well, Silver, it did cut down the amount of time it took to level, that seems like no waste of time to me, I think I actually increased my K/D ratio while using them lol

The vids looked interesting. I'm intrigued...

Vrals597 wrote:

well, Silver, it did cut down the amount of time it took to level, that seems like no waste of time to me, I think I actually increased my K/D ratio while using them lol

Level, depending on one's point of view, may not matter in the slightest. To you it matters which is fine, I don't care if you like leveling. I just want you to know it doesn't help you and to me that means it doesn't matter. Your K/D rising (something else that doesn't matter) is almost definitely not related to your BoH use. It is much more likely that you just got better at the game while the negatives wheren't showing much.

Just to make a point here, the part of the game that most definitely does matter is your enjoyment of it... Whether you get that from watching your stats rise or finishing as many games as you can on the winning team is down to you.

Personally, feeling like you're playing better after removing your BoH was an enjoyable experience for me. They made you try different approaches through a game and this increases your 'game-bag' of playstyles and tactics, which in turn improves you as a player, IMHO.

Good discussion in here.

s1lv3r4554551n wrote:

Level, depending on one's point of view, may not matter in the slightest. To you it matters which is fine, I don't care if you like leveling. I just want you to know it doesn't help you and to me that means it doesn't matter. Your K/D rising (something else that doesn't matter) is almost definitely not related to your BoH use. It is much more likely that you just got better at the game while the negatives wheren't showing much.

Silver, so you say that to you leveling doesn't matter and and the same with kd rising. So what possessed you to go ahead and get 44,625 kills in Uncharted 2? You often have talked about being a competitive player but now I'm lost with your position on the game and the competitive mode in general. Especially when one of your most used boosters is a BoH, but you claim to not care about leveling?

I agree with Leo that the most important part of a game is the enjoyment of it, but that enjoyment is always associated with something else like leveling up or raising your kd or winning a match. I'm just curious as to yours now.

Personally I always loved playing unranked games and having close, tough, competitive battles which I found the general match making was lacking. When I did play the match making I liked to try and come first in my team and win, I found these things satisfying and fun to achieve personally. The fact that I could do that the majority of the time and still manage a respectable kd was an added bonus and proved an extra challenge for me and was a good gauge to tell if I was improving or not.

So to everyone what makes you get online onto Uncharted 2 competitive? Or at least used to? Why?

Level, generally speaking, is usually irrelevant. A lot of people point to it being an indicator of skill, or a general guess on where you lie, generally speaking, but it really has no bearing. The biggest benefit that comes with level, in games as of late, is just the availability of perks or equipment.

For example, in Uncharted, level doesn't mean much. Really, it stops mattering at all, around what....14? 18? When you get Down the Irons and Fleet Foot, with the only real advantage again coming around 45 or so, when you finally get Situational Awareness unlocked. After that, really, it's just bragging rights, and the right to wear a Badge, if you so choose. Maybe we're a little warped because a lot of us ventured into second or third accounts, or in Reo's case, eighth new accounts, and some of us have a lot of anecdotal evidence of level not mattering. I've seen low-levels with better chops than high numerals. Maybe they're alternate accounts, maybe they're just...gaming veterans, where a lot of the same concepts always apply.

If you're playing for a few goals, then sure, Badges are handy. Everyone wants that nice shiny X, or that XX, or even that XXX. It's as equally valid a goal as anything else, like Silver mentioned. I mean, we all play for different reasons. Me, I want to crush dreams, and sing songs by the campfire, and make people sad. I'm a jerk, and that's rad. I do what I can, and somebody else might just play for the hell of it, to unwind after a long day, and shoot some faces in, or...in Red's case, get some crotchshots. That's rad too. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that we all play for our own terrible selfish enjoyment, and that enjoyment comes from all kinds of things. Whatever floats your boat, generally speaking, is usually a pretty valid reason to play the game.

As far as the conversation about Badges goes, I stand by them being a powerful learning aid. I don't know that they directly, are beneficial, but what they make you do, is where they come in handy. Invalid, for example, is a booster that I loved. Everyone I know hates it, but that booster had zero impact on my KD, and it really forced me to take a step back, and re-evaluate the traps that I had fallen into, and the niches that I'd grown complacent to fill, in my Uncharted 2 playing. It was something that really helped me to grow as a camper, and to be able to perfect some things that I got lazy in, and wasn't being punished enough for, without having such a severe handicap.

It's possible that I'd have gotten over those things eventually, just through sheer playtime and growing more as a player, but to me, the boosters can help accelerate that process. Your mileage may vary though, and I know that a lot of the regular Uncharted crew weren't happy about it. Personally, I loved rocking Glass Jaw and Half-Loaded. It gave me a soapbox to rain down verbal abuse from, because I had two gray boosters, and I still won! It also made sure that I didn't let myself get too lazy, or I'd perform badly, and I had to reign myself in, and play intelligently, to get myself back up to a level I felt I should have been performing at.

Everyone had a different perspective on them. Some players rocked them because it was expected of them, as high-level players. Some players liked them because it was an enabler for better trash talk, and still others liked them because they felt it spurred on some kind of introspective analysis of their gameplay, or forced them to step their game up, to compensate, and they would ultimately improve.


EDIT - Flight, I did it to crush dreams, and make people sad. And so I could say mean things to them. MAG was largely the same way. It was an avenue for me to be competitive, and a focus for my competitive OCD tendencies.


It's awesome that you brought up the close-games comment as well, because I was actually having a similar conversation with someone, this morning. To me, I hate close games. I want to dominate, on all kinds of levels, because it shows that I, and my team, performed that much better, than the opposition. I'm not talking about rolling low-level lobbies, those are easy, and it's fairly boring, but if I can match up with a crew that's supposed to be good, and we roll them, that shows that we're on top of our game, and that we know what we're doing. That's kind of how I looked at what went down with the Sabo Que-syncs, with 3C versus the Flock, and....VLS? Close games are exciting, and they're tense, and I get why people enjoy them, and strive for that, but I want one way or the other, for it to be a blow out. It's either...proof that I'm on top of my game, or humbling, and that I need to keep pushing myself, and learning.

i love bohs and i dont give a shit about k/d or that sort of thing. what i enjoy is the challenge, and bohs give me a challenge. iirc half loaded and invalid are my most used boosters. not positive about half loaded, but i know invalid is.

also leveling didnt mean that much to me. i didnt care so much about my level as i did the progression. it lets me feel like im fighting towards something. if im not leveling i feel like whats the point, even though im not really working towards anything. i guess the journey not the destination saying fits here.

Thank you to everyone who reported that 'post' that appeared in several threads a little while ago.

Good looking out for the community.

Please, resume your regularly scheduled discussion.

mostly i will buy this game and b!t_h about it lol

At least your honest about it

nobody wrote:

At least your honest about it

No game is perfect. Every game is going to have a lof of people who whine about games. Hell, I'm one of them.

Endlo- wrote:

EDIT - Flight, I did it to crush dreams, and make people sad. And so I could say mean things to them. MAG was largely the same way. It was an avenue for me to be competitive, and a focus for my competitive OCD tendencies.

LOLZ! If we ever play the same game, we should squad up! (^_-)b

mattmo0121 wrote:

nobody wrote:

At least your honest about it

No game is perfect. Every game is going to have a lof of people who whine about games. Hell, I'm one of them.

Not true.
Rfom was perfect.
And if you disagree, I'll simply put my hands over my ears and run in tight circles saying 'la la la la la' until you stop.

Endlo- wrote:

EDIT - Flight, I did it to crush dreams, and make people sad. And so I could say mean things to them. MAG was largely the same way. It was an avenue for me to be competitive, and a focus for my competitive OCD tendencies.

It's awesome that you brought up the close-games comment as well, because I was actually having a similar conversation with someone, this morning. To me, I hate close games. I want to dominate, on all kinds of levels, because it shows that I, and my team, performed that much better, than the opposition. I'm not talking about rolling low-level lobbies, those are easy, and it's fairly boring, but if I can match up with a crew that's supposed to be good, and we roll them, that shows that we're on top of our game, and that we know what we're doing. That's kind of how I looked at what went down with the Sabo Que-syncs, with 3C versus the Flock, and....VLS? Close games are exciting, and they're tense, and I get why people enjoy them, and strive for that, but I want one way or the other, for it to be a blow out. It's either...proof that I'm on top of my game, or humbling, and that I need to keep pushing myself, and learning.

I know what you mean about liking to crush peoples dreams, I have to say there is nothing I love more, in any game than hunting down second accounts and ruining their oh so precious kds and statistics.

The close games I find are always much more tense and it seems, at the time anyway, that there is a lot more on the line. It makes me very aware that every decision that I make could end up being the difference between winning and losing. As a result I find myself playing a lot more attention to every mistake that I may make. I find myself getting much more excited and tense in these games which is a feeling that I crave. The MAG queue syncs that you mention were amazingly fun and much better than rolling randoms, but to be honest they weren't particularly close

Whereas when I am playing with my clan mates and dominating the public matches I got much more complacent with what I did and would often accumulate unnecessary and stupid deaths. So I found that I didn't learn anything from owning people as you get lazy and slip into the same routines each match which may work against nobodies but get you owned against half skilled players. Which is why I didn't play that many public matches, they got much too boring and easy, when [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] played as a clan [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] never lost, only silly disconnects or when the game put our party against each other. We had some of the highest win loss ratios around for a while, mine has obviously since dropped as I have got back on by myself, with other friends etc after finishing playing Uncharted 2 as my main game.

Even when I do completely own another team, even if they are supposedly good, then again I don't feel like I learn anything new. Like the epic 32 vs 32 MAG clan battles. 3C won them so easily we didn't have to do anything different from normal. Everyone was good enough to effectively go whatever way they were comfortable with just a bit more communication and organisation was all that was needed, admittedly there was a few tactics when it came down to squads and where people would spawn but it wasn't that different.

Whereas in close matches I find that it matters a lot more in securing the better positions and power weapons because these could be enough to turn the game in the enemies favour, but if your rolling the other team then who cares who gets the RPG? It doesn't matter that much if you're not there locking down the area waiting for it to spawn. It doesn't matter, just means that the other team might get a few extra kills, no big deal if you have a lead of 20. This is why I get much more complacent when demolishing other teams I find myself not watching the clock for the weapons spawns and not caring if an enemy gets a power weapon - bad habits which I don't want to have.

Which is why I prefer close games that you come out of with sweaty palms and a feeling of exhaustion, gripping your controller as hard as you can.

Cheers Silver I was getting confused with what side of the fence you were on that's all I got those stats from the Naughty Dog site so sorry if they are wrong it's NDs fault, I don't know the accuracy of the website any more. I have to say that it's nice to see that you have taken notice and read thoroughly what others have posted and changed your opinion accordingly, nice informative post, thanks.

Nice post, as usual, Flight.

I definitely understand the appeal of the close game, and I completely understand where you're coming from, on that. I had that same kind of settling complacency, a few times, in both MAG and Uncharted. It was a little easier to remedy in Uncharted 2, because if you felt that you were slipping, or settling into a comfortable niche, it was easy to keep scaling up that difficulty slider, by equipping the more severe Badges again. For a while after I hit my X, in UC2, I actually went back to rocking Invalid and Come Get Some, because it was a challenge, and it kept me on my toes. I mean, it really doesn't get much more severe than that, and it definitely made the game more exciting, for a while, and made me push myself to get back to my old scores, under a new and difficult set of circumstances.

For MAG, I know what you mean, that's kind of what led to a bunch of us burning out, I think. It was hard to motivate PPH to step outside of their comfort zone, and that's actually why I made that ill-fated trip over to Raven, to play with ^D^ for a while. I should've stayed and looked into some other groups, it might have fared a little better if I'd have been in another clan, that was a bit more diverse. After a while though, it's easy to feel like you hit that ceiling, and for me, that's when I tend to put the game down, and move on. It happened with Uncharted, and it happened with MAG, a few times each.

I guess for me, those blowouts, are indicators of where I stand. If my group blows someone else out, that should be able to step up, and give us a good game, it shows that we're just firing on all cylinders, and have our games down. If we get blown out, then it's a good way to be able to take a step back, take a look at where you got beat, and focus on improving that aspect of your play, or the way that your crew functions. I guess it's just a matter of perspective, between us, and I definitely understand where you're coming from, I just prefer to have a clear example of what's going on, and where I stand in the game, and in my abilities.
- Maybe it's just a perspective forged out of example. I can think of a handful of players, in both titles, who I've been absolutely destroyed by. You take that beating in stride, learn from it, look at where you need to improve, and get it done. Be good, get good, or quit, in my eyes. Those examples give me a much clearer picture, personally, of where I need to focus my attention, and you get that validation when you're able to then surpass those people, and get that affirmation that you've grown as a player.


As far as feeling more...competent, I suppose, when there's more pressure, I guess that's something that I've always tried to strive for, regardless of the circumstance. I've always tried to make sure that I approach something with the cleanest play that I can, and put forth that "optimal" effort, regardless of the circumstance, or who may be on the other side of the scoreboards. It's a tricky line to walk sometimes, and a lot of us can vouch for being frustrated with what should be solid games and performances, but they weren't up to what we try to put forth, every time we step into a game. Different things drive us all, as players, and different things push those buttons in us, and elicit those responses or those senses of success and enjoyment.

mattmo0121 wrote:

nobody wrote:

At least your honest about it

No game is perfect. Every game is going to have a lof of people who whine about games. Hell, I'm one of them.

that was mostly a joke

Rxforwar wrote:

mattmo0121 wrote:

nobody wrote:

At least your honest about it

No game is perfect. Every game is going to have a lof of people who whine about games. Hell, I'm one of them.

Not true.
Rfom was perfect.
And if you disagree, I'll simply put my hands over my ears and run in tight circles saying 'la la la la la' until you stop.

I guess I should stop then.

You have any plans for gaming in the future Endlo? MW3 strike any interest in you?

I'll game eventually, I'm just not sure what game is going to bring me back. Not very interested in anything coming out soon, that I know of. Uncharted 3, Resistance 3, Black Ops, Killzone 3, none of it really seems all that appealing. I'm keeping an eye on Dust 514, though, and of course, I'll be on MAG 2, whenever it may be released.

I might keep an eye on MW3, but it's probably not going to be something I get too into. CoD was never quite my type of game.


I think we should all take turns telling RX that RFOM isn't perfect. He'll be stuck running in circles for a while, if we take it in shifts.

I kind of love the idea that I can spawn with the sniper in this game

Charlitos wrote:

I kind of love the idea that I can spawn with the sniper in this game

Would you if they take away the one shot kill?

Yeah, not as much though. I actually think that they are changing the Sniper back to the 1.04 one, with more bullets, much quicker rate of fire, but half as powerful when not aimed for the head. I'll still get used to it though, mark my words

I'd be totally ok if they 1.04ed the dragon sniper

So the rumor is that people who got PlayStation Plus with the free 30 days of the Welcome Back Package, won't be allowed with early access to the Uncharted 3 beta on June 28. Only the original subscribers of the service apparantly will. Again, this is just a rumor, but is also quite big news if it's true. My source is a post of someone on a FaceBook gaming page, not credible, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Thoughts?