilled homeboys to roll with, which is where the second problem comes into play.

I cannot find a consistent group of people to play with online to save my life. My personal friends that live around me usually aren't playing the same games as me and when they do they are rarely playing at the same time as me, and my x-box live and PSN friends lists are full of people that I met one day, played a good game with, then said 'we should play again sometime' and then never saw again. The result of this is that I've gotten very good at working with people who aren't trying to work with me, covering their flanks and angles and providing support fire in that phenomenon known as 'unspoken teamwork.' this is good enough to allow me to beat the average run and gun scrub in skill level in matchmaking games on most shooters I play, but then the game gets abusive.

I am exactly the skill level required to have 5 frustrating losses for every good game I have in the Halo matchmaking system. Joining, for example, the halo Team slayer playlist I have gotten as high as level 35 when playing with friends on the brief chances I get to play with them. Then I am up against people in teams they play with constantly, who control power weapons, rule the map, and kill you out of the gate no matter where you come from. My team could technically win but they don't know each other because I was a single person joining the playlist and got matched with other single people or teams of two to be sent to the slaughter against similarly skilled CLANS. So in both the game balancing end, where power weapon control tactics largely remove tactical thought and positioning from the equation of the fight for my enemy because any dumb choice they make can often be fixed by shooting me really fast with their one hit kill gun, and the matchmaking end where a single skilled person is placed on a team with other skilled people against an experienced team's teamwork advantage, I am completely at a disadvantage and two thirds or more of my games are embarrassing and not fun slaughters that I can do nothing to salvage. I've had nights where even playing with my team we were constantly matched against people who were completely above our depth in the games power weapon 'tactics' so dispite them being relatively easy to kill in fair fights their teamwork at controlling and clinging to the advantages set on the map made them impossible to beat for us. These people are also almost uniformly rude but that's to be expected.

It makes the games feel dumb and cheap because the amount of thought and effort required to win with the advantages they have is much less then the amount of effort I have to put in to get a clever kill against the enemy when I can't simply follow the games 'sure path to victory' as closely as they do. I still enjoy playing shooters because the amount of fun I have when I do manage that clever kill is an experience I can't replicate in any other genre, but I get far too little of the fun and far too much of the crap many days.

In my opinion Halo 3 as an online game has been 'solved'. People know they have to go for the power weapons and control vehicles on vehicle maps and many of them know where to look for enemies spawning and where is best to camp with each gun. The game then stagnates and becomes only fun for people who are playing at low skill levels and doing whatever they want and laughing at the explosions or people playing at high skill levels who only do the same 3 things over and over, extremely well. You know your game has problems with awarding player creativity this when you only see people either camping with a sniper rifle, or running strait at the enemy and aiming for a quick kill. An ideal game has some people camping with a sniper, other people running forward stupidly to get their precious 1:1 kill death ratio by the law of 'I can shoot one of them before they kill me.', and other people gunning those people down when they didn't expect it because they were being closed minded and predictable.

I don't know if there is any sure way to fix this problem but I would like to see some people making these shooters try. As the gaming population grows up many of us will get older, and with age our reaction times will go down and our patience for being steamrolled by 12 year olds will likely go down with it. Online shooters need to go that extra mile to award improvisational thinking and cleverness to close the gap instead of only awarding people who play the game as the designer of the maps and guns imagined and do their best to provide matchmaking systems that avoid putting well practiced teams up against people just trying to have a little fun in their game.

Also providing rewards and a sense of progression for the losing team as well as the winners, like those exp systems that are all the rage these days, makes me care less about the game being unfair because I can usually get some clever kills in even if I'm up against a team of corpse humping jerkwaters.