Things We Hate About Gaming: Glitches in Games and the Glitchers Who Glitch Them
The fate of all glitchers…
I’d like to open this article with a question. How many times have you been playing a multiplayer game online and ended up at a stalemate because you couldn’t find the last guy on the other team? I’m sure everyone has had it happen to them once. Well I’m here to tell you where he was. You know that fence on the outskirt of the map? The fence with trees and rocks behind it? The fence that was put there to keep all the players inside the map? You see that rock behind the first three trees? That’s where he was. He was inside the geometry of that rock. He was probably snickering at the fact that he has no problem sitting in that rock while shoving as many Cheetos in his mouth as he can for twenty minutes. All this is happening while you wander the map checking every crack and crevice so that everyone who isn’t a jackass can play the next round.
While this scenario certainly isn’t exclusive to one game, for the sake of my own sanity I’m going to focus on the Gears of War series. I, like many others, played the first gears religiously when it first came out. Every day I would make time to chainsaw some online opponents. Eventually Gears 1 started getting title updates just like every other game released this generation. By the time the second update hit, the properties of the weapons were changing more drastically and I had become tired of relearning the guns’ effectiveness every time Epic decided to satisfy a vocal fan. So I decided to move on to other games. Around December of last year a good friend of mine convinced me to give the game another try. Apparently the once costly map pack was free and the community was still active. His rabid enthusiasm for the game convinced me to give it another try.
Dom is not pleased…
What the hell happened? I was a fan of the gridlock map in the first gears. So naturally when I was trying to relearn the game I went for that map whenever I could. I challenge anyone to play three consecutive games on Gridlock and not encounter someone getting out of the map or crabwalking. What is the matter with people? Some glitches in games are cool or funny and obviously there are glitches in games that make it easier for you to win. While it may be fun to go in a private match and get out of the map to see how much work Epic put into the backdrops of the maps or to start crabwalking with friends and say ‘œHa ha what a funny animation this is.’ Neither of those glitches will help you win.
I’ll explain. Getting out of the map does not increase your chance of winning. Getting out of the map with a sniper rifle does not make you a genius. You’ll know you’re not a genius when you run out of ammo, come back into the map (assuming you can find your way), and get chainsawed by the person who has been sitting there watching you shooting at bits of dust and leaves floating around the map. You cannot win by getting out of the map. If your sole purpose in life it to waste it by making people wait longer to get to the next round, then this is the tactic for you. I can honestly say that there is nothing more annoying then having to sit there and wait for the timer to run down because some brain-dead lump of a human being has all the time in the world to run the games timer out into a stalemate.
Crabwalking is equally inefficient. Yes it is harder for me to shoot you when you are crabwalking around the map like a jackass. However, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, if you were attending classes steadily you would know this and realize that it is just as hard for you to shoot me as it is for me to shoot you. There is no upside to this glitch. If you’re stroking yourself with one hand while guiding your character with the other and crabwalking is how you climax’¦seek help. This is not going to help you win but what it will do is make everyone on the opposing team feel it is their mission to humiliate you.
Now obviously these aren’t the only glitches in Gears 1 but they are the most prevalent and the most ridiculous. Sadly, there are always going to be people who wake up in the morning with the sole purpose of getting on Live and ruining the experiences of others. They do it because it’s all they have to do. They make their way from game to game finding ways to annoy people and despite Epic’s efforts, they have made their way to Gears 2.
I wouldn’t have to glitch if Epic hadn’t nerfed the shotgun. Bawwwww
Last night in a ranked game of avalanche something strange was happening. There was a person on the other team who was stuck in the shield crouching animation, with no shield in his hands, but holding a shotgun. Obviously this did him no good whatsoever. Stuck in this position he couldn’t run, take cover, or move fast enough to avoid any fire. At first I thought it was just an unintentional animation glitch, there are quite a few of those in Gears 2 multiplayer, but in the next round it happened again to the same guy. Well after someone else on my team saw it he told me that it was ‘œThe shield glitch’.
Apparently the purpose of this glitch is to get a boomshield or a meatshield and then switch the gun you’re carrying to the shotgun. Essentially making you a giant impenetrable hunk of bastard. Well my teammate wouldn’t tell me how to do it for fear of me using it, so I quickly typed it into Google. I’m not going to give instructions here but the success of the glitch depends on switching grenades. Once I found this out I was able to kill my glitch happy opponent within the first minute of every match. With him being determined to get the glitch to work, I would immediately roadie run to the grenades and wait for him to come in. As soon as he tried to pick them up, he’d get shotgun blast to the back of the head. Here’s where it gets idiotic, for the next two rounds I did the same thing and he continued to come right to me. I set myself up for failure, all he had to do was come in with the shotgun and shoot first. If he hadn’t of been so determined to get a glitch to work for him he could’ve gotten three kills pretty easily.
So why do people do this? Why do people purposefully do things that put them at a disadvantage? If the person had actually pulled the shield glitch off, all I would have needed to do was distract him while my friend went behind him and put a shotgun in his back. These are glitches that, unless you have nothing better to do than annoy other people over the internet, have absolutely no practical use. Yes they are there, yes people found them, and yes its interesting to see what they do for the first time but they are also like pressing a lose the game button.
This is your true opponent…yikes
Everyone has had these experiences with people who exploit the game in some way. Getting shot from underneath the ground in dustbowl in TF2 and in roundhouse in CoD: WaW is infuriating. The people who standby in Halo 3 are no better. Obviously these are things that will never go away. No game is going to be perfect but you know who aren’t helping the situation? The people who upload videos to YouTube showing how to do these glitches. Go ahead and look them up. Nine out of ten of them will say ‘œI’m not posting this so people can exploit it. I’m showing it so that the developer can fix it.’ I’m here to tell you that Cliff Bleszinski is not going to subscribe to your YouTube channel. We all know that it’s there so people can use it as instructions. My shield glitch experience is a perfect example. I saw a person doing a glitch, I looked it up, found out how to do it and then I stopped them. For most other people who look it up that last step is going to change to ‘œand then I did it!!!’
People who are good at finding these glitches shouldn’t be uploading tutorials to YouTube, even if their intentions really are pure. They should go straight to Epic or Bungie. They will listen. They don’t like this stuff happening anymore than we do because beneath all the things to exploit there are great games. Great, addictive, well crafted games that people put a lot of work into in order to make and others put a lot of work into in order to buy and enjoy them.
The ‘crabwalk’ in GoW1 was the straw that broke the camels back for me. I stopped playing after that became common knowledge.
Ming you though, some glitches can be fun. I know of a handful of map escapes in Halo 2 that required teamwork between players (often on the opposing team) before you could have a nice explore.
These types of glitches are what can turn a happy entertaining event into crap. Good article!
Oh there’s no doubt that some glitches can be fun in private matches with friends but going into public matches and using them specifically to annoy other people makes you a giant douche.
Just for some perspective, I was just on for a bit and in 3 matches the host disconnected when he was losing. Resulting in me losing some great scores. After that I got into a game where the host was standbying but my team still managed to destroy them. Before all that, apparently people have learned even more bastard tricks concerning the grenades. Gears 2 is becoming as bad as halo 2 was online. Epic needs to step up.
i agree whole heartedly with you. why would people want to wast their pathetic little lives trying to find ways to ruin the game and fun for other players? makes no sense and is very very annoying, i want to physically hurt every person who thinks glitches are funny or helps win the game. another example is COD Modern Warfare 2, if you have not heard there is a “care package” glitch and they can summon all the care packages they want and turns the whole map into a huge war zone. private match yes this would be funny but doing this on online matches just makes this annoying and destroys your kill death ratio if you decide to stay through the whole match.