Experts

These guys are good.

Everyone has some game or something that they do all the time. Some hobby or maybe a neat trick. A friend and I just started playing a game called Scum with new people that are just pros, experts, or enthusiasts. I’ve played a couple thousand hours on Scum myself, but I take long breaks from games here and there. Coming back and relearning is fun. Normally, I only play with a small group of the same friends. I always try to include more people, but not everyone likes everyone. People complain about people a lot. I don’t think I complain about anyone I play with, except for maybe one guy, but that dude convinced me to try some SWAT team game called “Ready or not” only to kill hostages we were supposed to rescue. He wasn’t even trying to play and just kept talking about how high he was getting. I’m trying to enjoy the new game, he convinced me to try, and he keeps resetting the level and making the rest of the party leave. Fucking dumb. I was trying to get into that game too. Seemed visually great, there were some cool looking strip club levels we didn’t even get to try. I was so annoyed, I uninstalled.

Scum though, is hard. A tough game to get into. People like to play solo, understandably, anyone on your team can easily rob you of everything you have. Which is fun. My friend and I got recruited to a group of hardcore Scum players on an official server. We decided, “…why not?” We’ve done everything we could do securing an entire island to ourselves. We planted as many minefields we could until we felt cozy. Visitors to our island died and we’d get all their stuff. Then people stopped visiting, we were doing too well.

The guys we joined raid everyone’s base on the server, but not ours, we were way too inconvenient. No one wants to get blown up on someone else’s island. The survival game is all survival and logistics. To raid our setup would take some skilled people with mine detectors, a few sail boats to float boxes out, a few hundred lock picks, a couple dozen protective gloves… just everything, but mostly time.

Their base is a maze using every silly tip and trick that stops cheaters and negates exploits. It sucks to have to learn to play against cheaters, but for the longest time I’m pretty sure there weren’t any admins watching or doing anything about people spoiling the game and generally ruining other’s time. They rob everyone and have everything, they’ll sell vehicles to other players all day, just to steal them all back later. Fun stuff. They can pick locks and defuse bombs so quickly and accurately that I’m always impressed. A few of the have been banned, accused of cheating, they had to clear their names with their own recorded videos of their actions. Got me recording too, I don’t want to get banned I’m having fun.

Lately, I decided that the game didn’t have enough bosses or mid bosses. I like just riding around on motorcycles while all armored up with just a handgun. I’m trying to make my character level up their motorcycle skill, but I also want to shoot other players while my character is drunk or on shrooms. Just being a wandering monster, the game only has a few different zombies and a couple different robots, I’m helping out. If an other player can manage to kill me they can have everything, I really don’t care about the loot. I remember when I just started playing, if I would have killed a guy, got a bunch of nice loot, and got a motorcycle that would have made my day. I don’t know how much the guys I’m playing with would care about me playing this way, so I’m keeping that part quiet. Hey though, a wandering monster has got to drop loot, right?

Some games are some people’s 200 year old bonsai tree. They just focus on their hobby, one guy also is an administrator on an unofficial server. He records players cheating and submits the videos to get their accounts banned. That seems so fun, If I were an admin, I’d probably watch what people were doing all day too. I even got to help him catch a suspected cheater, I made a character, he instantly moved my character to a hidden spot somewhat nearby the cheater only to see the cheater’s character’s head face directly at me right after. I ran around and he said the cheater was just locked on to me through walls and cover just always looking right at me. He spawned a dozen exploding zombies on him to let him know he was banned. I’m sure he’s got the video saved. I want to watch all these fun admin videos.

People take games very serious. It takes time, skill, and teamwork to do and see everything there is to see. Just like most MMOs, however, this is way more punishing like a roguelike game. It’s fun and exciting, but explaining it to people makes me feel like an idiot. I did get chuckle out of my dad though, I showed him some video clip where a cool youtube streamer and his friends failed to kill me. I swear I wasn’t stream sniping, I was just out being a wandering monster on his server and it was all self defense when I unknowingly got ambushed three to one. They three stooged it up, one guy sniped me in the back too early as his friend was just getting close enough to shoot. I always try to get a bulletproof vest ASAP, so I quickly spun around emptied an entire 9mm clip-azine into the first thing on two feet that I saw.

Fun stuff really exciting. If there wasn’t the risk of losing it all, there wouldn’t feel like there was any real stakes. How do you sell that kind of excitement to people? The absolute rush. How do you explain it? How can you appreciate it? Well, if I had no eyes, I probably wouldn’t appreciate paintings. If I were deaf, I’d probably only like songs with a lot of bass. People that don’t play chess do not really appreciate it. I had art classes in college, but I’m not an artist. These games are painstaking works that take a degree of skill to appreciate, but not everyone has the time to develop the skills. The subtle differences between like games in the genre will be lost on most people. To play with people that talk about similar games like Rust, ARK, DayZ, or Conan Exiles is always fun. Play covers of other people’s music and change it up in a way that isn’t noticeable unless you really know the song or really know music, that kind of feeling.