Second honesty: single player is practice.  That’s all.  It might be the most cinematic practice you’ve ever seen, with incredible set pieces and innovative action scenes allowing to you to indulge in every Hollywood fantasy, but as long as the enemies are AI it’s just a glorified Tutorial.  You played through Modern Warfare for the fun, World at War for access to the Zombie servers, but it’s all sort of pointless unless you’re plugging people so that victory means “You’re better than someone”, not “The computer was programmed to let you have that.”  That’s what game servers are for, and that’s why we’re looking at the most popular multiplayer FPSs:

1.  Counter-Strike

If this is news then please, stop wasting time here and get your ass onto a Counter-Strike server right now.  Right now there are more people playing CS than there are holding hands, which might sound like it says something scary about society until you realise romance never killed any terrorists.  Various versions take up the first, second and seventh positions on the most-played list - and that’s not just shooters, that’s in terms of every game Valve has (to say nothing of the thousands of pirate players out there).  Counter-Strike: Source is now outperforming 1.6 servers (despite the complaints of purists), and even the relatively unpopular Condition Zero servers are stuffed with several thousand players at all times.  Or to put it another way: statistically speaking, Counter Strike is more popular than Shakespeare.

2.  Call of Duty 4

Things can get a little hectic

Modern Warfare servers continue to crush even their own sequel, with World at War servers lagging behind because of “Less impressive weapons”, “Not being made by Infinity Ward” and the all-important “Being yet another World War II game even though the reason we were excited before was because Modern Warfare didn’t do that” factor.  Cod4 is the top FPS on X-fire’s total playtime charts ranking only behind World of Warcraft overall - and ranking below WoW in playtime is like ranking below the universe in size.

3.  Team Fortress 2

It’s all about class balance

Valve’s magnum opus of online play, and proof that a decade of development time pays off.  Team Fortress 2 servers rank second only to Counter-Strike on Valve’s charts, and even outperforms Football Manager 2009, the biggest non-shooting-people-in-the-face title on their service.  For some reason.  The constant addition of new maps, fixes and unlocks keeps the population pumped up, although it’s still a factor of four behind even the closest Counter-Strike game.  But then, many religions have less devout followings than CS.

4.  Left 4 Dead

This game is fun

Multiplying the number of players by the average game bodycount, L4D servers shoot through three million zombie corpses an hour.  It seems those protesting the sequel were an extremely vocal minority, with most players far too busy “actually playing the game” and “enjoying themselves” to waste much time on such silliness.  It also means that at this very second there are at least four kilo-Louii running around with machine guns.

5.  Day of Defeat

There’s a slight learning curve

Ruggedly hanging in at number five are the Day of Defeat servers (both Source and old-school) - guilty of being set in the same time period as 90% of all known games, but at least with the excuse of coming from a time before the problem wasn’t quite so bad.  It also shares the status of being a Half Life modification, meaning that the altered adventures of Gordon Freeman literally have the entire FPS table surrounded.

1. The Creepy Counter-Strike Skull

Counter-Strike servers are already stuffed with Skullz and Killaz [sic], usually embedded in usernames between clan tags and half the number row’s symbols. Modder “Laca” enables the anti-terrorists to become even scarier than “someone with an assault rifle out to kill you” by skulling things up under the creepily human eyes.

2. Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault

Those playing on Medal of Honor servers shouldn’t suffer because of the age or authenticity of their game - so “Vdog777” has built an in-character costume, and is far better at 3D modeling than coming up with a name. The French resistance fighter adds another option when you’re dressing to impress (and shoot several times in the head) those fashionable Nazi chappies.

3. Team Fortress Halloween

Halloween costumes are something fun and awesome, so of course Valve are involved. We’re only talking about this because we enjoy it, anyway, as anyone on any TF2 server has already enjoyed the new koth_harvest_event map, exploding pumpkins, brand-new hats (to pile on top of all the other awesome headgear), and the incomparable ghost costume of Zepheniah Mann.

PS We love our Gibuses, though proper grammer sometimes makes for odd pronunciation.

4. The Classic Spy

Just because you’re ten years behind the times doesn’t mean you can’t dress up - though it can mean you wish you were more advanced. That’s the lesson behind the awkwardly-named |WS|*Nikon’s smooth spy skin, disguising a Team Fortress Classic server’s Spy as: a TF2 spy!

5. The Red vs Blue Crysis

In the most insanely complicated meta disguise outside of Major Smith in Where Eagles Dare, “not so l337” lets Crysis commandos disguise themselves as the staff from Red vs Blue, who in turn are played by Spartans, from Halo. It would be impossible to add more layers to a costume without forming a human pyramid or dressing up as a double-decker bus.

6. Day of Metal Gear Defeat

Dr. Cloud understands exactly how to guarantee an Allied success on Day of Defeat servers: staff the side of the angels with an endless army of Solid Snake clones. With the Axis forces represented by far inferior GRU cannon fodder it’s quite likely the sheer psychological pressure will force them to fold (despite their advantage in heavy machine guns).

7. Left 4 Dead

The most popular costumes over the last week come from the Left 4 Dead pre-order exclusive demo, with our four favorite survivors sporting spanking new skins.

Bill: Everyone’s favorite armed uncle-figure swaps Vietnam flashbacks for a love of candy, and an incredibly convincing Coach fatsuit.
Zoey: The apocalypse’s only female pulls an incredible double reverse-Michael-Jackson, both turning from white to black AND staying alive to play Rochelle.
Louis: The hard-working everyman goes even further than Zoey to become Elllis’s engineering Suthan bo-ay.
Francis: Why hate everything at random, when Nick can hate and distrust everything as a scumbag conman?

The best bit? Game servers can be dressed up every day of the year!

a) Unable to read the original story, in which case wow, how are you doing this now?

b) Actually one of the boycotters, in which case you’re not reading because you’ve already skipped ahead to scream obscenities in the comments.

The founding members of the boycotting group, “Walking_Target” and “Agent of Chaos”, posted to say that they’d achieved everything they’d wanted to with their group - the internationally accepted signal of surrender.  When someone gives up on the only thing that made them notable, and that thing was trying to prevent people from playing a popular videogame, it’s hard to decide if it makes them more or less sad.  Here we study the stages of the L4D2 boycott - with handy Left4Dead server situations analogizing each.

The upper limit of the boycotters wit

1.  NERD RAGE!

Nerd rage!  The most powerful force known to man, assuming that man is actually an anaemic kitten somehow connected to twitter.  While most reacted to news of a sequel to an incredibly popular game by the same uncountable-awards-winning company with “Cool”, some knew that this was a gross betrayal of everything the glorious “Shooting dead things again online” L4D server community stood for.  Something had to be done - and that “something” meant shouting in CAPS AND ITALICS!  (They may also have used exclamation marks.)

The Witch: A calm, collected disputant compared to internet arguments

We’re not saying that theirs was a hysterical list of nonsensical complaints.  We’re just pointing out how they claimed that two new game modes, the ability to play as the special infected and an entire new map is not “significant content”, and that their seventh complaint of nine is “The fiddle-based horde music is extremely disliked.” You can make up your own mind.

Left4Dead Equivalent: Bill saves Francis from a special infected and gives him pain pills.  Francis starts screaming “FAG!” and trying to shoot Bill, but missing every shot at point-blank range.

2.  The Steam Group Petition

Following on the glorious success of every other internet petition, which all have real effects and certainly aren’t the saddest things ever (or advertising spam e-mail collectors), our two brave heroes set up a Steam group “L4D2 Boycott.”  Because nothing says “We are even remotely capable of not buying this product” like setting up an advanced discussion group, based on intense analysis of trailer videos, on the developer’s website.

That zombie had more chance than the average internet petition.  That zombie STILL has more chance than the average internet petition.

This group reached forty thousand members, which would be even remotely impressive if

1. You forget the standard “multiply by zero” rule for translating online petition groups into real effects
2. The pre-orders for Left4Dead 2, an exclusive group which actually requires you to give money instead of bullshit, far outperformed it

Left4Dead Equivalent: All four survivors write “The Special Infected Shouldn’t Hurt Us” in teamchat several times.  They add many exclamation marks!

3.  Infighting!

The most hilarious thing about internet hate groups is that they’re made of internet haters.  The aren’t actually coherently angry, they’re screaming spitballs of keyboard-pounding poor impulse control and after interacting for any length of time they’ll inevitably turn on each other.  Any implication that the members are nothing but keyboard bashing balls of low self-esteem and poor impulse control should be disregarded, despite being true.  Here’s what happened when the group’s founders were flown in to look at L4D2, which is approximately infinity billion times more attention than they deserved.

Agent of Chaos and Walking_Target get to visit Valve.  As you can see, the boycott group rally in support of this dialogue

Their own group made that, as well as an impressive number of invective variations on the themes “sellout”, “betrayal”, and at least one accusation of being physically violated by Valve staff.

Left4Dead Equivalent: Zoey finds the Tier 2 weapons and calls the others.  They shoot her will screaming “FAG!”

4.  Giving Up

Agent of Chaos insists “Our goal wasn’t to steer people away from L4D2″, which is an odd not-goal for a group called “L4D2 boycott”.  But since they didn’t even remotely do that it may be best that he retroactively redefined their goal to “to get Valve’s attention.”  Which is exactly what they did, and is actually pretty impressive for an internet complainer.

Walking_Target, alas, lets this go to his head with “we have paved the way for Developer-Community relations in the future. No matter what the press or other gamers say, we have made an indelible mark upon the future of this industry.”  You can tell someone’s giving a great quote when they include “People are going to take the piss out of us so hard” in the middle of their own statement, and the only indelible mark they made was on each other’s palms when they high-fived each other when they were invited to play Left 4 Dead 2.

Left4Dead Equivalent: Due to a bizarre L4D server bug, when Bill and Francis die we’re left with two Zoeys, two little girls who immediately go the wrong way, and are both smacked through walls by a Tank with “Reality” painted on its chest.

Shooters and cyberterminals, this is Dystopia in one screenshot.

The first thing that hits you is the graphics, in a good way.  A great deal of work has gone into the dystopian feel of the game.  Grimy graffiti and shattered security doors under neon lighting contrast well with the psychedelic cyberspace, easily kicking the hell out of all attempts at cyberpunk cinema to date.  (Especially that awful Keanu Reeves “Johnny Mnemonic”.)

The game’s hook is the two levels of play, with some classes slipping into cyberspace at stations scattered around the level.  While they navigate the Tron-tastic computer space their bodies are defenseless, leaving team-mates have to defend them as they alter security systems, unlock doors, or other effects which alter the “real world” level.  And if computers affecting a real world inside your computer game in the real world isn’t enough for you - well, we can’t make it more meta than that without you turning out to be us all along.

This couldn’t be more cyberspacey if you were on a LightCycle

Unfortunately the idea isn’t realised as fully as they’d like: the designers obviously imagined an involved split-layer gameplay, with teams navigating both worlds to outfox each other, while most levels just end up with a series of linear objectives - each of which requires a hacker to complete.  It’s like an attack/defend map where every capture point requires a minigame.  On the upside those mini-levels are beatifully realised, probably the best rendering of Gibson’s cyberspace yet, and there are some tense moments as you hack through 3-D neon matrix listening to faint echoes of real-world gunfire getting closer to your defenseless body.

Another appeal is the customisable classes - as well as the standard light/medium/heavy divisions, you equip your character with various “Implants” (basically skills) to customize your role.  These implants compete for slots, so each subset means making a choice of how you’re going to play - hacking or scanning the real world, silenced weapons or sprinting ability, healing or agility etc.  On a populated Dystopia server this can lead to quite an assortment of abilities, though you need a good team to make the most use of them.  Don’t worry, thoughZ shooting the enemy until they’re dead is always a useful contribution.

It’s pretty easy to recognize Heavies

All told, it’s another free Source server mod with official Steam support - meaning you simply don’t have an excuse to be bored.  No muss, no fuss, either install the client (or ask your server provider to add it) and you get to try a whole new world for no cost at all.

Image Credit: IGN.  Graphics Engine Credit: Ten years ago.

Why Minh made a whole new game instead of adopting the insanely attention-grabbing title of “Counter-Strike 2″ is simple: the insane expectations associated with that attention.  Minh used to work with Valve on exactly that project, but hardcore gamers respond to change like vampires react to garlic-flavored sunlight, and CS server experts are to hardcore what the BFG is to a pistol.  It’s hard to express just how obsessive some players are, but when we tell you he’s still getting shit over some of the gun models having cartridge ejection ports in the wrong place a full decade later you might have some idea.

That’s why Minh broke loose and decided to make his own game (while Cliff started seeing Seattle and living with some extremely cute cats), and Tactical Intervention is the result.  A result where every change, good or bad, will inevitably enrage the CS veteran.

The Good Changes

Faster Rounds

The first and most important matter Minh made an issue of was the length of CS server rounds.  He’s concerned with the enjoyment of every player, and waiting in spectator for five minutes while the top-ranked players stalk each other isn’t much fun.  The problem is that kind of mastery is exactly what the expert loves, viewing other players as expendable target practice, so expect world-class-whining about any changes enforcing this.

Weakened Sniping

Minh’s main complaint about his creation, just like most people who’ve played it, is how incredibly overpowered the AWP sniper rifle is.  This single-shotter singlehandedly stalls the whole game as people are either too scared to move or sniped from approximately half a light year away.  This results in an eternity of waiting as dead players spectate, hovering over the ghosts of teammates too terrified to step out into the open.  The thing is, CS masters have spent years perfecting the ability to noscope you AWP-style with the merest mouse-twitch - any change with eliminates that advantage will be opposed.

The Bad Changes

Hostages

Go to any Counter-Strike server and see how often they play cs_office (and how instantly it empties when that cursed place appears).  CS servers make middle-management at Cannibals Incorporated just before lunchtime look like Sesame Street - “ultra-competitive” doesn’t cover it simply because the phrase doesn’t involve enough swearing.  Now remember any game where you lost through no fault of your own, but because some idiot AI escort mission moron didn’t know which end of a gun the bullets came out of.  Now try to combine the two in your head (Warning: may cause rage-splosion).

Attack Dogs

Another addition taking any risk of your results being related to ability is the attack dog.  Because we all know how popular homing missiles are in online games (here’s a fun party game: say “Blue shells are great” to a Mario Karter, just be sure to duck).  Imagine in an online game, and while you’re at it, just thump yourself in the stomach a few times.

The thing is, the complaints of the obsessive aren’t exactly anything someone who plays for fun should worry about.  Minh made one of the most popular games of all time, and when he releases another you can be sure we’ll be on hand to see how those servers stack up.

Versus servers spiked as players try to find the best spot to Smoke Survivors from (Answer: that bit where they pass over the fence on top of the truck - grab the last one when the others have already dropped)

1.  The Length

The reduced length of the Crash Course campaign, with only two chapters instead of the usual four, is sure to fuel the moronic moaning of those who insist they’re somehow being ripped off by continual free updates and extensions.  It also reveals their inability to understand what the developers are doing - the shorter campaign isn’t an attempt to shortchange players, but get pump up the number of people playing L4D servers.

As it stands it’s an excellent zombie-movie experience, but in length as well as mood: a campaign can take up to an hour (with versus easily doubling that) while many players can’t actually cancel their entire evening just to play.  Survival mode, and now the shorter campaign, are obvious attempts to make the game more accessible to people whose day-planners don’t revolve around video-gaming time.

2.  Verticality

We’ve covered left, right, forward, back and down - we’re safe forever!

Crash Course crams more multi-level ledges, overpasses, ridges and apartment roofs into two chapters than the other campaigns have in four.  Instead of narrow alleys or wide open spaces we have considerably more three-dimensional areas, with undead (and especially special infected, repetition on purpose) taking advantage of all angle attacks to eat the un-undead.

Those looking forward to the sequel’s release in November should look forward to two things:

1. Delays.  This is Valve.
2. Enhanced multi-level environments when it finally does come out.

3.  The Plot

The Left4Dead safe rooms are the best examples of videogame writing anywhere, and I’ll stack one wall of Valve graffiti against any ten RPGs you care to mention (Aerith deaths included).  As well as an astonishingly accurate parody of internet commentary, the newly-downoaded content extends on that to paint a wider picture of the world of L4D servers - and it’s not good.

Yep, that looks like the sort of world where you’d need an assault rifle to even look at a map

The game about endless oceans of the undead eating everything else in the world was never exactly optimistic, but that one chart extends the apocalypse almost infinitely.  This isn’t a few potholes of nightmare that need escape - this is an entire world of undead where the entire army gives up on the country and tries to salvage a few isolated pockets, and fails at most of those.  Expect some extremely evil extension on this theme in the sequel.

4.  More Involved Finales

The frantic finales have always been the entire point of Left4Dead servers, and Crash Course tries a few tweaks to the formula (which you just know are experiments the developers are eagerly awaiting results on).  The result isn’t up to previous examples: the truck depot level just doesn’t feel as desperate as the helipads and farmhouses we’ve fought in before, but the increased complexity of the design and the additional events (being forced to run out and restart the generator) speak of attempts to mix up the basic “Hold here while you’re attacked by the entire population of Winsconsin”

We’ll always embrace more Dawn of the Dead references in our survival horror.

But what drives these despicable denizens of dustbowl and No Mercy?  What brings someone to de_dust only to snipe from the skybox?  Here we look at three types of exploiter (in order increasing abomination against everything online games are about.)

1.  The Desperate

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but that’s because they existed in the boring time before games.  They had to read ancient latin texts to get undead characters which went around forgiving people instead of feasting on them.  Nowadays we know the road to hell is actually paved with a trip to Mars colony and/or out of control genetic weapons experiments, but the good intentions problem remains.  Especially in Killing Floor servers where your teammates respawn if you survive the round, the Flesh Pound is bearing down on you like a  - well the fact we’re alive proves there is no real-world analog for a Flesh Pound - and you know that hiding inside that map glitch will get everybody to the next stage.

In fairness, if anything would make you hide inside a wall this is it

It’s a dirty dishonorable trick and the way those words shouldn’t apply to the undead doesn’t matter.  Small studio creations are especially open to exploits as ambitious maps outstrip their testing resources.  Don’t punish them by breaking their game!  Do you really want world where the only levels are perfectly tested, empty, and two feet across?  Get out there and take your death like a man!  Knowing you can hide inside a protective rock whenever you want is fine for Alicia Masters, but in turns a desperate death-struggle into a boring hobby.

2.  Peer Pressure

A unique pressure brought about when you have to work with other players to survive the onslaught.  It’s not the worst form of exploit as you aren’t screwing over other players - you’re just destroying everything the genius game designers worked to create for your enjoyment. Which isn’t that much better.  The problem is when your teammates all jump into the map glitch safe spot, and suddenly you’re the asshole for wanting to “play” the “game.”

As well as hordes of the undead, the virus created horrific trimutated glitchers

Or rather, not play the game because you’re being slaughtered by every single enemy on the map and your anti-fun teammates won’t leave their glitch-haven to come save you.  It affects Killing Floor, but is a particular problem on Left4Dead servers.  At least on Campaign mode it only ruins a set-piece or two, but you’ll always end up with an idiot on Survival (check!) shouting at everyone to glitch themselves onto a ledge where nothing can touch them “because we’ll totally get GOLD you guys!”)

3.  Pure Unadulterated Scum

In the above you’re ruining the game for yourself, but once you’re killing people with glitches instead of guts you’re officially ruining it for everyone.  Counter-Strike servers suffered from serious game-breaking glitches over their history, massively amplified by the incredibly competitive nature of the players, but years of patches have boiled most of them out.  Now the worthless simply install their own hacks, another subject we’ll deal with in due time.  Once the IP-tracking missiles are ready.

Laughing at people trying to play the game, before building a sentry on an unreachable ledge and screeching “If they didn’t want us to it wouldn’t be possible!”

The modern exploiter adventurelands are TF2 servers, where every update and added map (fun free gifts for gaming enjoyment) is immediately broken into and abused (by people who don’t understand a single word in the previous brackets).  The barrage of brilliant new levels and extras has the exact opposite of the intended effect on exploiter scum:  Hiding outside the level, firing new taunts through the gates before the game begins, sentries installed in utterly unreachable locations by jumping on dispensers - truly these masters of modern gaming show their expertise in online entertainment.  At the small cost of turning themselves into mockeries of even the concept of fun.

Achievements have been out for almost a month, and in true Garry’s Mod server fashion more have been added already.  Also in Garry’s Mod fashion, most of the achievements are crazy activities you’d never imagine yourself engaging in until you suddenly find yourself standing on a pyramid of five thousand exploding barrels and pointing a rocket launcher at your own feet*.

*At which point either your computer crashes or you’re Tony Stark using HAL9000

Some achievements are easier to get than others

While regular games reward progressing through the plot, Garry’s Mod is all about the insane achievements that only come from starting to play and suddenly realising it’s ten hours later.  The sheer sandbox freedom of physics and flinging things is hard to explain for anyone who hasn’t experienced it, or wasted a day trying to build a roller coaster for the Half Life jalopy to jump over a swarm of exploding undead.  (Which you can totally do, so if you’re still reading now instead of loading the game you’re officially saying this article is better than the best thing ever.  Thanks!)

The fun aspect of the “Anything you like” life-replacing Mod is here too, from the achievements that openly insult the user

to a fun namedrop

The elusive “Garry” has still not been spotten in the wild

but even then, only achieving things that other people told you to on a Garry’s Mod server?  That’s like politely asking a zombie to leave when you own ten chainsaws!  That’s why you must make use of the great Garry’s Mod mod (not a typo) engineered by the amazing, incredible, utopia-inducing RabidToaster of the facepunch forums.  (The only thing we know about him is that he made this mod, and it’s enough to justify all those positive adjectives and any others you can think of.)

This mod is constantly adding new achievements to the game, and even lets you script your own.  Yes, you can mod your own achievements in an achievementless mod - this is the most meta coding palindrome possible.

So self-referential you can see the back of your own head if you stare hard enough.

These extra-chievements don’t add anything to your official Steam score, but if you’re playing Garry’s Mod to meet set goals you’re missing the points worse than a cold bald hedgehog.

Accelerating towards the ground at terminal velocity, I realise that achievements can lead to some very strange behavior.  And unless the ground is significantly more susceptible than shotgun blasts than previously advertised I’m going to die.

If nothing else, these little Boxes of Joy are enough to remind you of just how much fun Garry’s Mod servers can be.

I’m about to have more fun than is legal in most states.

When I get a hat I’ll show them - I’LL SHOW THEM ALL!

The problem came from the current method of hat distribution.  It’s basically “Hang around forever and hope,” and the hilariousness of a game about blowing people up needing hat logistics isn’t enough to distract people from the fact that method sucks.  But TF2 servers have shown connecting even the most pointless extra (and the only point in these hats is the one on the Medic’s helmet) toachievements would just destroys gameplay for days as armies engaged in grind; while just instantly giving the extras to everyone removes any sense of value.  Or at least, any sort of value for the fanatics focused on getting them.

“Idlers” attacked the random distribution intended to add treats to players’ inventories by setting their computer to think it was playing forever.  Downloadable programs spoofed the servers into thinking the user was an inhuman Team Fortress 2-ing Terminator who needed not stop for rest, food or even the barest bathroom break.  They racked up the items at only the minor cost of turning themselves into absolute mockeries of the whole idea of playing games.

It is vital to my self-esteem that I look like this!

When Valve shut these shenanigans down it set off the stupidest civil war since the “Meat Eaters vs Vegetarians” battle in that ancient “Peace on Earth” cartoon.  (You know, the one you sat through one Saturday when nothing else was on, with talking squirrels preaching about war in final proof that kids will watch absolutely anything if it’s animated.)  Some TF2 servers set instant kick options to boot those either with or without the angelic addition, depending on whether their owners were pro cheat or not, and there was even a Steam group for medics who “don’t heal halos.”  Because punishing people who just play the game and wanted to try out their new hat is obviously how to have fun.

The halos themselves suffered from a stupidly short life - going from everyone excitedly trying out their new hat, to almost everyone taking them off again as they realise that a hat everyone actually has isn’t very exciting.  If any realised the irony of removing the halo because it was now boring only to loudly complain that all the “proper” hats should be unlocked for everyone instead, they sure didn’t show it.  Everyone wants to have the rare item and honestly doesn’t see the problem with that statement (similar to the flood of Jedi that destroyed the old Star Wars MMO a while back).

But it’s only a matter of time before more intelligent options are on offer.  Valve are working up a trading system (and it’s only taking so long because it has to be built to be exploit-proof against the same sort of people who caused this) and after that we should all have options for our over-full inventories.  And maybe then we can get that awesome Spy fedora.

Pictured: not as awesome as being befedora-ed