News from Rincewind: Llamas!

Wednesday, April 16 1997

Llamas!

Ahh yes... the lamer. It's virtually impossible to play this game for more than five seconds without hearing someone accuse someone else of high crimes against the community. And almost everybody has at one time or another themselves been charged with lameness, whether it be excessive lagging, cowardly behavior, or a lack of humility. Furthermore, the standards by which such offensives are judged can frequently be different from arena to arena, meaning that someone who has achieved great success in the Chaos Zone may be looked upon with derision upon his move to Running. Newbies have it worst off because they aren't even aware that such standards exist, let alone what they are. Based upon my own experiences, I'm going to try to lay out what I think is acceptable and what isn't from arena to arena, advice which anyone is of course free to take as they wish.

Ratings killing is perhaps the most despicable of all crimes. People who do nothing but fly around in a zero-bounty ship and impact themselves against other player's fire are worse than slime. You can get revenge against a neg killer by killing him at a high bounty, but you can't do anything against a ratings killer, not to mention that your stats are much more negatively affected by killing a neg that dying as a neg. These little shits have lowered my average kill by as much as thirty points in one session, which I frequently have to remedy by greening up an alias to a large enough bounty and killing it with my real account.

Another universally agreed-upon dirty deed is the killing of negs. The easiest way to get yourself ostracized by everyone in the arena is to murder a poor, defenseless ship in cold blood. A few very lucky neg killers are possessed with enough tact and wit to be tolerated as a much-need source of comic relief, but don't count on it.

Excessive mining is also a no-no. It's perfectly ok to drop mines while being chased or to use minefields in order to catch a particularly annoying opponent, but if you do it all the time you're just a parasite. Repelling into mines is even worse, but I whole-heartedly condone such an act if directed against a large turret stack. Mass turrets are indiscriminate and tend to rack up neg kills at an alarming rate, and thus I believe they should be targeted with every weapon in your arsenal.

Bursting is perfectly OK in all circumstances. I can never understand those players who whine to the arena that I suck because I killed them with a burst. In fact, it's practically impossible to use burst effectively unless the opposing player is stupid enough to follow you into a crowded area where it's obvious what you intend to do. What a moron! Bwahahahaha!

So you want to vulch? Sure, go ahead, but don't be explicit about it. In an arena of seventy or eighty people it's impossible not to vulch, and you're simply going to have to use your radar to avoid becoming a victim. When less than forty people are online or if you meet two ships out in the middle of nowhere fighting, try to be more considerate. It's impossible to vulch a red, however. If you are carrying a flag, all bets are off.

There isn't much that's considered lame in the Chaos Zone. You have to wake up pretty early in the morning to out-mine, out-neg-kill, and out-turret some of the choicest picks in this arena.

Running Zoners are the most discriminating when it comes to potentially offensive conduct. The lamest thing you can possibly do in this Arena is to warp while holding flags, because the game mechanics are such that even a moderately skillful Javelin player can hold the entire arena hostage for hours with an itchy Insert finger. This applies even if you are facing certain death in the midst of a 6-on-1, believe it or not. Until antiwarp is made more effective, this taboo is not going to go away.

In the War Zone, mining in all forms is perfectly OK if used in the defense or attack of a base. This does not give you free reign to drop minefields out in the open like some people like to do, so use your brain. It's also fine to warp when holding flags or for any other reason, due to the skewed and segregated population distribution on the map.

[4/16/97]