The Art of Griefing 101 – God bless America

AoG101 is back. Erik is busy getting awesome on TF2 and L4D.

Today’s story is not of the epic battles between America (Frank and myself) vs England (Wardrox and friends) but of a meta-game in Left 4 Dead that not only angers people across the world, but is fun as hell to play!

Operation: No Gas Can Left Behind

Crouch walking in Left 4 Dead does a few things. It obviously makes you slow as hell, but it also makes your guns more accurate, and removes your “aura” as long as you’re not shooting. Infected teams rely on this aura to find you from far away. So if you have, say, an entire team of assholes just crouch walking the whole map, they become simultaneously hard to kill and extremely annoying because they’ll take 30 minutes to complete any given stage.

So what does that have to do with the title of this one? Well, the train station section in Blood Harvest has a lot of expendable items such as gas cans, propane tanks, and oxygen tanks. All of these objects explode when shot, and the gas can spreads lots of fire. The key word here is expendable. Nobody really cares about these things.

On this particular griefing day we decided to take it upon ourselves to save as many of these poor, under appreciated tools from Blood Harvest’s fourth section as possible. The stated goal of transporting every single one of them to the safe room. In doing so we decided we were going to be very deliberate about it, and crouch walk the entire time. Since four survivors means you can only carry four of these items at once, we would actually deposit these items in the safe room and turn around to find more in the level.

At one point a tank came. We had to break the gimmick of crouch walking, as well as sacrifice a gas can in order to set the thing on fire. We still prized the expendables more than each other though. Often saving a dropped gas can before bailing out a team-mate. Losing the gas can warranted a team sing-along to Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind”, much to the anger of the enemy team who were, of course, screaming at us to hurry the hell up. But, not actually leaving since they got more time to play as their precious zombies this way. When asked why the hell we were doing this we replied that, in the event of a Mad Max scenario of resource scarcity, we weren’t going to find ourselves at the mercy of roving gangs.

We managed to get three gas cans and two propane tanks to the safe room. When the other team’s turn came to be survivors, one of the guys had apparently seen the immense wisdom of our ways, and began to join in on the activity. In deference to his superior judgement, we allowed him to be the sole survivor of his team.

PS: If you guys wish to join me on steam add ferris285@hotmail.com to your friends list and join in on the stupidity.