Bob Colayco Associate Editor	Now Playing: Battlefield 1942: The Road to Rome (PC), C&C Generals (PC), Splinter Cell (PC) Eagerly Awaiting: Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (GC), Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (PC), Auto Modellista (PS2), Starcraft Ghost (Xbox), Doom III (PC)

Be a Team Player

I'm an unabashed fan of online multiplayer games. The games I end up playing for weeks and months on end are the ones that pit me against the wits and reflexes of other human beings. Although AI has arguably gotten better over the years, the pace of its improvement has been far outstripped by improvement in other technologies like graphics. Even today, racing games still cheat by allowing computer cars to catch up from ridiculous deficits, strategy games throw multiple enemies at you while saddling you with big disadvantages in resources, and so on. The only true, fair challenge is to play against another human player.

In the shooter realm, team-based multiplayer games like Counter-Strike and Battlefield 1942 have become many times more popular than the traditional deathmatch games like Quake III and Unreal Tournament. I am a big fan of both types of shooters, but the problem we see today with team-based games is that they are more complex. With that complexity, many people are having a difficult time learning, or are not bothering to learn, the nuances of the game and how to help their team win.

With the traditional shooters, it was fairly simple. If you kill a lot of guys, you're doing your job, and you're helping your team. You needed to make some adjustments in capture the flag, but for the most part, if you were killing a lot of people you were doing your job. With team-based games like CS and BF1942, it's not that simple. Taking the traditional mentality into a game like CS or BF1942 can actually hurt your team more than help it. For example, many players are enamored of sniper classes. It's glamorous and sexy to be the guy who takes one shot and gets one kill. After the (horrible) movie Enemy at the Gates was released a couple of years back, Counter-Strike servers were flooded with AWP-carrying Vassili Zeitsev wannabes.

We don't need six of these on a team, OK?

Back when I had admin rights to some CS servers, I'd get so frustrated that I'd frequently kick players from my own team off the server for playing selfishly. They'd often rejoin the server, angry or puzzled as to why they were booted. I'd explain it to them, but instead of trying to understand me, they'd usually shower me with expletives, and I'd ban accordingly.

The play mechanics in Battlefield 1942 adds an order of magnitude more complexity, and this, of course, multiplies the number of confused players online. How many times have you been on a server and seen messages like "How do I fly this plane?" or "How do I drive this tank?" Or sometimes you see people selfishly hogging key planes and vehicles and not using them effectively. When you're behind in captured bases and your tickets are getting depleted, everyone should coordinate a rush on an enemy base for a cap, right? Unfortunately, you all too often see seven or eight snipers lying down on top of a hill away from the action, uselessly trying to snipe from across the map. Sure, some of them have gaudy kill-to-death ratios, but they're not contributing anything to a chance at victory. You can argue the need for snipers until you're blue in the face, but when more than half your team consists of snipers, you're not going to capture or hold anything effectively.

I don't know how to effectively pilot a plane in BF1942, so I avoid using them. Someone else is going to be more effective at flying, so I leave the planes alone and hope the best pilots get in the planes (not likely with the way everyone's attitude is). At some point I'm going to fire up BF1942's single-player mode, fill a map with some bots, and practice my piloting and bomb marksmanship there. But in the meantime, I'm not going to waste everyone else's time crashing our own planes into the ground without dropping even one effective bomb.

If you don't know how, don't get in!

Of course, the onus shouldn't just be on players to learn how to play. Instruction manuals for games are becoming thinner and more useless as publishers use lack of information as a not-so-subtle way to "encourage" sales of strategy guides. I think games like Battlefield 1942 should include more comprehensive literature and in-game, offline tutorials to really teach new players the ropes before they blindly jump online. People are still going to be lazy and try to play off the bat, but at least the resources to learn should be made easily available to those who seek it.