Wow, I was kinda joking in my earlier post about the lack of teabagging in the Halo: Reach beta trailer. But then a friend pointed this little nugget out to me from Kotaku. I guess the joke's on me. Anyways, I sent Bungie an email which you can read below if you're so inclined.
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Dear Bungie,
Please don’t fix your now infamous teabagging bug in Halo: Reach. Seriously, it’s really great that you guys can have a healthy office environment where your games can stay friendly and teabag moves are given and received in good spirit. Sometimes the rest of us can experience this at LAN parties and whatnot with friends and indeed, it can be a real hoot. But in case you haven’t noticed, Xbox Live is an experience far-removed from these more ideal situations where everyone is capable of getting along and having fun. In fact, one could go so far as to say that Halo, or nearly any other FPS, is the antithesis of a fun gaming get-together on XBL.
It seems like more often than not in any kind of a public match somebody will assume that their free XBL headset gives their ill-informed opinions enough value to be shared with everyone else. This alone makes the very idea of picking up a controller and playing a round or two of Halo 3 after a hard day of work seen like more trouble than it’s worth. But the voice chat is in some ways a necessary evil, and one that you don’t really have that much control over, so it can be tolerated.
Teabagging animations, on the other hand, are just not excusable at this point in XBL’s life-cycle. It’s like giving a dog a big bag of cat poop: you know that the dog just doesn’t have the self-control to not eat it. I understand that you guys have to make money, and that frat boys and kids with rich parents make up a sizable chunk of your customer-base, but these people are going to buy your game no matter what. Look at many of their profiles and I bet all you’ll see are Halo game achievements. This is the “low-hanging fruit” in the truest sense of the word.
I love the gun-play in the Halo games, but it’s to the point now where I can’t convince anyone I know to invest in the series because of how tarnished the franchise is by its online community. For four games now, Halo players have been able to hone their skills to a point where the bar of entry is practically unreachable, and that many of these players will rub that fact in by means of teabagging and other acts of mean-spirited bravado is just a turn-off for many more mature, yet unskilled, players. You have the ability to step up to the plate now and show people who are turned off by Halo’s dark underside that you want to provide a better experience through more than just the game-play tweaks.
Or hell, leave the teabagging in. But give people an optional “bag-buster” loadout with a dead-man’s switch that, when they are teabagged will, instead of humiliate the dead player, show their killer getting blown up thanks to their own hubris. And after somebody dies to this two or three times in my game, if they’re on my team, give me the option to eject them from the game for wasting precious time not going after the objective at hand. Electrified armor would work just as well in this regard. I don’t know, you guys make the games, you come up with something better.
Please, give me a reason for people to buy Halo: Reach instead further excuses to shun it.
Thanks,
Matt
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Dear Bungie,
Please don’t fix your now infamous teabagging bug in Halo: Reach. Seriously, it’s really great that you guys can have a healthy office environment where your games can stay friendly and teabag moves are given and received in good spirit. Sometimes the rest of us can experience this at LAN parties and whatnot with friends and indeed, it can be a real hoot. But in case you haven’t noticed, Xbox Live is an experience far-removed from these more ideal situations where everyone is capable of getting along and having fun. In fact, one could go so far as to say that Halo, or nearly any other FPS, is the antithesis of a fun gaming get-together on XBL.
It seems like more often than not in any kind of a public match somebody will assume that their free XBL headset gives their ill-informed opinions enough value to be shared with everyone else. This alone makes the very idea of picking up a controller and playing a round or two of Halo 3 after a hard day of work seen like more trouble than it’s worth. But the voice chat is in some ways a necessary evil, and one that you don’t really have that much control over, so it can be tolerated.
Teabagging animations, on the other hand, are just not excusable at this point in XBL’s life-cycle. It’s like giving a dog a big bag of cat poop: you know that the dog just doesn’t have the self-control to not eat it. I understand that you guys have to make money, and that frat boys and kids with rich parents make up a sizable chunk of your customer-base, but these people are going to buy your game no matter what. Look at many of their profiles and I bet all you’ll see are Halo game achievements. This is the “low-hanging fruit” in the truest sense of the word.
I love the gun-play in the Halo games, but it’s to the point now where I can’t convince anyone I know to invest in the series because of how tarnished the franchise is by its online community. For four games now, Halo players have been able to hone their skills to a point where the bar of entry is practically unreachable, and that many of these players will rub that fact in by means of teabagging and other acts of mean-spirited bravado is just a turn-off for many more mature, yet unskilled, players. You have the ability to step up to the plate now and show people who are turned off by Halo’s dark underside that you want to provide a better experience through more than just the game-play tweaks.
Or hell, leave the teabagging in. But give people an optional “bag-buster” loadout with a dead-man’s switch that, when they are teabagged will, instead of humiliate the dead player, show their killer getting blown up thanks to their own hubris. And after somebody dies to this two or three times in my game, if they’re on my team, give me the option to eject them from the game for wasting precious time not going after the objective at hand. Electrified armor would work just as well in this regard. I don’t know, you guys make the games, you come up with something better.
Please, give me a reason for people to buy Halo: Reach instead further excuses to shun it.
Thanks,
Matt
Thank you for expressing this! I agree wholeheartedly.
ReplyDeleteI really wanted to have fun, but I just couldn't hang. Among other things, I wish they had built in a taunt system (like the one in TF2) from day one. Might have cut back on the douchey, immature behavior.
Until then, I'll keep on supporting Steam instead.