ubercharged.net

So it was another Saturday night that I sat down to play some Team Fortress 2. I dunno what it is about the weekends, but the morons come out of the woodwork more than any other day. Last time I was ranting against drunken idiots on voice comms. This time I’m pissed about something that screws up my evening’s gaming even more - the dreaded team stack of doom.

Now I know that I’m an old boring sod with no time for organised clan play. So I’m pretty much sentenced to public server games. Because of this, I rarely expect the quality of gameplay to be stellar. You get a mix of teams. Some days you get steam rollered, other days your guys go on a rampage getting critical hit after critical hit, other days you have a good tight game. Those are the best. My ideal game has both teams neck and neck the whole way, pushing each way, attacking and counter-flanking. This goes all the way to the end - then my team wins by a fraction (ok, I’ll accept losing by a fraction over a steam roller game as well).

At least normally I like to think that a bad game is a factor of random chance. Its to do with the fluctuations of the tides and the interplay between vibrations of particles at a quantum level (yeah, I know people try to get on the winning team when they join, but bear with me). So it royally pisses me off when I see one side deliberately full of clan players from the same clan owning all in their path and capping out levels in less than a minute and spamming LOL PWNED in the console.

The obvious thing is to just change servers when this happens - but here is the problem with weekends, every populated server within 100ms ping had a clan stacked up on one side.

I’m not some kind of irrational stack hater: Stackable furniture is great; I’m kinda ok with haystacks; and I use stacks in a computer science sense most days one way or another. HOWEVER. There is no place for the evil team stack described here.

I tried to play their game for a while. I’d look for the stackers and try to join their side. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Places on the stacked side are full, and players on the other team are constantly coming and going. So its hard to sneak into a spot. Plus I just felt dirty. I’d get on a team that won round after round without resistance, and I had to put up with the 13 year old shrieking from the stackers on voice comms when they won - which was every 30 seconds or so. Plus, even when you’re winning it just gets boring after a while.

The other side to that coin is that some stacking clans just suck. If you do manage to do the nasty and sneak onto a stacked team, its likely that you only got on cause that clan sucks no one wants to play on their team anyway. Yes, that happened to me as well.

Just as I was hitting rock bottom, and contemplating playing through portal (again) to relieve the frustration, I stumbled across The Older Gamers Australian Team Fortress 2 server. I nervously clicked on the server info and was dismayed to see 10 TOG players on the server. “Oh great another server and they’re all going to be stacked on one side again!” I thought. Not so. The TOG players were a shining example of perfect symmetry, balance, and harmony with nature. A model citizen in the desolate fog of the depravity and despair that are a hundress other stacked servers. I stayed on there and had a couple of good games.

So this is a big thumbs up to the TOG guys. They’ve got a nicely run server in a dark stormy night of blatant clan stacking. I know where I’m going back to.

UPDATE 15 Nov 2007

They’ve finally pushed me over the edge into OCD behaviour. So I’ve started collecting screenshots of blatant stacking, and have put up a permanent clan stackers hall of shame page.