Thursday, January 24, 2008

Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

I think I might have mentioned this before... I start slow when I play Halo 3 online. While it's embarrassing in Team Slayer to spend the first four minutes dying 52 times without a kill, it's worse in Lone Wolves where no one can carry me to victory. Almost without fail, I start a game by dying at least 4 or 5 times before getting a kill. Invariably by this time the guy in the lead has 4 or 5 kills, which means not only am I already -5 in my kill/death ratio, I'm also a whopping 10 kills behind the leader. So if I want to win, I need to get moving.

Come on get down with the sickness

As a result I am playing from behind. Sometimes I win in dramatic fashion (see Cal vs. Stanford.) Most of the time I get close enough to have a shot and then fall short.

One reason might be my strategy on every map. If I’m on Sandtrap, for example, I go straight for a Warthog gun. This will maximize my kills early on and hopefully give me some momentum going into the later part of the match. The problem with this strategy is that I usually go after the coveted weapons. On the pit, while I am going for the sword or rocket launcher, so is some guy who is plotting my demise. Often I am on the losing end of these duels.

I consider every meeting with a single other enemy a duel. My goal is always to kill the enemy during these duels, even if I have to die to do it. If I know I’m hosed, I try to stick them with a grenade. If I have a rocket launcher and he is right next to me, I shoot at our feet. I know it’s not the best strategy, but if I know I’m going to Respawn Land, I want to at least have some company.

At the end of the day, however, I don’t know why I start off cold and get hot. This is true no matter how many times I’ve played for the night or whether or not I’m in the zone. Ultimately it makes my matches more suspenseful, because I can't just jump to a huge lead and try to hold it.

And yes, I finally hit Skill 35, so I'm a Commander. What match got me the rank? You guessed it: Crazy King.

2 comments:

Yakko Warner said...

I have the opposite problem whenever I play Lone Wolves. Seems I start off fine, often even hold down the lead for the first third to half of the game. And then... nothing. It's like I slam headfirst into a brick wall while everyone passes me up, and I end up in the bottom third of the stack because I can't seem to do anything but die in the last few minutes of the game.

It's extremely frustrating. It's like I'm trying to swim upstream. And it's why, while I may have cracked level 30 only in Team Slayer with lots of help from my friends, 35 is likely way out of my reach.

Solstice01 said...

I witnessed this phenomenon yesterday: I was ahead by 4 in the last three minutes and lost by 3! I can sympathize. The common theme seems to be losing, any way we slice it. :)